We begin today with Renée Graham of The Boston Globe reminding Democrats to campaign on the most important issue of the upcoming midterm elections: American democracy.
If Democrats are still scrambling for a unifying theme to energize its voters, it’s the democracy, stupid.
That’s borrowed from the famous phrase coined by Democratic strategist James Carville during Bill Clinton’s first presidential run in 1992. “The economy, stupid” was a pointed reminder for staffers and the candidate himself to stay focused on their message to voters.
Swap in democracy and that’s a message that should be on the lips of every Democrat. Yet a Politico analysis found that out of more than $300 million spent this year by Democrats on broadcast advertisements nationwide, less than 4 percent went to ads that specifically mentioned “Jan. 6, the insurrection, democracy or stolen elections.”
Between now and November, Democratic candidates will talk about the successful passage of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. They’ll tout the first major gun safety legislation passed by Congress in nearly 30 years. But they must also seize the opportunity to amplify the biggest difference between their party and their opponents. It’s not just Democrats vs. Republicans. It’s democracy vs. authoritarianism.
Robert J. Shapiro writes for
Washington Monthly that we shouldn’t forget about the Biden economy because most Americans are better off than they were even two years ago.
No one can argue with President Joe Biden’s job record—more than 9.5 million unemployed Americans found jobs over the past 18 months, and the unemployment rate fell from 6.4 to 3.5 percent.
Whether Americans’ incomes are higher is more complicated, because the pandemic disrupted the economy in so many ways. First, GDP collapsed in 2020, and unemployment soared—followed by massive public spending that extended into Biden’s term in 2021 and helped us recover. But supply problems, especially energy, ignited inflation, and spending, worsened it. While the fast-rising employment has produced a record 14.9 percent surge in overall wage and salary income since Biden took office, how much has inflation eaten away at those unparalleled gains?
For all of the “pain at the pump” stories, the answer is that wages and salaries have kept pace with inflation since Biden took office—and by this measure, most Americans are much better off than before the pandemic hit in 2020, and before he took office in 2021.
Nate Cohn of The New York Times points out (as does Markos) that Democrats have outperformed Republicans in every special election since the Dobbs ruling.
One special election would be easy to dismiss. But it’s not alone.
There have been five special congressional elections since the court’s Dobbs ruling overturned Roe, and Democrats have outperformed Mr. Biden’s 2020 showing in four of them. In the fifth district, Alaska’s at-large House special, the ranked-choice voting count is not complete, but they appear poised to outperform him there as well.
On average, Republicans carried the four completed districts by 3.7 percentage points, compared with Donald J. Trump’s 7.7-point edge in the same districts two years ago. The results aren’t merely worse than expected for Republicans; they’re straightforwardly poor. Republicans need to fare better than Mr. Trump, who lost the national vote by 4.5 points in 2020, to retake the House — let alone contemplate winning the Senate. [...]
But strength among high-turnout white voters can get a party pretty far in low-turnout midterm elections, which tend to have a relatively whiter electorate. Perhaps in part for that reason, there is a decent historical relationship between special election results and midterm outcomes. And before Dobbs, Republicans were outrunning Mr. Trump in special congressional elections. Since then, the pattern has reversed.
Dahila Lithwick of Slate notes that even in the face of courting electoral disaster, anti-abortion activists are not content with the Dobbs ruling; they are prepared to go to even more extremes.
It is no surprise whatsoever to hear that Mississippi—the state that prevailed in Dobbs and continues to have one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation—is one of many GOP states that has not opted to expand new mothers’ Medicaid coverage; or to expand the social safety net in any material fashion. The data on the connection between poverty, death, illness, and inequality in the bulk of the states that ban abortion is unequivocal. Yet discussions about states making life easier for mothers have been shut down using the same tired and wrongheaded GOP talking points about the worthless, lazy poor and their entitlements.
What has changed, perhaps, is the stories. Every day between now and November we are going to hear about atrocities befalling women whose complicated pregnancies, miscarriages, and forced birth are not the stuff of Hallmark movies. These tales are becoming part of virtually everyone’s collective muscle memory. This week alone, we have endured the story of the Louisiana woman, Nancy Davis, who will be forced to carry a skull-less fetus for the next six months, and the 16-year-old in Florida deemed too immature to abort, but seemingly just fine to be a parent. Republicans devoted last month to calling a child rape victim who was denied abortion care in Ohio and flown to Indiana for treatment a liar. We’re hearing horror stories about women denied access to methotrexate, which is used to treat certain types of cancer, because it can be used for abortion. We’re hearing about pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions for Plan B and oral contraceptives. We’re hearing about the Texas woman who carried a dead fetus for two weeks, and the women who cannot be treated for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages until their own lives are at risk are now the stuff of daily reporting, as are the certifiably insane responses from Republican candidates, including Michigan’s GOP candidate this week, who argued that 14-year-old rape victims should be forced to carry to term because the forced birth will provide a “bond” that is “healing.”
This, then, is the sticky wicket. Pro-lifers who could have taken their win after Dobbs showed that the real endgame was never going to be “letting the states decide” or tweaking the line for fetal viability downward or any of the rape and incest exceptions bargaining positions that are now policymaking detritus post-Roe. The endgame was always a national personhood amendment that confers all the rights of a person on a fetus, and that while such efforts have been defeated, time and again, at the ballot box in even red states, the plan is to just make it happen the same way Dobbs happened, through unscrupulously gained court seats and state gerrymandering and vote suppression and bottomless dark money.
The Conversation asked three experts, Terri Friedline, Dominique Baker, and John W. Diamond, about the potential impacts of President Joe Biden’s plan for student loan forgiveness.
Dominique Baker, Assistant Professor of Education Policy, Southern Methodist University
When approximately 10,000 student loan borrowers had their private student loans randomly canceled from 2010 to 2017, researchers found that it ultimately enabled them to more easily move, change jobs and earn more money. The borrowers were also 11% less likely to default on credit cards or other loans.
I expect similar outcomes will flow from the Biden administration’s decision to cancel federal student loans. And the decision to cancel up to $20,000 for those who received Pell Grants means that even more relief may flow to borrowers who are Black.
From the standpoint of racial justice, I believe this additional relief for Black borrowers is necessary because of centuries of systemic inequities. Such inequities include accumulating education debt through “predatory inclusion,” a practice in which Black people are offered access to things like college or buying a house but on exploitative financial terms that have long-term negative effects.
Black student loan borrowers are also often the most burdened by student loan debt. As one example, Black bachelor’s degree earners are more likely to default on their student loans than white students who earn a bachelor’s degree – 21% versus 4%, respectively. Even more startling, Black bachelor’s degree recipients default at a higher rate than white students who leave college with no degree – 21% versus 18%, respectively.
Adam Harris of The Atlantic says that work still remains to overhaul a system that is reliant on student indebtedness.
According to a White House fact sheet, 90 percent of Biden’s debt relief will go to those who earn less than $75,000 a year—and the administration estimates that 20 million people will have their debt completely canceled. “An entire generation is now saddled with unsustainable debt in exchange for an attempt, at least, for a college degree,” Biden said at a White House event. “The burden is so heavy that even if you graduate, you may not have access to the middle-class life that the college degree once provided.” That Democrats arrived at this point at all, though, is a testament to how grim the student-loan crisis has become. A decade and a half ago, Democrats were advocating for small increases in the federal grant program to help low-income students afford college. Over successive presidential campaigns, Democratic hopefuls, including Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, have called for canceling most, or all, student debt issued by the government—effectively hitting reset on a broken system. And now the party is announcing one of the largest federal investments in higher education in recent memory.
When he was running for president in 2007, Biden advocated for a tax credit for college students and a marginal increase in the size of individual Pell Grant awards—tinkering around the edges of solving a brewing mess as America lurched toward a deep recession. From 2006 to 2011, college enrollment grew by 3 million, according to the U.S. Census Bureau; at the same time, states began to cut back on their higher-education spending. On average, by 2018, states were spending 13 percent less per student than they were in 2008.
Historically, when states look to cut their budgets, higher education is one of the first sectors to feel the blade. Polling shows that the majority of Americans agree that a college degree pays off. But college, unlike K–12 schooling, is not universal, and a majority of Republicans believe that investment in higher education benefits graduates more than anyone else. So lawmakers have been willing to make students shoulder a greater share of the burden. But this shift leaves those with the fewest resources to pay for college—and those whose families earn a little too much to qualify for Pell Grants—taking on significant debt.
Robin Givhan of The Washington Post reviews how the soon-to-be retired Dr. Anthony Fauci became a cultural touchstone and not simply for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
For the last three years, this trim, gray-haired doctor with the wire-rimmed glasses has been the vessel into which the country has poured all its fears and frustrations. He is hero and tormentor. Truth-teller and unreliable narrator. He has borne our angst. And through it all, he’s shown the public nothing but patience and decency — and only the occasional flares of angry exasperation mostly reserved for a senator named Rand Paul (R-Ky.) whose preferred response to the pandemic might be summed up as do-as-little-as-possible. [...]
Throughout his career, Fauci, 81, has dealt with a host of virologic menaces — AIDS, Zika, Ebola, covid-19 — but it may be that none have been quite so confounding as disinformation, as the disregard for facts, as the demonization of intelligent inquiry. This is a scourge of our own deliberate making. As he said during a recent interview on MSNBC, the country is at a place “where we can see something in front of our very eyes and deny it’s happening.”
So many of our growing cultural bugaboos came to a head in our reckoning with Fauci. He is an intellectual at a time when many deem book-learning dangerous and cheap. He epitomizes academic journals and peer-reviewed articles. Meanwhile, folks are burning books they don’t like or they don’t understand or that simply make them sad. As a scientist Fauci deals in facts, when so many barter in free-floating feelings. He focuses on a singular truth, when so many others rhapsodize about speaking their personal truth. We want to kill the messenger, ignore his message and bury the horse he rode in on.
Jessica Huseman of Texas Tribune says that an opinion issued by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to allow immediate access to ballots as soon as they are counted poses a danger to Texas election security.
Federal and state law require that ballots be kept secure for 22 months after an election to allow for recounts and challenges — a time frame Texas counties have had set in place for decades. Paxton’s opinion, which doesn’t stem from any change to state law, theoretically permits anyone — an aggrieved voter, activist or out-of-state entity — to request access to ballots as soon as the day after they are counted. Such requests have been used by activists all over the country as a way to “audit” election results.
The opinion from Paxton doesn’t carry the force of law, but experts say it will almost certainly serve as the basis for a lawsuit by right-wing activists. The opinion has already impacted elections administrators across the state, who told Votebeat that they’ve seen an onslaught of requests since Paxton released it.
“[Paxton’s office wants] to throw a monkey wrench into the operations of vote counting, especially if they think they might lose, and Paxton is in a close race as far as I can tell,” said Linda Eads, a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law and a former deputy attorney general for litigation for the state of Texas. She said she was “shocked” by the opinion.
The Editorial Team of The Kyiv Independent commemorates the 31st anniversary of Ukraine’s independence and the 6-month mark of the Russian invasion of their country.
For many of us who were in Ukraine in those early weeks of the invasion, it felt like the sky had fallen. There was no guarantee that tomorrow, next week, or summer would ever come. Nothing was certain beyond any given moment.
We saw that, beyond Ukraine, the world has largely counted us done.
The Western coverage of the invasion often spoke of “when” Kyiv will fall, not “if.” It was David against Goliath, and the world wasn’t expecting a miracle.
And it wasn’t a miracle. It was courage, it was power and it was the utmost desire to survive and preserve its independence, its freedom, and its future that kept Ukraine fighting.
That is why it means so much that six months later we can mark the Independence Day of Ukraine – still a free, independent country. A country that is suffering – but still standing strong against the overwhelmingly large enemy.
We are well aware of the price that has been paid for it.
Emma Graham-Harrison of the Guardian reports on a Russian plan to disconnect the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant from Ukraine’s power grid.
World leaders have called for the Zaporizhzhia site to be demilitarised after footage emerged of Russian army vehicles inside the plant, and have previously warned Russia against cutting it off from the Ukrainian grid and connecting it up to the Russian power network.
But Petro Kotin, the head of Ukraine’s atomic energy company, told the Guardian in an interview that Russian engineers had already drawn up a blueprint for a switch on the grounds of emergency planning should fighting sever remaining power connections.
“They presented [the plan] to [workers at] the plant, and the plant [workers] presented it to us. The precondition for this plan was heavy damage of all lines which connect Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant to the Ukrainian system,” Kotin said in an interview on Ukraine’s independence day on Wednesday, with the country mostly locked down because of the threat of Russian attacks.
He fears that Russia’s military is now targeting those connections to make the emergency scenario a reality. Both Ukraine and Russia have accused each other of shelling the site.
Finally today, Steven Wertheim writes for Foreign Affairs about a progressive foreign policy “crisis” in an age of great-power rivalries.
Since the Cold War, U.S. progressives have approached foreign policy from three overlapping but distinct perspectives. The first, and the one arguably best represented in policymaking, seeks to promote democracy and human rights against authoritarianism and atrocity. Like more mainstream liberal internationalists, progressives who espouse this view believe that U.S. power should promote universal values and standards. As progressives, however, they are prone to worry that the United States might violate international rules, abet repression, cause suffering, and benefit elites at the expense of working people. This strain of thought includes a spectrum of figures ranging from Samantha Power, the current USAID administrator, who made her name urging U.S. military intervention to prevent genocide, to U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, who has called for a global progressive movement to counter the “new authoritarian axis.” They want the United States to be consistent in upholding human rights and building a just world, putting less emphasis on serving U.S. interests or adopting a particular grand strategy.
A second position emphasizes global cooperation, often through global governance. From this perspective, the highest priority for the United States and the world is to address transnational and planetary challenges, such as climate change, pandemic disease, nuclear proliferation, and economic inequality. Global cooperation and internationalism frequently combine, as in the person of former State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, who prizes “people-centered policies” above geopolitics while supporting U.S.-led humanitarian interventions. Some cooperators value U.S. military superiority for muting geopolitical conflict and forging collaboration among states. Yet because they prize wide international participation to tackle common problems, global cooperators oppose dividing the world into hostile camps and fault the U.S. alliance system and overuse of coercion for doing just that. Under the rubric of “progressive realism,” for example, the journalist and scholar Robert Wright has championed global governance along with strategic humility and nonintervention.
The third viewpoint takes political-military restraint as its lodestar. Whereas progressive internationalists and global cooperators want to shape the world order to their liking, restrainers are skeptical that such a goal either should be paramount or will be achieved through military preponderance. Instead, they believe the United States’ expansive global military role has become detached from U.S. interests and produces a vicious spiral, constantly generating problems for the United States to try to solve. Progressive restrainers, such as this author, Kate Kizer of the Center for International Policy, and Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, often appeal for regional or global cooperation, arguing that geopolitical modesty by the United States could reduce international tensions. Regardless of the prospects for cooperation, however, they maintain that the security and well-being of the American people demand extricating the United States from far-flung defense commitments. Otherwise, the national-security state will put armed primacy above all else, preventing the country from acting strategically in a changing world and from meeting its citizens’ needs at home.
Have a good day, everyone!