Tag Archives: President Biden

Wise Legal Advice Biden May Not Be Getting and Possibly Good News About Russia

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As is often the case, there is a golden mean between paying no attention to politics and paying too much. Since I don’t have President’s Biden ear, I’m guilty of the latter (I’m pretty sure the messages I’ve sent him didn’t made it to his desk).

Nevertheless, here is some brief discussion of the debt ceiling I read today that I want to share:

From Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo:

Even though this won’t come as new news to many of you, the following is still a clarifying prism. A negotiation is usually two sides haggling to get things they want. Leverage is often unequal…. But in this negotiation, Republicans are getting various policy priorities and Democrats are “getting” Republican agreement not to create a global financial crisis. That’s extortion, not negotiation. A government can’t operate in any consistent or sustainable way when policy deliverables go to the party willing to credibly threaten the most damage to the country.

And from two law professors with fancy titles who work at respected universities:

Our advice has always amounted to a version of the now-overused mantra: “Keep calm and carry on.” The best thing to do in a debt ceiling crisis is to continue to raise the money necessary to pay the government’s bills. If Republicans block action on the debt ceiling, the President would indeed break the law by issuing new debt. But among his options at that point, all of which would be bad, that would be the closest thing to a plain-vanilla response. We would not see the government stiff its creditors.

Instead, the Treasury Department would do what it always does: go into the financial markets and raise funds from willing lenders. Those lenders would almost certainly demand higher interest payments than otherwise, which would offer the irony that the Republicans’ vows to “do something about the debt” will result in more debt, not less. But in a world of their making, borrowing money as it is needed, in as close to the normal way as possible, will be President Biden’s best (and least unconstitutional) option.

Elsewhere, there’s evidence that some Russian soldiers are switching sides and actually taking back territory from the Russian army. It isn’t a surprise that some of the troops don’t care for Putin at all. This is a good sign, combined with the fact that Ukraine is offering special treatment for soldiers who surrender, including care overseen by the Red Cross and no requirement to ever return to Russia. We used to think high-level officials might be the ones to do something about Putin. Maybe the uprising will start in the lower ranks. After all, the Russian Revolution began with mutiny in the army.

There Was a Balloon. Other Things Have Happened Too.

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President Biden’s Chief of Staff for the past two years, Ron Klain, is leaving the White House. He talked about the administration’s accomplishments last week. I haven’t been able to find the text of his remarks myself but someone at Post.News provided this:

The most significant economic plan since FDR, while managing the largest land war in Europe since Truman.  The biggest infrastructure bill since Ike, the most first-year judges since JFK, the second largest health care bill since LBJ.  The most significant gun control bill since Clinton and the largest climate change bill in any country at any time anywhere on the planet.  All while managing the worst public health crisis since Wilson, with the narrowest Democratic majority in Congress for a new President in 100 years.

But it doesn’t stop there. Student loan debt relief.  Record low black and brown unemployment. The PACT act for veterans. A sweeping marijuana pardon. The Respect for Marriage Act. The most Americans ever with health coverage. Ending the longest war in American history. We’ve seen a dramatic drop in child poverty, the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years, the deficit cut more than any President.  And the most jobs created in any two years in US history.

Not bad for a team and a President that was written off for dead in the winter of 2019, and again in the winter of 2020, the winter of 2021, and again in the first week of November 2022. 

The media reported Klain’s departure, but it what really got people’s attention is that he started to cry at one point. How dare he become emotional when leaving one of the most important, most challenging jobs in the country, especially when you consider the Biden administration’s somewhat amazing list of accomplishments! Clearly, Klain is not the kind of manly man we need near the top of our government. Far better to have a macho guy like our former president, a real tough guy whose principal emotion is anger, who doesn’t understand the concept of personal responsibility and who, during his last year in office, paid more attention to his hair than the pandemic.

Anyway, having read some of Klain’s speech, it was disturbing but not surprising to see the results of a new poll.

The poll finds that 62 percent of Americans think Biden has accomplished “not very much” or “little or nothing” during his presidency, while 36 percent say he has accomplished “a great deal” or “a good amount.” On many of Biden’s signature initiatives — from improving the country’s infrastructure to making electric vehicles more affordable to creating jobs — majorities of Americans say they do not believe he has made progress, the poll finds.

Breaking those numbers down, 77% of Democrats thought Biden had accomplished “a good amount or a great deal”. 32% of “independents” thought he had. Only 7% of Republicans agreed.

Now, not all Democrats pay much attention to politics. That partly explains why 22% didn’t think much of the president’s accomplishments. As for “independents”, they’re the people who pay even less attention to politics and/or don’t see any meaningful difference between the parties, even after the past six years. That 7% of Republicans thought Biden has done well can be seen as a positive result given the politicians Republicans prefer and the “news” they consume.

The journalistic community will see this poll as a problem for Biden. It demonstrates a bigger problem with the journalistic community. Their principal job is to inform the public. But many more Americans know that a Chinese balloon — nothing more than a curiosity, which the Pentagon easily took care of — traveled across the US than that inflation is way down and we have the lowest unemployment rate in 50 years.

In a Crisis, Bigger Is Better

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Paul Krugman explains why Biden’s Covid relief package has to be big (I’ve left out some of the economics discussion, but left in the history):

. . . No, the Biden plan isn’t too big. While [some] pundits’ concern that the size of the package might produce some economic stresses isn’t silly, it’s probably overwrought. And they have the implications of an expansive plan for the future completely backward: Going big now will enhance, not reduce, our ability to do more later.

. . . What policymakers are trying to do here is like fighting a war — a war both against the pandemic itself and against the human fallout from the pandemic slump.

And when you’re fighting a war, you don’t decide how much to spend by asking “How much stimulus do we need to achieve full employment?” You spend what you need to spend to win the war.

Winning, in this case, means providing the resources for a huge vaccination program and for reopening schools safely, while limiting the economic misery of families whose breadwinners can’t work and avoiding gratuitous cuts in public services provided by fiscally constrained state and local governments.

And that’s what the American Rescue Plan mostly involves; it is, as Biden’s economists say, a bottom-up plan that starts with estimated needs. Using numbers from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, here’s the composition of the proposed package:070221krugman1-jumboAlthough discussion is weirdly dominated by those proposed $1400 checks, they’re only a fraction of the total; medical spending, school aid, aid to the unemployed, and help for state and local governments dominate the plan. And there’s a good case for those checks, too; more about that later.

. . . But what about the argument that there are big elements of the Biden plan that aren’t essential relief?

Skepticism about the substance of the Biden plan, as opposed to its size per se, mainly centers on the idea of sending cash to the great majority of American adults — the so-called stimulus checks, although they aren’t stimulus and they aren’t checks. There are other elements; . . . some believe that aid to state and local governments will be bigger than necessary. But the stimulus checks are the big question mark. So let’s focus on them, and with them the broader question of how to set the stage for future policy.

There’s no question that many people receiving stimulus checks will be people who haven’t taken a serious hit to their income and don’t need special help. In that sense the checks will be poorly targeted, certainly as compared to enhanced unemployment benefits.

However, we know that a substantial number of people experiencing significant income losses won’t be helped by unemployment benefits — for example, those who are still working but at reduced hours or wages. Universal basic payments will give such people much-needed help. True, they’re a leaky bucket, and you wouldn’t want them to be the main element of a rescue plan — but they aren’t! They’re a supplement that will do some good.

And they’re also hugely popular, which isn’t an irrelevant consideration.

Actually, every major element in the Biden plan has strong public approval. But support for stimulus checks is through the roof.

[Note: According to a poll taken this month, 68% of voters want Biden and the Democratic Congress to pass a relief package that will do the most to stop the spread of coronavirus and help people economically. Only 32% favor a smaller package that will do less but have bipartisan Republican support.]

Now, policy shouldn’t be driven entirely by opinion polls. But if you care about setting the stage for policy beyond the pandemic, delivering the goods to voters in the first round will be crucial.

Of all the arguments made by critics of a big rescue plan, the one that really has me rubbing my eyes is the suggestion that we should scale the plan back to make room for later policies, like investment in infrastructure. Wasn’t the overwhelming lesson from the Obama years that that’s not how it works? The effective constraint on good policy isn’t financial, it’s political — and as a result underpowered policy in the short run ends up killing the chance of good policy in the years ahead.

A trip down memory lane: Back in 2009 I was more or less frantically warning that the Obama stimulus was too small, and a key part of that warning was my fear that going small would undermine future policy prospects. Here’s what I wrote in January 2009:

“I see the following scenario: a weak stimulus plan, perhaps even weaker than what we’re talking about now, is crafted to win those extra GOP votes. The plan limits the rise in unemployment, but things are still pretty bad, with the rate peaking at something like 9 percent and coming down only slowly. And then Mitch McConnell says “See, government spending doesn’t work.”

“Let’s hope I’ve got this wrong.”

Alas, I didn’t have it wrong.

Circumstances are different now, but the basic logic is the same. If you want effective policy on infrastructure, on the environment, on children and more, Biden has to deliver big, tangible benefits with his rescue plan. Otherwise he’ll squander political capital, and probably lose any chance to do significantly more.

So this plan really needs to go big. The risks, economic and political, of falling short are huge, and should [end the discussion].

A Great Opportunity for the Democrats

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Having fifty votes in the Senate and the Vice President gives the Democrats a chance to make real progress and seriously damage the radical right. From Greg Sargent of The Washington Post:

In the early morning hours on Friday, Senate Democrats passed a measure laying the groundwork to move President Biden’s big economic rescue package via the reconciliation process, by a simple majority. Republicans are already thundering with outrage.

The move does indeed pose a serious challenge to Republicans. But it’s one that runs deeper than merely moving toward passing this one package without them. It also suggests a reset in dealing with GOP bad-faith tactics across the board — and even the beginnings of a response to the . . . ideology loosely described as “Trumpism.”

First, the new move suggests a growing recognition that the conventional understanding of how “bipartisanship” works has things exactly backward — and that Republicans have manipulated the public debate on this topic for far too long.

For instance, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is already denouncing this move. The minority leader railed that Democrats have “set the table to ram through their $1.9 trillion rough draft,” adding: “notwithstanding all the talk about bipartisan unity, Democrats are plowing ahead.”

McConnell’s underlying claim is that Democrats should allow their plan to be subject to a supermajority requirement via the filibuster [of 60 Yes votes] to facilitate bipartisanship. The idea is this: If a partisan majority [in this case, the 50 Democrats plus the Vice President] can’t pass things by itself, it must reach out for bipartisan support [from at least ten Republicans] . . .

This is a scam. The reality is the other way around: In McConnell’s hands, the filibuster has actually made bipartisanship less likely.

By preventing a partisan majority from passing things, McConnell has created the conditions for withholding the support necessary to enact them, for the instrumental purpose of casting Democratic presidents (such as Barack Obama) as failed conciliators.

This has worked as follows: GOP senators have withheld support regardless of the concessions made to win them over, because they calculate the president’s party will take the political hit for failing to make bipartisan deals.

The paradox here is that using reconciliation — moving to pass something by a simple majority — actually could bolster the conditions for good-faith bipartisanship. GOP senators who might be gettable will no longer have a built-in incentive to oppose a particular bill. It’s likely passing anyway, so the lure of helping [their own] party by opposing it — because the Democratic president will get blamed for failure — isn’t nearly as strong.

Under those conditions, Biden actually would have an opening to negotiate with Republicans in the quest for bipartisan support. In the conditions McConnell wants, the incentives for moderate GOP senators point in the other direction.

Whether Biden actually will end up negotiating down to win a few Republicans is an open question. But the point is, in McConnell’s cynical scenario, this would be nothing but a fool’s errand, because it would be far less likely to work.

McConnell’s other basic idea — that a supermajority requirement protects the minority — is also nonsense. Adam Gurri makes a key distinction between protecting the rights of the minority party and protecting those of minorities of voters. The latter are protected by many other veto points in the system. Protecting the minority party’s rights by subjecting all Senate business to a supermajority requirement is only about facilitating its ability to obstruct.

Senior Democrats have begun to articulate the idea that the true way to revitalize faith in government — and in democracy — is by successfully delivering on big-ticket items. Achieving bipartisan cooperation for its own sake will do far less to address deep civic division and disillusionment than robust and effective action on behalf of the common good.

The Biden plan now will be written by Congress. But the new move lays the groundwork for passage of a package that could spend as much as $1.9 trillion. . . .

In an interesting column, David Brooks suggests that such large-scale spending could begin to accomplish “social repair.” We should spend far more than what’s merely needed to fill the “output gap.” We should spend to address the deep inequalities and injustices revealed by the pandemic and longer-term structural ills such as flat wages and regional stagnation. Undershooting here, Brooks notes, carries far greater moral and civic risks than overshooting.

I’d go further: Such an approach also contains the seeds of a broader answer to Trumpist populism. Success in using robust government action to charge up the recovery and get the coronavirus under control — including sinking medical resources into rural America — could clear political space for Biden to restore humanity to our immigration system and sanity to our international climate efforts.

Spending effectively toward the common good might begin to defang destructive zero-sum nationalist appeals. That could pave the way for a “new synthesis” that combines bolder progressive economics with a refusal to backpedal on issues that Democrats have long seen as politically perilous in the face of right-wing populist demagoguery. Biden’s ambitious actions so far on immigration and climate suggest just this understanding of the moment.

All this might sound overly optimistic. And there are countless ways Democrats can screw this all up. But the early returns suggest they are constructively breaking with old ways of thinking. And that could portend a serious long-term challenge to the Trumpified [Grotesque Old Party].

Unquote.

Senate Democrats can change the Senate rules whenever they want. They just need the courage to do so (and the cooperation of their least progressive members).

A Few Pertinent Items

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From: The Economy Does Much Better Under Democrats. Why? – The New York Times

“A president has only limited control over the economy. And yet there has been a stark pattern in the United States for nearly a century. The economy has grown significantly faster under Democratic presidents than Republican ones.”

“It’s true about almost any major indicator: gross domestic product, employment, incomes, productivity, even stock prices. It’s true if you examine only the precise period when a president is in office, or instead assume that a president’s policies affect the economy only after a lag and don’t start his economic clock until months after he takes office. The gap “holds almost regardless of how you define success,” two economics professors at Princeton, Alan Blinder and Mark Watson, write. They describe it as ‘startlingly large’.”

Untitled

” . . . if the causes are not fully clear, the pattern is. The American economy has performed much better under Democratic administrations than Republican ones, over both the last few decades and the last century.” 

From: AOC isn’t going to forget about the insurrection and move on – The Washington Post

“Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says she was told that trauma victims should ‘tell their stories’ as a part of their healing. And that is what she did Monday night . . . The New York congresswoman initiated a live stream on Instagram and . . . recounted what had happened to her during the violent invasion of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.’

“She talked about flattening herself behind her bathroom door as someone entered her office, screaming, ‘Where is she? Where is she?’ It turned out to be a police officer, but until she learned that, ‘I thought I was going to die’.”

“She talked about eventually escaping to the office of Rep. Katie Porter (Calif.), where the two Democratic congresswomen rifled through staffers’ gym bags, searching for sneakers they could change into in case they needed to jump out a window or run. . . .” 

“Ocasio-Cortez, her voice wavering, revealed during the live stream that she was a survivor of sexual assault, something she said many people did not know, because there were only so many times she’d wanted to tell that story. But she was mentioning it now, she said, because of its relevance to the attack at the Capitol.”

“Almost immediately after Jan. 6, she said, people began implying . . . that reconciliation depended on ‘moving on’. Those words, she said, were the tactics of ‘an abuser’.”

“She compared it to a sexual harasser telling his victim that the quickest path to normalcy would be her forgiving him. Or to parents telling the child they once abused that the mistreatment had happened in the past. . . .”

“There needs to be accountability, she said, because forgiveness does not happen when a perpetrator wants to move on. It happens when a victim is ready. . . .”

From: It’s Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Party Now – The New York Times

“Some decent Republicans imagine they’re in a battle for their party’s soul. Representative Adam Kinzinger, who . . . voted to impeach Txxxx, recently started a PAC devoted to fighting the forces that led . . . the Capitol rampage. “The time has come to choose what kind of party we will be,” he said in an introductory video. The thing is, Republicans already have chosen.

Just look at the party’s state affiliates. On Jan. 4, the Arizona G.O.P. retweeted a “Stop the Steal” activist who’d pronounced himself willing to “give my life” to overturn the election. Said the party’s official account: “He is. Are you?” An Arizona lawmaker has since introduced a bill that would let the Legislature, controlled by Republicans, override the presidential vote of the state’s increasingly Democratic citizenry. The Oregon Republican Party approved a resolution suggesting that the Capitol siege was a “false flag” attack. The Texas Republican Party has adopted the QAnon slogan “We are the storm” as its motto, though it insists there’s no connection. . . . 

[QAnon supporter Marjorie Taylor Greene] is not the outlier in this party. Kinzinger is.

“American conservatism — particularly its evangelical strain — has fostered derangement in its ranks for decades, insisting that no source of information outside its own self-reinforcing ideological bubble is trustworthy.”

“If you’re steeped in creationism and believe that elites are lying to you about the origins of life on earth, it’s not a stretch to believe they’re lying to you about a life-threatening virus. If what you know of history is the revisionist version of the Christian right, in which God deeded America to the faithful, then pluralism will feel like the theft of your birthright. If you believe that the last Democratic president was illegitimate, as Trump and other birthers claimed, then it’s not hard to believe that dark forces would foist another unconstitutional leader on the country.”

“There was a moment, after the Capitol riot, when it seemed as if a critical mass of the Republican Party was recoiling at what it had created. But the moment passed, because it would have required the party’s putative leaders to defy too many of their followers.”

From: More than two-thirds of Americans side with Biden on COVID relief — and most support the rest of his agenda – Yahoo News/YouGov Poll

“When asked about the 20 policies that define President Biden’s agenda, more Americans support than oppose all 20 of them, according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll.”

“The margins are decisive. The majority of Biden’s proposals garner at least twice as much support as opposition. Nearly half are favored by more than 60 percent of Americans.”