Tag: coronavirus relief package

Kill the Legislative Filibuster?

By Todd Lassa

Before last November’s election, Joseph R. Biden punted on the question of whether he supports killing the Senate legislative filibuster. It’s a move Senate Democrats have been considering at least since it won a majority by the slimmest of margins, with Vice President Harris the tie-breaker for when legislation is split down party lines 

The issue is not the first priority with Senate Democrats, who are moving President Biden’s $1.9-trillion coronavirus relief package via the arcane reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority vote rather than the 60 votes – including 10 Republican senators – necessary when the potential of a filibuster is involved. 

The question is, how much legislation can Biden’s Democratic allies in the Senate pass in the next two years without eliminating the legislative filibuster, which means most bills will require those 10 Republican votes? After January 2023, Democrats either will lose their wafer-thin Senate majority, or will build on it, though it is unlikely either party will gain at least 10 senators in the November 8, 2022 mid-terms. 

Filibuster reformation seems to come up every four years with the presidential election, if not every two years. 

In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, rallied Democrats to end the filibuster for federal judicial nominees and executive office appointments. Spiking the filibuster, called “the nuclear option,” requires only a simple majority vote. 

Republicans warned that triggering the nuclear option on appointing federal judges would come back to bite Democrats whenever they inevitably lost the Senate majority. 

And they were right. In 2017, then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, led a majority of his party to end the judicial filibuster for U.S. Supreme Court nominees, paving the way for President Trump’s nomination of Neil Gorsuch as replacement for the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Adding hard-core partisanship to injury, Gorsuch’s Senate approval came the year after McConnell prevented a vote on Obama’s nominee late in his term to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland, who now is Biden’s nominee for attorney general.

In the end, Trump saw his three Supreme Court associate justice nominees get Senate approval in his four years in office, compared with Obama’s two associate justices in eight years. 

The question for Democratic senators now is, how much more of Biden’s agenda could the Senate pass in the next 23 months if just 51 votes were needed? And would it be worth weathering the inevitable Senate and White House flip somewhere off in the future?

_____
Click on Forum for a new commentary by Stephen Macaulay
Email editors@thehustings.news with reader comments.

With COVID Relief Still Under Debate, Where Do We Go from Here?

By Nic Woods

President Donald Trump signed late Sunday evening the omnibus funding package, including $900 billion in coronavirus relief that Congress passed last week after denouncing the $600 relief checks to taxpayers as “disgraceful.”

The amount – $600 – is paltry, but so is the $2,000 Trump and Democrats in the House of Representatives sought, but Congressional Republicans blocked. 

The $2,000 may have helped six months ago, but it is all too little now for the households that need it most.

The relief the bill claims to offer does not make up for lost wages from closed businesses and, for those facing eviction, $2,000 is only a drop in a bucket that has grown larger for months. For small businesses that have really taken a hit (many of which were never able to receive funds in the first round “stimulus” bill) any relief may come too late to delay the inevitable. 

Many iconic places across the nation have already closed for good.

While an abomination, but also an opportunity for discourse that should happen post-COVID, along with health care, separating life security from job security is a conversation long overdue. If anything, the pandemic has shown what our country looks like when unfettered capitalism fails us all.

Because the “invisible hand of the market” does not work if supply and demand are as out of whack as they have been since March. As Harvard Business School economist Michael Luca told The New York Times back in October, “if a market is not safe, people won’t participate in it.” 

So COVID-19 has only exacerbated a process that has been occurring for much of the past 50 years. Secure, well-paying jobs with benefits were going the way of the dodo bird prior to 2020. Now service jobs – which have become a pillar of our economy, but also tend to require close contact – are in deep trouble. Retail and hospitality will continue to suffer unless they can guarantee worker and customer safety, and even large companies that did well during the outbreak are shedding jobs. 

Even the gig economy, which so many have relied on to make ends meet until jobs open up, has become oversaturated, with more shoppers, personal assistants, delivery persons and drivers than individuals or companies that need them.

But one thing is for sure. People who are not used to living in full, constant survival mode are going to be increasingly disgruntled having to scrounge for food, shelter, and clothing while others are making out like bandits. And it is something we must start talking about, because it is not just affecting the working class anymore. In a global pandemic, everyone is affected. 

And money protects no one when only some have it and others don’t. So, to those who fear socialism? What if a little is necessary to save capitalism from itself and keep the destitute from aiming their pitchforks at your door?

Nic Woods dedicates this column to the memory of anthropologist, activist, and author David Graeber, who died Sept. 2. Graeber’s work laid the groundwork that inspired Woods to write the column.

—–