The fight is on to bring President-elect Joe Biden into office with a Democratic Senate majority to add to the Democratic House majority. But if Mitch McConnell controls the Senate and can continue to block legislation at will, no matter how popular it may be … Biden shouldn’t give up. He should keep pushing, and he should make sure voters know about it.
That’s Bryce Covert’s message in The New York Times. Biden “can get a jump start without Congress by requiring higher wages and paid family leave at federal contractors, increasing living standards for hundreds of thousands of Americans,” she writes. And whatever he does, it’s important for voters—say, the Florida voters who voted to increase the minimum wage at the same time as they voted for Donald Trump—to know what Biden and other Democrats are fighting for.
Policies like a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave, paid family leave, education funding, and more Democratic priorities are popular with voters, as election after election has showed in recent years. Democrats need to make sure voters believe these popular measures really are Democratic priorities.
● Lindsay Beyerstein writes on Life inside a pre-release prison: Like prison, but more work.
“Honestly, most people would rather just stay in prison because once you're done with prison then you're done," said 27-year-old former resident Tara Norman. "But in Passages, you have to do so many things after the fact just to stay out of jail."
● Erik Loomis writes on the slave labor lobby. That would be major corporations, lobbying Congress and arguing at the Supreme Court.
● Great news:
● How a soccer club won a $1.2 million grant from DeVos’s Education Department to open a charter school:
The [federal Charter School Program] awarded the football club $1,260,750 to be spent within its first five years, even though their submitted application only received 70 of 115 possible points by reviewers — a failing grade of 61 percent. And the club did not have permission from the local school board to actually open the school.
● Google illegally fired two employees pushing for workplace rights, regulators say. And then, Google followed it up by firing a top ethics researcher, who was also one of the few Black women in a prominent role at the company, over a critical email.
● "This strike is a fight for our lives": Healthcare workers are walking off the job to demand pandemic protections, Jeff Schuhrke writes.
● Will the Supreme Court overrule farmworker union rights?
● Reinstating and extending the pandemic unemployment insurance programs through 2021 could create or save 5.1 million jobs.