#so he became a state rep to change that law. ended up proposing another where all new hampshire residents who volunteered

[mourning-again-in-america]

I was in a great books program in college, and its best marketing came from alumni who went to a vegan theater commune in Vermont and pulled in a bunch of the other theater communards to the program. Every other thing I've learned about Vermont has confirmed this stereotype.

no one ever talks about vermont i dont know anything about vermont

no cop outs, if you've never heard of vermont in your life choose the last option. vote on my poll. vote on my poll

[theliberaltony]

via FiveThirtyEight

Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination is good news for liberal policy activists. And that’s whether she wins the nomination or not. The Massachusetts senator appears poised to serve as a progressive policy anchor in the 2020 Democratic field, pushing the field — and the eventual nominee — toward aggressively liberal policy stands.

How might Warren have such influence? Because the Massachusetts senator is planning to release detailed and decidedly liberal policy proposals on issue after issue. Her rivals, if past primary campaigns are any guide, will feel pressure to either “match” her on policy by coming up with their own proposals, say that they agree with Warren, or convince the party’s increasingly left-leaning electorate that Warren’s proposals are too liberal. And remember that presidential winners usually try to implement their promises — so an idea put out by Warren in March could be in Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s platform in August and be signed into law by a President Gillibrand in 2021.

Here’s an example of how this works, from a past Democratic primary. Early in the 2008 campaign, John Edwards released a comprehensive plan to provide health care for millions of Americans. A few months later, then-Sen. Barack Obama, looking to compete with Edwards among liberal voters and activists, put out a similar proposal, which was the basic outline for the Affordable Care Act he signed into law as president.

In the 2020 Democratic nomination process, I expect that other candidates will also have lots of policy proposals. And Bernie Sanders in particular is likely to join Warren in pushing the Democratic primary debate to the left. But Warren is likely to be at the forefront of the “policy primary,”– the one-time Harvard professor is perhaps the wonkiest person in the field. And Warren knows how to push her ideas onto the national agenda quite well. Before she was elected to the Senate, Warren convinced congressional Democrats and President Obama to create the agency now known as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Warren campaign aides told me that unveiling major policy proposals will be a big part of her candidacy, with the ideas intended to reinforce Warren’s broader message that the country needs “big, structural change,” not just incremental tweaks.

“I’ve been working on one central question for 30 years,” Warren told me in brief interview after a campaign event in Greenville, South Carolina, on Saturday, “‘what’s going wrong with working families across this country, why is America’s middle class getting hallowed out?’ I never thought I would come into politics, not in a million years, but that was my chance to fight bigger, back in 2012, when I went to the Senate.”1

“Getting into the presidential race means I can talk about the kinds of big, systemic changes we need to make,” she added.

“Warren is an unusually wonkish, policy-focused figure, not just attached to some concerns … but very specific and knowledgeable about them,” said David Karol, a University of Maryland political science professor and expert on the presidential nominations process, in an e-mail message.

Karol said that Warren’s potential effect on the 2020 race is analogous to four years ago, when Sanders seemed to push Hillary Clinton to take more leftward stances than she might have otherwise. If Clinton had been elected president, she would have felt pressure to implement some of those liberal campaign promises, which would have made Sanders’s 2016 run particularly important in shaping U.S. public policy. But Karol argued that Warren is somewhat distinct from Sanders, because in his estimation, she is more attuned to the finer details of legislation. So Warren might push the rest of the Democratic field to the left and force Sanders, who is already very liberal, to be more specific in explaining how his proposals will work.

“[Warren] has a deep mastery of policy, a staunchly progressive voting record,” said New York-based liberal political activist Sean McElwee, best known for advocating for the abolition of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, in an e-mail message. “She’ll be a real contender and will force every other candidate to get smart on policy and push the boundaries of what it means to be a progressive.”

So what are Warren’s ideas? It’s worth separating them into two general categories: ones that she is one of the principal authors of and those where she has embraced someone else’s proposal. The latter is important too — Warren taking up an idea while running for president can bring attention to obscure proposals written by backbenchers on Capitol Hill.

Here are some major Warren-authored policies:

A 2 percent annual tax on household net worth between $50 million and $1 billion, and an additional 1 percent tax on household net worth above $1 billion.

Bans on members of Congress and other top officials in Washington from owning individual stocks while in office and doing any kind of lobbying after they leave office.

Postal banking, a requirement that all U.S. post offices offer checking and saving accounts to Americans who want to sign up for them.

Federal manufacturing of generic prescription drugs.

The removal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

A reduction in the overall Department of Defense budget.

Federal funds to help first-time homeowners make the down payment on homes if they buy in neighborhoods that suffered in the past from redlining.

A requirement that large corporations reserve 40 percent of the seats on their boards for board members selected by workers at the company.

A ban on the U.S. using nuclear weapons first in a military conflict with another country.

A $146 billion “Marshall Plan” for Puerto Rico.

Here are a couple of proposals written by others that Warren has embraced:

Medicare-for-all;

The “Green New Deal,” a proposal championed by New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey to limit fossil fuel use in the U.S. in order to address climate change..

There are two caveats to this analysis. First, Warren’s influence on policy rests on her remaining a viable candidate, appearing in the debates, regularly visiting the early primary states and not, say, dropping out in May of this year. Second, I think Warren will particularly affect candidates, like Sanders, who are competing with her for support among liberal Democratic primary voters and activists like McElwee who comprise the party’s left wing. So Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who appears to be targeting more moderate Democrats, may not feel that she has to match Warren policy-for-policy.

That said, even more centrist candidates are likely to feel Warren’s pull on the race. Journalists and activists are going to ask candidates like Klobuchar if they support single-payer or Medicare-for-all. That will create pressure on those candidates to address Warren’s proposals, even if in the end they call for a less liberal variant — some kind of Medicare option for people between ages 50 and 64 instead of Medicare-for-all, for example. And Warren is likely to come up with ideas on issues that disproportionately affect blacks, Latinos, and young voters, three other key electoral blocs in the party. More moderate candidates can’t concede those voting blocs, so Warren’s proposals on issues that affect those voting blocs will likely influence all of the candidates.

So watch for Warren’s ideas — in some ways separately from Warren. A week after Warren unveiled her wealth tax, Sanders put out a plan to vastly increase the estate tax. I’m not saying Sanders proposed that idea only because of Warren’s move, but he might have proposed it so early in the presidential race (even before he officially announced his candidacy) because he felt pressured to match Warren. I would assume many Democratic candidates will put out proposals to vastly increase taxes on the wealthiest Americans — even if they aren’t as aggressive as Warren’s proposals. And his opposition to Warren’s wealth tax seems to be one of the primary reasons ex-Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz, a one-time Democrat, is considering an independent presidential run.

So while Warren’s poll numbers put her behind some of her rivals right now, she’s already having an outsized influence on the race — and I would expect that to continue.

[dipulb3]

Democratic lawmakers wrestle with how to proceed on immigration

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/democratic-lawmakers-wrestle-with-how-to-proceed-on-immigration/

Democratic lawmakers wrestle with how to proceed on immigration

Democrats involved in the efforts are in talks with leadership about how to proceed with the immigration agenda in the House but decisions haven’t been made yet, according to multiple members and aides. Leaders in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are still holding education seminars with various groups within the Democratic caucus, according to one member.

“There are two camps. One is that we should have three separate votes and one that says we should bundle them all together,” said one Democratic member who asked to speak on the condition of background to freely discuss the internal caucus conversations. “It’s also unclear if they want to try to do this in a purely partisan way or do they want to try to build bipartisan support for it?”

The question of order and timing is in part a calculation about what can actually become law. While Democrats largely support legalizing millions of immigrants who are already in the country illegally, as Biden’s proposal would do, there is a risk in passing a sweeping bill in the House only to watch it go nowhere in the Senate.

Moderate Democrats, some of whom won election in districts that Donald Trump carried in 2016 and 2020, fear that voting on a comprehensive immigration bill without a clear path in the Senate could open them up to unnecessary attacks. It’s one thing, they argue, to vote on legislation that will become law, but it’s another thing to vote just for the sake of messaging and then suffer political attacks later.

Lawmakers involved in previous attempts at immigration overhauls also concede that moving Biden’s immigration measure forward is no easy feat, and instead focus on a piecemeal approach.

“If we look at reality, I think we know that it’s easier to get bipartisan support on the DREAM Act and agriculture plan,” said Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas, citing two measures that previously passed the House and would provide relief to farmworkers and undocumented immigrants who came to the US as children.

“I think we have a much better shot at those two, even though I support full comprehensive immigration reform,” Cuellar said. “I don’t want to end up with good intentions; I want to end up with some sort of progress.”

One option could be to vote on the farmworker and Dreamer bills separately and keep working to see if changes could be made to the comprehensive bill to garner some Republican support down the line.

“In the abstract, my preference has been for a big comprehensive bill that has a lot in it and not piecemeal. It’s easier to do some hard things when you do it that way,” said Rep. Dan Kildee, a Democrat from Michigan.

“This is the struggle, whether we continue to just pass stuff that just initially is a statement of our values, knowing we then have to back down in order to actually legislate, and there is some tension within the caucus,” Kildee added.

Others argue that Democrats should take advantage of the opportunity sooner rather than later.

This “is our moment to finally fix an immigration system that has been broken for decades. We can keep families together, stimulate our economy, and properly manage our border at the same time. The U.S. Citizenship Act will do just that. We must use this momentum to pass robust reform,” said Democratic Rep. Linda Sanchez of California, who’s leading the Biden bill on the House side, in a statement.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, a Democrat from Washington state, echoed that. “We want to make sure we’re not forgoing the possibility of a truly comprehensive bill for these other bills. If we do these smaller pieces, does that mean we’re not going to get to the whole thing?” Jayapal told Appradab. “Let’s just push hard on all the different places.”

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, confirmed on a call with reporters this week that putting a bill on the House floor by March 8 is “being discussed,” but he didn’t offer a timeline.

“This is a hiccup where we have to figure out what’s going on the floor, but ultimately it’s going to be up to the Senate,” said a source familiar with the discussions.

The Senate would need 10 Republican lawmakers to cross the aisle and vote for a comprehensive immigration bill, something that doesn’t seem plausible in the wake of Trump’s recalibration of the party’s positions on immigration.

During the Trump administration, many Republicans on Capitol Hill moved farther to the right to restrict even legal forms of immigration. The former President’s border wall — a lightning rod for Democrats — became synonymous with gaining control of the southern border for the Republican base, and even senators who worked on the 2013 comprehensive immigration overhaul, like Republican Sens. Marco Rubio of Florida and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have made it clear they would prefer a piecemeal approach this time.

Democrats have the advantage of controlling all three branches of government. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, could bring immigration legislation to the floor even if it didn’t have the votes to pass, but the timeline for something like that is still far off, given other measures, like Biden’s infrastructure package, that the Senate is working through.

Immigrant advocates have stressed the need for a legislative revamp after years of constant policy changes and executive actions that have put millions of lives in limbo. They find themselves in the unusual spot of supporting Biden’s bill, and the vision it lays out, while recognizing there may be more success in passing smaller measures for the time being.

“Our movement is so hungry for a breakthrough this year that we are focused on what’s going to get us from today to the finish line with a breakthrough victory,” said Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, an immigrant advocacy organization.

“It’s fine if you want to vote on it, but what we’re trying to do is get momentum that leads to a victory,” Sharry said, referring to Biden’s immigration bill. “It’s not really either/or. It’s now and later.”

Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council, noted how previous attempts at an overhaul hang over the latest effort to pass sweeping legislation.

“What’s playing out behind the scenes is an assessment in real time of what’s possible in this particular Congress, in this moment. And it’s in response to the way we’ve pursued immigration reform previously, which is to cobble everything into one bill, rally everyone behind it and only to see it fall apart,” Loweree said.

In a letter to the White House on Friday obtained by Appradab, a group of immigrant advocates urged the President to push Democratic lawmakers to “pursue every possible avenue to deliver for immigrant communities without delay,” starting with measures addressing immigrant youth, Temporary Protected Status holders, essential workers and farmworkers.

“With passage in the House of these bills, we expect the White House to go all in on a strategy urging the Senate to pass permanent solutions for immigrant youth, TPS holders and farmworkers. These are clear, attainable and immediate steps Democrats can take to set President Biden’s bill, and the larger objective of citizenship for all 11 million undocumented immigrants, in motion,” reads the letter.

A member of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who requested anonymity to speak freely told Appradab that debate within the party on these kinds of issues is expected. “There isn’t any major bill that comes to the Congress where there isn’t some internal debate about what exactly it should look like. It’s the same thing with this bill,” the member said.

Still, the message from groups advocating for immigrants in the US is clear: “Just move in March,” Sharry said.

[kacydeneen]

PolitiFact: Fact-Checking the Fifth Democratic Presidential Debate

The impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump and nationwide voter suppression were center stage during the fifth Democratic presidential debate in Atlanta.

The debate, which was hosted by MSNBC and the Washington Post, opened with clashes over the candidates’ tax plans, pivoted to climate change records and ended with jabs over marijuana policy.

PolitiFact analyzed several statements from candidates on the debate stage at Tyler Perry Studios in Atlanta. Here are some highlights:

Biden says Americans like their plans

"160 million people like their private insurance."

This rates Half True.

A cursory look at polling would suggest that most of the people he’s talking about. Polling done earlier this year by the Kaiser Family Foundation with the Los Angeles Times found that most beneficiaries are "generally satisfied" with this insurance. (Kaiser Health News, a partner of PolitiFact, is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)

But once you dig a little deeper, that narrative gets more complicated.

Even while Americans say they like their plans, large proportions indicate that the private coverage they have still leaves meaningful gaps, requiring them to skip or delay health care because they cannot afford it.

In the same KFF/L.A. Times poll, about 40% of people with employer-sponsored coverage said they had trouble paying medical bills, out-of-pocket costs or premiums. About half indicated going without or delaying health care because — even with this coverage — it was unaffordable. And about 17% reported making "difficult sacrifices" to pay for health care.

One military veteran attacks another

Says Pete Buttigieg said that as president, he "would be willing to send our troops to Mexico to fight the cartels."

— Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii

Gabbard’s attack contained an element of truth, but was exaggerated and misleading.

Buttigieg, who did a seven-month deployment as a Navy Reserve intelligence officer in Afghanistan, said Gabbard took his remarks out of context.

Gabbard, a major in the Army National Guard who served two tours of duty in the Middle East, alluded to comments Buttigieg made three days earlier in a candidate forum in Los Angeles. An interviewer said President Donald Trump had suggested sending U.S. troops to Mexico to help deal with the drug cartels there, then had this exchange with Buttigieg:

Question: "Do you see a time where troops could go into Mexico if Mexico welcomed it?"

Buttigieg: "There is a scenario where we could have security cooperation as we do with countries around the world. Now, I would only order American troops into conflict if there were no other choice, if American lives were on the line and if this were necessary in order for us to uphold our treaty obligations. But we could absolutely be in some kind of partnership role if and only if it is welcomed by our partner south of the border."

His campaign later clarified, the Sacramento Bee reported, that Buttigieg would only be open to military use as a "last resort" in response to Mexican cartel violence or an outside threat that endangers the country’s security.

Biden shouts out PolitiFact’s report on a climate change bill, but...

"While I was passing the first climate change bill that PolitiFact said was a game-changer, … my friend (Steyer) was introducing more coal mines and produced more coal around the world, according to the press, than all of Great Britain produces."

— Former Vice President Joe Biden

Biden was one of the first lawmakers to introduce a climate change bill. But we here at PolitiFact didn’t call it a "game-changer."

Biden’s shout-out to PolitiFact came in response to a comment from billionaire Tom Steyer. Steyer said that he is the only Democratic candidate who has made climate change his No. 1 priority.

We found that Biden was one of the first U.S. legislators to introduce a climate change bill.

His first climate change bill was introduced in 1986, but it died in the Senate. The next year, a version of Biden’s legislation became an amendment to a State Department funding bill. President Ronald Reagan signed it into law.

Biden’s Global Climate Protection Act called on the president to set up a task force to plan how to mitigate global warming. It also called on the president to make climate change a higher priority item on the U.S.-Soviet agenda.

While Congress had focused on the issue before, most experts we spoke to said Biden’s bill was the first climate change legislation of its kind. However, those same experts also cautioned against overstating the importance of the bill. It didn’t introduce a plan for reducing emissions or adapting infrastructure for climate change.

"It was a plan to make a plan. Which, of course, neither Reagan nor Bush ultimately did," Josh Howe, a professor of history and environmental studies at Reed College, previously told PolitiFact.

As for Steyer’s own record on the environment, a 2014 report from the New York Times analyzed the operations of Farallon Capital Management, Steyer’s investment management company. It found that Farallon invested millions of dollars in companies that operate coal mines or coal-fired power plants.

The Times reported that Farallon-supported coal mining companies increased their annual production by about 70 million tons after they received money from the fund. "That is more than the amount of coal consumed annually by Britain," the Times wrote.

Booker knocks Warren’s wealth tax

"The wealth tax: I’m sorry, it’s cumbersome. It’s been tried by other nations. It’s hard to evaluate."

— Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.

It’s accurate to say that other countries have tried wealth taxes similar to the one that Warren has proposed. Several countries still have them.

He was responding to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s wealth tax, which would put a 2% levy on wealth above the $50 million mark to provide universal pre-kindergarten and cancel student debt for most people. (We previously found there’s ample reason to doubt her math.)

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international body based in Paris, has counted 12 or 13 countries that collected revenues from net wealth taxes in 1996. (The tally differs slightly based on how you measure it.)

Nine European countries have ended their wealth taxes since then. Today, six or seven European nations have some form of wealth tax.

As Booker said, the reason why some countries nixed their wealth taxes has to do with how difficult it is to levy them. A 2015 report from the European Commission found that determining the value of people’s assets was difficult. A 2018 report from the OECD said revenues collected from wealth taxes were generally low and that there were several "efficiency and administrative concerns."

However, we’ve spoken to experts who say the same thing wouldn’t necessarily happen in the United States. OECD analysts said arguments for and against wealth taxes depend on how other tax laws would work with Warren’s proposal.

Biden misstates African-American support in Senate

Says he has the backing of "the only African-American woman that’s ever been elected to the United States Senate."

— Former Vice President Joe Biden

This was a slip-up that Biden quickly corrected after a mystified reaction from other candidates on the stage — notably Kamala Harris, who is an African-American woman elected to the Senate and who, as an active candidate, has not endorsed Biden.

"That's not true!" said Booker.

"I'm right here!" said Harris, laughing.

Biden was referring to his endorsement by Carol Moseley Braun, a Democrat who represented Illinois in the Senate for one term. She was the first African-American woman to be elected to a Senate seat. Harris was the second and, so far, only other to achieve that distinction.

Steyer understates Congress’ action on climate change

"Congress has never passed an important climate bill, ever."

— Tom Steyer, hedge fund manager

While reasonable people can disagree about what qualifies as "important," Congress has certainly passed several notable bills responding to climate change over the years.

One landmark law that passed well before the modern era of climate change policy — the Clean Air Act 1963 — paved the way for the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which used regulatory mechanisms to set state carbon emissions targets and a pathway to meet those targets. The Trump administration shelved the plan before it went into effect.

In 1992, the Senate passed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, which had been signed under President George H.W. Bush and which laid out an international process for future climate-change agreements.

That same year, language creating the renewable energy production tax credit was signed into law as part of the Energy Policy Act. This credit gave a boost to wind energy and, starting in 2005, solar energy. The tax credit is widely seen as enabling the United States’ fast-growing renewable-energy sector.

In 2007, President George W. Bush signed the Energy Independence and Security Act, which established a renewable fuel standard for fuel producers, offered incentives for renewable fuel production, and phased out incandescent light bulbs.

And in the same year, an appropriations bill established mandatory reporting of large-source greenhouse gas emissions.

Klobuchar counts states without paper ballots

"We still have 11 states that don’t have back-up paper ballots."

— Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.

Klobuchar would have been better off saying some counties and towns in 11 states don’t offer back-up paper ballots, according to research by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University, a liberal organization that advocates for voting rights.

An August report from the group concluded that "11 states use paperless machines as their primary polling place equipment in at least some counties and towns, as Virginia, Arkansas, and Delaware transitioned to paper-based voting equipment in 2017, 2018, and 2019."

Three of those states — Georgia, South Carolina and Pennsylvania — have committed to replacing equipment by 2020. That means that in 2020, portions of eight states will still use paperless equipment. Louisiana would be the only state to have paperless voting systems statewide, Liz Howard, counsel for the Brennan Center's Democracy Program, told PolitiFact.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on Russian interference in July found that "paper ballots and optical scanners are the least vulnerable to cyber attack; at minimum, any machine purchased going forward should have a voter-verified paper trail and remove (or render inert) any wireless networking capability."

Photo Credit: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images This story uses functionality that may not work in our app. Click here to open the story in your web browser. PolitiFact: Fact-Checking the Fifth Democratic Presidential Debate published first on Miami News

[thisdaynews]

Big Soda’s big comeback

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/big-sodas-big-comeback/

Big Soda’s big comeback

When the mayor of Philadelphia unveiled his battle plan against sugary sodas, it looked like he was riding a national wave. The year was 2016, and one city after another was trying to fight obesity by nudging their citizens away from cheap, high-calorie drinks. In a speech to the City Council unveiling his firstbudget, Mayor Jim Kenney declared his plan to pay for a host of city initiatives with a new tax on every ounce of soda.

“This was a fight we thought was worth having,” said James Engler, Kenney’s chief of staff.

For a decade, concern had been rising in the public health world that soda’s superfluous calories were fueling an epidemic of obesity and diabetes, and supporters in Philadelphia and elsewhere embraced local taxes as a win-win—a way to encourage healthier choices while also generating some new money to help communities with high obesity rates. In California, Berkeley had passed a soda tax in 2014. Oakland, Boulder and Chicago would soon take up their own laws.

In Philadelphia, the soda industry poured more than $9 million into fighting the new tax, to no avail. The City Council passed the law in June 2016,and Philadelphia began collecting 1½ cents for every ounce of soda sold—boosting the price of a 12-ounce drink by 18 cents, and far more on big convenience-store cups. Soda companies, represented by the American Beverage Association, appealed the law, and the case went all the way to Pennsylvania Supreme Court—where the city won.

That might have seemed like the end. But it was only the start of a whole new fight. Starting in 2017, the beverage industry changed tactics and opened a new front at the state capital in Harrisburg, spending considerably less money—less than $2 million—on an influence campaign to get the state’s business community to put pressure on their legislators. The goal was no longer just to quash Philadelphia’s tax: It was to pass a new state law that would prohibitanycity in Pennsylvania from passing a local soda tax.

And that fight is still very much alive. One version of the bill failed in 2017, and a similar measure is before legislators this year, with the lobbying effort led by a major grocery chain allied with beverage manufacturers who spearheaded the earlier version.

“They don’t want to just stop us from doing it now,” Engler said in an interview. “They want to make sure it wouldn’t happen anywhere else, either.”

Pennsylvania has found itself the latest battleground for a national strategy by soda producers aimed at stopping local taxes on their products—not by fighting the cities directly, but by pushing pliant state legislatures to ban any such tax increases statewide. Called “preemption” laws, they’re designed to limit cities from imposing taxes of their own. Legislatures in Arizona and Michigan have already passed state laws forbidding local soda taxes. In Washington state, the industry backed a voter initiative barring local soda taxes; it passed in 2018.

Perhaps the industry’s most remarkable success has been California, a progressive state in which multiple cities passed their own soda taxes in the wake of Berkeley’s first-in-the-nation law and additional cities were ramping up campaigns. There, the industry used the statewide initiative system as leverage over lawmakers:It collected enough signatures to put a measure on the state ballot that would prevent any city or locality from imposinganytax on residents, no matter what the reason, unless approved directly by two-thirds of voters.The lobby then offered to withdraw the measure from the ballot if legislators simply passed a law stopping local governments from taxing soda. Faced with a potential new law that could have crippled budgets statewide, they complied. California’s preemption law went into effect in 2018—ensuring that, until 2030, the only cities in the state with extra beverage taxes are the handful, like Berkeley, that have already adopted them.

In its nationwide push against soda taxes, the beverage industry makes two main arguments: One, the health benefits of taxing soda are overstated; and two, the taxes put an unfair burden on small businesses and shoppers. “We are definitely solidly behind preemption efforts because this is a very damaging tax to consumers, working families and small businesses,” ABA spokesman William Dermody said in an interview.

Beyond that, however, its campaign trades on a basic insight about modern American politics: Although the liberal leadership of American cities might be a hard nut for a pro-business lobby to crack, state legislators are often far more friendly to business, and they often have the power to overrule city laws. And it’s often much cheaper to lobby in capitals like Harrisburg, Sacramento and Springfield than to wage a fight in expensive cities.

A study published earlier this year found that at least 12 states have enacted preemption laws aimed at squashing local anti-obesity measures including soda taxes; four states have specifically outlawed soda taxes and three other states have considered preemption laws in the past year.

“When you have a conservative state and a progressive city within that state, it becomes challenging,” said Pennsylvania Rep. Donna Bullock, a Democrat who supports Philadelphia’s tax, “because the conservative lawmakers use preemption to control progressive cities.”

THE SODA INDUSTRY’Spreemption strategy largely has gone unnoticed on the national level, in part because state legislatures tend to draw less attention than policy fights in Washington and in big cities, and in part because beverage companies often obscure the real focus of the laws by framing them as opposition to “grocery” taxes. They also enlist grocers associations, local farm bureaus and retailers as allies to make it appear that the opposition is local, even though the campaigns draw significant funding from the national association.

Public health groups, which are often local, find themselves outgunned against an organized national strategy, and tend not to have the resources to play defense in multiple state capitals at the same time.

There are a few exceptions,including the American Heart Association, which has been actively pushing for soda taxes nationwide.But even with a national network of lobbyists, it has been outspent and outmaneuvered in state after state. “[H]aving to defend against preemption has become part of our strategy,” the AHA’s Jill Birnbaum told POLITICO. She said this approach is playing out in virtually every state where her organization is pursuing soda taxes.

Another national player is former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who became the face of anti-soda policy with a failed 2012 attempt to ban large sodas in New York. His organization now goes head-to-head with the beverage lobby in state and local campaigns, pouring more than $17 million into a trio of California ballot initiative campaigns,including the Oakland soda tax fight.He also put millions toward trying to defend a tax in Cook County, Illinois, that includes much of greater Chicago (unsuccessfully) and Philadelphia’s tax (successfully, so far). His money also helped beat back a preemption ballot initiative in Oregon. In Washington state, where the industry-backed preemption initiative prevailed, Bloomberg didn’t get involved.

Dermody, the spokesman for the American Beverage Association, said in an interview that the preemption push has gained urgency in the past few years. He pointed to an ultimately unsuccessful 2017 Santa Fe soda tax proposal that drew the support of the city’s political establishment as “one of those turning points” in the larger debate.

“I think a lot of folks in other cities and towns started to pay attention to it,” Dermody said, because the New Mexico effort underscored the idea that “my gosh, this could happen anywhere.”

In its push against soda tax, the beverage industry is acting in concert with business owners and in some cases labor groups, like truck drivers, that worry about the impact if taxes start to cut down on soda sales. “We back all of these measures, but they’re backed by many other folks in the states at the same time,” Dermody said.

In Harrisburg, the preemption push has been driven by both the ABA and the Wakefern Food Corporation, which operates grocery stores in Pennsylvania. Anthony Campisi, who has lobbied on the chain’s behalf, said there’s a natural alignment of interests between the beverage manufacturers and the stores that sell their products; carbonated beverages are an important source of revenue, particularly for convenience stores.

“What the beverage tax has done is essentially made it very hard for those stores, particularly in poor urban neighborhoods, to succeed,” Campisi said. “It really does it make it difficult to keep stores open in poor urban neighborhoods when there’s a massive tax on a core area of the business.”

While public health experts say the efficacy of soda taxes is well-established, the beverage industry points to contradictory evidence. Despite adopting a national soda tax in 2014, Mexico’s adult obesity rate rose from 2012 to 2016, Dermody noted, and research has shown that while consumption declines in areas with soda taxes, the reduction is at least partially offset by augmented sales in nearby jurisdictions. A recent editorial in the Journal of the American Medical Association said it is “still unclear if these taxes improve health outcomes,” given the multiple factors causing obesity.

“If you tax beverages at an extremely high rate, do sales go down? Yeah. We’ve seen that happen. Do they improve public health, and does overall consumption of sugar go down? No,” Dermody said.

Despite the murkiness, the industry is worried. Both Coke and Pepsi identified soda taxes as “risk factors” in recent reports to investors. Pepsi’s filing described a global phenomenon, encompassing not just Seattle but Saudi Arabia and France, in which soda taxes would reduce demand and amplify the public perception “that our products do not meet their health and wellness needs.”

THE LOBBY HASreason to be concerned: Whether because of taxes or health concerns, sugary beverage consumption has begun declining in the United States. The American Medical Association endorsed soda taxes in 2017. This spring, the American Academy of Pediatrics also threw its weight behind taxing soda to bolster public health.

Given the challenges of campaigning in liberal cities, it may have been inevitable the beverage industry switched to statehouses. It is certainly more economical.

Campaign finance numbers from California neatly illustrate the calculus. The American Beverage Association spent more than $30 million combined on failed attempts to beat back local soda taxes in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley and Albany, California. It cost a fraction of that to qualify the statewide initiative it used as leverage to push Sacramento into a deal that ended local soda taxes for more than a decade. The ABA channeled $8.9 million to the committee managing the initiative.

“What they did in California last year,” said Harold Goldstein, executive director of Public Health Advocates, “was a sign to me that this is part of a much more intentional national strategy.”

The shift to state preemption has alarmed public health advocates and their political supporters, who had spent years mounting a city-by-city effort to build a track record—and momentum—for public health policies designed to slow the obesity rate.

“The mindset of prevention folks on sugary beverages was, ‘We’re not going to win at the state level until we win a constituency and get some momentum at the local level’,” said Victor Colman, director of the Childhood Obesity Prevention Coalition.

Industries hoping to avoid regulation often find it easier to fight a single battle in a state capital than a series of skirmishes in cities, said Jennifer Pomeranz, a public health professor at New York University who has researched preemption. Distance works to their advantage, she argued.

“Local legislators are pretty attuned to the needs of their community members, so the industry has a harder time,” Pomeranz said, “but once you’re at the state level, legislators are a little more disconnected.”

The Philadelphia experience figured into the calculus in Michigan, one of several states in which preemption efforts have themselves been preemptive strikes. Rather than wait for local soda tax proposals to bubble up, opponents moved to eliminate the option before anything could be proposed.

In 2017, before any jurisdiction had floated a soda tax in his state, Michigan state Sen. Peter MacGregor introduced a preemption bill, saying soda taxes were “creating controversy in other locations, Cook County (Chicago) and Philadelphia for example.”

Birnbaum of the American Heart Association also said there were exploratory soda taxefforts underway in Detroit when the Michigan Legislature passed its preemption bill andcrushed the possibility. Senators representing Detroit were among the few legislators who voted no.

In Arizona, state Rep. T.J. Shope introduced a preemption bill that was signed into law in 2018. As in Michigan, no city in Arizona had yet proposed a sugary beverage tax.But a November 2017 poll found broad public support for a statewide soda tax, and he suspected some Arizona cities were inclined to consider them.

A third-generation grocer, Shope said he was approached about sponsoring the preemption bill by soda industry representatives who were keeping an eye on the national landscape.

“I think they were probably looking for a state to take a stand,” he said.

IN 2018,California became the soda industry’s Rubicon. Because the state is both the nation’s largest economy and its biggest consumer market, economic and regulatory decisions there can have an outsize impact—particularly given California’s function as a liberal bellwether in which ambitious progressive policies are tested and then exported to other states.

Moreover, California offered the beverage industry some tools of direct democracy not available in other states, specifically the state’s ballot measure system. For a few million dollars, a sum that amounts to a rounding error for major corporations, interest groups can place a measure on the state ballot and then offer to pull it if Sacramento authorizes an alternative deal. As a result, it’s not uncommon in California for groups to launch a ballot measure that’s unpalatable to lawmakers or to an ideological rival, then forge a legislative deal that averts a costly campaign.

A committee launched by another business group but ultimately funded largely by soda giants got a measure on the ballot that would have set a two-thirds popular vote threshold for local governments to pass new taxes—a change that Democratic lawmakers and allies like organized labor warned would be ruinous for local finances. Though the group’s name didn’t exactly trumpet the soda industry’s involvement—“Californians for Accountability and Transparency in Government Spending, a Coalition of California Businesses, Taxpayer Groups, Business Property Owners, and Beverage Companies”—the effort was universally understood as a beverage industry power play after the ABA kicked in nearly $9 million.

With a deadline to remove measures from the ballot closing in, organized labor and business groups struck a deal to remove the vote threshold measure from the ballot.The new language barring soda taxes was swiftly inserted into a budget bill, which lawmakers passed after railing against what they called industry extortion. Nascent soda tax campaigns in cities including Stockton and Santa Cruz evaporated.

Optimistic health advocates had hoped that California would become a cautionary tale of industry overreach, in part because lawmakers resented having their hands forced. Instead, it appears that the pendulum is still swinging in favor of the beverage industry. This year, every one of a batch of bills intended to combat obesity has collapsed, from taxing soda to slapping health warnings on cans to limiting portion sizes.

The medical groups backing the bills say they aren’t defeated yet: They plan to put a statewide soda tax measure on the 2020 state ballot, which could give them leverage to negotiate a deal with the soda industry.

But the legislative wreckage attests to the beverage industry’s favorable odds when it’s focused on statehouses. “You kind of feel like if it could happen in California,” Birnbaum said, “it could happen anywhere.”

Jeremy B. White covers California politics for POLITICO.

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[kansascityhappenings]

Pelosi: No State of the Union in the House until shutdown ends

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rebuffed President Donald Trump on Wednesday, saying she would not allow him to give the State of the Union in the House chamber while the government is shut down.

Trump had insisted in a letter that he was planning on delivering his annual State of the Union address from the chamber of the US House next week as planned, essentially daring the body’s top Democrat to formally disinvite him from delivering the yearly message.

Hours later, Pelosi responded, saying she would refuse to bring up for a vote a measure that would allow Trump to speak.

“I am writing to inform you that the House of Representatives will not consider a concurrent resolution authorizing the President’s State of the Union address in the House Chamber until the government has opened,” Pelosi wrote.

Speaking from the White House Roosevelt Room as Pelosi’s letter became public, the President vowed to respond soon.

The back-and-forth escalated one of the rancorous subplots of the extended standoff over border security that has shuttered government agencies and left hundreds of thousands of federal workers without pay.

Trump’s letter, written with characteristic flourish, dismissed concerns raised by Pelosi about security during a partial government shutdown. It set up a potential showdown with the Democratic speaker, who controls the chamber’s proceedings and must allow for a vote on his speech.

“I will be honoring your invitation, and fulfilling my constitutional duty, to deliver important information to the people and Congress of the United States of America regarding the State of our Union,” Trump wrote in his letter.

He wrote he’d consulted with Secret Service and Homeland Security officials, who told him of “absolutely no problem regarding security with respect to the event.” And he declared the speech would occur on Tuesday from the House chamber.

“It would be so very sad for our country, if the State of the Union were not delivered on time, on schedule, and very importantly, on location!” he wrote.

As speaker, it is Pelosi’s prerogative to invite the President to deliver the annual address. Both the House and the Senate would need to pass resolutions convening a Joint Session of Congress before the President’s appearance. And it’s not yet clear — despite Trump’s insistence he would be appearing in the Capitol next Tuesday — whether Pelosi would take the required steps.

Peppered on Wednesday with questions about the President’s letter, Pelosi was circumspect as she departed her office.

“Stay tuned,” she said.

The letter was the latest in a round of squabbling over the yearly speech, which is a constitutional requirement that has been caught up in the back-and-forth over border security and reopening shuttered government agencies.

Pelosi initially wrote Trump last week to inform him the speech should be delayed, or delivered in writing, since the law enforcement agencies tasked with protecting the Capitol during the event are affected by the shutdown.

The Department of Homeland Security later cast those concerns aside, saying its agents and officers had been preparing for months to protect the venue, and would be ready shutdown or not.

The bickering over the speech had little outward bearing on the broader dispute over border security and a wall, which has prompted the longest government shutdown in US history. In his letter, Trump did not propose any new way to end the shutdown. Democrats have so far rejected the White House’s offers to include some deportation protections in exchange for wall funding.

Trump has not spoken with Pelosi since a January 9 meeting in the White House which Trump abruptly left after Pelosi told him she would not support border wall funding, according to a congressional aide familiar with the matter. The President has also not spoken to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer since that January meeting.

Polls show most Americans blame Trump for the shutdown, and say border wall funding isn’t worth closing down parts of the government. Trump has voiced concern about losing the public’s support, and expressed surprise most Americans aren’t on his side.

White House aides had hoped to use the State of the Union to convince more people of the wisdom in building a wall, and had begun drafting a speech with the shutdown as a backdrop. But Pelosi’s initial letter threw those plans into flux.

With the future of the President’s speech in question, aides began weighing other venues for the presidential address, and writing an alternative version of the speech. But the broad preference had remained to deliver it in the traditional manner, before a joint session of Congress.

Administration officials said they were hoping to essentially dare the House speaker to formally uninvite the President from addressing the nation, using Wednesday’s letter to scale up pressure on Pelosi to say one way or the other whether he will be allowed to deliver the speech in the House chamber.

The hope, the officials said, is to force her hand — either to say he cannot speak from the House chamber or to allow it to move forward.

Both Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer advised lawmakers not to bring family to Washington next week, an indication the State of the Union was not expected to happen as planned, according to a source in a Wednesday morning caucus meeting.

Still, Hoyer told reporters later in the day that security would not be a concern if the President speaks in the Capitol on Tuesday.

“The Capitol Police is going to be fully prepared to do whatever,” he said. “They’re making preparations and the sergeant-at-arms has assured us that they will be prepared.”

Other Democratic leaders sounded less certain the address would proceed as planned.

“Unless the government is reopened, it’s highly unlikely the State of the Union is going to take place on the floor of the United States House of Representatives,” said Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, a member of Democratic leadership, during a news conference Wednesday.

While other options exist for delivering the speech — including delivering it somewhere outside of Washington — White House officials said they are hesitant to hold a campaign-style rally instead of the State of the Union address because of a perceived informality.

The message Trump plans to deliver at the Capitol — even one shaped around the shutdown — would be much more sober than the President’s usual rhetoric at a rally, where he often deviates from the script and works off the crowd.

The speech is also expected to include other topic areas, such as the economy and foreign policy, that might be harder to include in a speech in a political venue. And officials believe they have a positive message on both of those areas they want to break through.

Some officials said a rally would be viewed as just another campaign speech, which they acknowledge people have started to tune out. And there is a recognition among aides it’s harder to keep Trump on-message in a rally versus a more formal address. Officials also noted that television networks rarely carry the President’s rallies live.

Presidential advisers have also looked again at the Oval Office and at other venues inside the White House for the address, though the Oval Office is considered a tough sell for the President since he disliked the address to the nation he delivered there earlier this month, and polls showed it changed few people’s minds about the border wall. Aides have also surveyed the East Room and Cross Hall areas, which could more easily facilitate an audience.

from FOX 4 Kansas City WDAF-TV | News, Weather, Sports https://fox4kc.com/2019/01/23/pelosi-no-state-of-the-union-in-the-house-until-shutdown-ends/

from Kansas City Happenings https://kansascityhappenings.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/pelosi-no-state-of-the-union-in-the-house-until-shutdown-ends/

[democratsunited-blog]

Why Democrats think health care may finally be a winning issue

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5779

Why Democrats think health care may finally be a winning issue

In March 2010, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., appeared on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” tasked with selling the newly passed Affordable Care Act to an audience of skeptical Americans.

“I think as people learn about the bill, and now that the bill is enacted, it’s going to become more and more popular,” Schumer said. Then he added a prediction about how lawmakers’ votes on the landmark health care bill would impact them at the polls in the midterms that fall: “By November,” Schumer said, “those who voted for health care will find it an asset, those who voted against it will find it a liability.”

Eight months later, Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, losing control of the chamber to the GOP, and six seats in the Senate. Republicans also gained control of 26 state legislatures and 29 governors’ mansions across the country.

In every election cycle from that point forward, Republican candidates promised that a vote for them meant a vote to repeal, and maybe replace, the health care law. In former President Barack Obama’s last two years in office, congressional Republicans attempted to repeal the ACA nearly 50 times, though their efforts always failed.

At the time, taking an anti-Obamacare stance was not that politically risky. In April 2014, for example, a Pew Research poll revealed that just 37 percent of Americans supported the law. The same poll showed that 64 percent of Republican voters — who overwhelmingly opposed the law — saw the ACA as “very important” to their vote in the midterms. Once again that year, the strategy worked: Republicans flipped 13 seats in the House and nine in the Senate, gaining control of the body for the first time since 2006.

How things have changed.

Eight years later, now-Senate Minority Leader Schumer’s 2010 prediction may finally come true. Democrats are running on a promise to protect Obamacare, and if they take back the House — or even the Senate, though the odds there are lower — the ACA’s growing popularity will be a big reason why.

“Democrats were worried about this issue politically in 2014,” said Leslie Dach, the chairman of the advocacy group Protect Our Care and a former counselor to the Department of Health and Human Services during the Obama Administration. “Now you can talk loudly and publicly and be for the ACA.”

In the closely-watched Nevada Senate race, Democratic Rep. Jacky Rosen, right, has criticized Sen. Dean Heller, left, for voting to repeal the health care law passed under former President Barack Obama. (Photo By Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call)

The change in politics around Obamacare reflect a shift in public perception. Forty-nine percent of American adults supported the ACA in April, according to a tracking poll run by the Kaiser Family Foundation. In April 2014, the same poll found 38 percent of American adults approved of the health care law. The ACA remains divisive, but the days of a vast majority of Americans opposing it appear to be over.

Democrats in recent elections have taken note. In 2017, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Ralph Northam ran a health care-centered campaign, promising to expand Medicaid in Virginia. Northam won, Democrats gained 15 seats in the state’s House of Delegates, and in May, Virginia became the 32nd state to expand Medicaid.

This year, examples of other Democrats following Northam’s playbook abound. In conservative Idaho, Democrat Paulette Jordan has also promised to expand Medicaid if she gets elected as governor. In Nebraska’s second congressional district, Medicare-for-All supporter Kara Eastman beat her moderate opponent in the Democratic primary. And in response to Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court this week, Democrats immediately latched onto his opinions on health care, including his opposition to the ACA, and calling on voters to think about what it means to them ahead of the midterms.

The trend extends to state legislatures as well. Health care loomed large in many of the 44 state seats Democrats flipped since the 2016 election, according to Jessica Post, the executive director of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, the party’s lead group focused on state races. Especially at the state level, the issue for many voters is personal, Post said.

The ACA remains divisive, but the days of a vast majority of Americans opposing it appear to be over.

“If you don’t have access to a hospital, that’s so much more important to you than Trump’s Twitter account,” Post said. “It’s an issue that for many Americans, it really drives their voting.”

The strategy hinges on championing Obamacare’s benefits, while blaming its flaws on Republicans and the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine the law. Premiums for people who receive health care through the ACA exchange are expected in spike this fall, just before the midterms, and Democrats are reportedly planning to seize the moment to highlight their claim that the law has suffered under Trump and the GOP.

Republicans’ trajectory on Obamacare since it passed in 2010 is very different.

When Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, launched his first Senate bid in 2012, for example, repealing the ACA was his first campaign promise. Now, as Cruz runs for re-election, there’s no sign of his views on the health care law on his campaign website.

Cruz isn’t alone. GOP Senators defending safe seats like Mississippi’s Roger Wicker and Nebraska’s Deb Fischer have largely avoided the issue in their re-election campaigns as well.

President Donald Trump speaking in the White House after a House GOP health care repeal effort failed last year. File photo by REUTERS/Carlos Barria

The GOP’s quiet backpedal comes after a disastrous attempt to undo the law in President Donald Trump’s first year in office. After several starts and stops, the Republicans’ effort to repeal the law failed in dramatic fashion last summer with Sen. John McCain’s“no” vote, delivered days after the Arizona Republican was diagnosed with brain cancer. Since then, Republicans have proposed a handful of other health care-related bills, but most haven’t gained much traction.

Republicans did manage to score one significant blow to the ACA last year, when they included a repeal of the individual mandate in the tax reform bill that passed in December. Still, it was short of what many Republicans — including Trump — had promised.

“There’s been a general dialing down of the repeal and replace rhetoric from Republicans since they failed [to do so] in 2017,” said James Capretta, a health care policy fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute said. “I think they look at the political landscape and securing the vote for a pretty significant change at this point will be difficult.”

Indeed, at the end of last year, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., told NPR he was ready to “move on to other issues” besides health care in 2018. True to his word, McConnell hasn’t renewed the health care debate this year, instead focusing on immigration and budget battles, among other issues.

Democrats have worked to keep health care on the forefront of voters’ minds throughout 2018.

Now, as the midterms approach, Republicans will likely focus even more on the party’s accomplishments since Trump took office. As Capretta of AEI put it: Republicans are “better off running on the benefits of the economy, the tax bill, immigration.”

Democrats, on the other hand, have worked to keep health care on the forefront of voters’ minds throughout 2018 — and they’ve stepped that up in response to Trump’s nomination of Kavanaugh.

“Judge Kavanaugh got the nomination, not because he’ll be an impartial judge on behalf of all Americans,” Schumer said Tuesday. “But because he passed President Trump’s litmus tests: repeal women’s freedom for their reproductive rights, and repeal people’s health care, including the protections for pre-existing conditions.”

This latest threat to the health care law has energized liberals. Hundreds of people protested the nomination outside of the Supreme Court Monday night. The progressive group Indivisible said it has held events in 27 states since Monday protesting Kavanaugh’s nomination and urging senators to vote against his confirmation.

Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017 helped rally liberals around protecting the law. File photo by REUTERS/Tom Mihalek

Even before Kavanaugh’s nomination, vulnerable red state Democrats, like Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, placed an emphasis on health care in their re-election campaigns, seeking to take advantage of polling that shows voters trust Democrats over Republicans when it comes to health care. According to a Pew survey released last month, 48 percent of voters believe Democrats do a better job of handling health care, compared to 32 percent of voters who feel the GOP has a better handle on the issue.

Republicans argue that voters will see through the Democrats’ efforts to take credit for some aspects of the law without owning it entirely. Another challenge: Democrats aren’t fully unified on health care policy, which has muddled their messaging effort.

Whereas moderate Democrats have largely focused on strengthening Obamacare, a growing wave of progressive candidates have also backed Medicare-for-All proposals, highlighting the rift between the party’s establishment and far-left wings. Backing universal health care might have worked in Democratic primaries, but it could backfire with moderate and independent voters in the general election this fall.

That prospect hasn’t stopped Democrats from honing in on health care, and reminding voters where Republican lawmakers stand on the law.

Nevada is a good case in point. GOP Sen. Dean Heller, one of the most vulnerable Republicans up for re-election this year, voted against the first ACA repeal attempt in 2017, a vote seen by many as an effort to assuage moderates opposed to the bill. But Heller later voted for the more conservative “skinny repeal,” which would have removed the individual mandate, among other changes.

This year, Heller has focused on taxes and immigration. But his Democratic opponent, Rep. Jacky Rosen, has hammered him over his flip-flip on health care, and the attacks will likely only intensify as the midterms heat up.

Dach, from the group Protect Our Care, said the midterms are offering proof that Republicans picked the wrong side on Obamacare.

“If you want to take something away from people, things become clear,” he said. “People saw how it has changed their lives from a time when they couldn’t get health insurance.”

Read full story here

[thisdaynews]

What Mayor Pete Couldn’t Fix About the South Bend Cops

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/what-mayor-pete-couldnt-fix-about-the-south-bend-cops/

What Mayor Pete Couldn’t Fix About the South Bend Cops

SOUTH BEND, Indiana—Pete Buttigieg emerged from his black Suburban outside the police department Friday night, and stepped into the middle of the tensest moment of his nearly eight-year career as mayor. Protesters, angered by a police shooting five days earlier, pressed a list of 10 demands into his hands. On the list: Would he support an independent investigation by the Justice Department?

After quickly scanning the document, Buttigieg agreed. But there were nine more issues and the crowd wasn’t appeased.

Story Continued Below

“Can you say it to us today in front of all these cameras that black lives matter?”

“Did you just ask me if black lives matter?” the normally unflappable Buttigieg replied, anger in his voice.

“Yes, we want to hear you say it,” another said.

“Of course black lives matter,” Buttigieg said into a microphone.

“You running for president and you expect black people to vote for you?” a black woman asked him.

“I’m not asking for your vote,” Buttigieg said.

“You ain’t gonna get it either,” the woman shot back.

This confrontation in his hometown was not where the 37-year-old mayor had expected to be on Friday night. Buttigieg’s schedule had him in South Carolina at Rep. Jim Clyburn’s World Famous Fish Fry. Recently, he had been riding a carpet of congratulatory headlines about his robust fundraising and his surging presidential campaign. He was on a glide path to center stage at next week’s Democratic debates.

But early last Sunday that all changed, when a white police officer in Buttigieg’s South Bend police department who had been accused of excessive force in the past shot and killed a 54-year-old black man. Officials said the victim was rifling through parked cars and armed with a knife; the officer hadn’t activated his body camera video and the camera on his dash hadn’t switched on either so there was no independent record of the fatal encounter. Buttigieg left the campaign trail to deal with fallout from an encounter that almost instantly was swept into the fraught national debate over how police treat minorities in their communities.

Over the course of the week, under the gaze of a horde of national media, Buttigieg struggled to reclaim control of the narrative that he has nurtured during his surprising candidacy—the thoughtful, compassionate technocrat whose smart policies have reinvigorated his once beleaguered Rust Belt city. On Thursday, a black pastor interviewing Buttigieg on a radio show noted pointedly that Buttigieg was “running two campaigns: One is for the presidency of the United States of America; and the other is damage control after a Father’s Day shooting of Mr. Eric Logan.” A day later, Logan’s grieving mother screamed at him during the march: “I’m tired of hearing your lies.”

The shooting has exposed a lingering and bitter conflict between South Bend’s black community and a predominantly white police department—a department that has grown only whiter since Buttigieg became mayor in 2012. As mayor, Buttigieg, who has pledged transparency and professionalism, sometimes seemed to make matters worse. Three months intohis first term, he forced out the city’s first black police chief, who had been accused of illegally recording his officers, some of whom were said to have made racist remarks; since then, there have been a number of controversies with racial overtones—violent confrontations between police and minority residents, and lawsuits by black officers alleging that Buttigieg’s handpicked police chiefs engaged in racially discriminatory behavior.The officers involved in the shooting and its aftermath each have been accused multiple times of using excessive force against black people. On Friday, the lawyer for the victim’s family specifically targeted Buttigieg in an interview,saying the shooting was a byproduct of the Buttigieg administration’s “acceptance” of police misconduct.

The criticism comes at a particularly sensitive time on his campaign. After having been dogged by concerns that he wasn’t a viable candidate with black voters – scoring as low as 2 percent in some polls – he had begun to make some progress.When word came of the shooting, Buttigieg had just finished a trip to South Carolina, where he campaigned on his so-called Douglass plan, a policy proposal aimed at fostering black entrepreneurship and lowering incarceration rates. A Post and Courier-Change Research poll last week showed him surginginto third place behind Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, a gain of 6 percent among black voters there. Buttigieg the presidential candidate has caught fire, in part, due to his knack for connecting local and national issues,but the shooting this week dredged up a kind of history that could tie them together in the most damaging way.

On Wednesday morning, after two days of private meetings with community members, Buttigieg emerged to make his first public remarks since Sunday’s late-night press conference. He went to a local Board of Public Safety swearing-in ceremony to address six new police officers and their parents. “As you know, you are also joining this police department at a very challenging moment here in South Bend,” he told them. “We gather in the wake of a shooting that has left family members grieving the loss of someone they love and leaves an officer and his family dealing with the consequences of a lethal encounter.”

Buttigieg acknowledged that relationships between city leaders and police and community members had frayed. The mayor expressed frustration that the officer hadn’t activated his body camera—part of a $1.5 million technology investment a year ago—when it mattered most. He had also instituted implicit bias training for his police force and created a website where citizens could review documents related to complaints against police. This, he said, “is just one reminder of how much work is yet to be done.”

“How far we will have to go before the day when no community member or officer would hesitate to trust one another’s word—and ultimately, how far we have to go before we live in a society where none of the circumstances leading to Sunday morning’s death could have happened in the first place?”

After his speech, Buttigieg fielded media questions that focused on how he was handling the response: Why hadn’t he attended a vigil for the victim at the scene of the shooting Monday evening? “I took some advice from community leaders on this and reached the decision that it would be more of a distraction if I were to attend.” Buttigieg faced what seemed to be a no-win situation: attend the vigil and be accused of co-opting it for the sake of his presidential campaign or not attend and be criticized for callousness. What about the optics of appearing publicly with police first instead of in the community or with victims? “I’m not really concerned about optics so much as making sure that the community is headed in the right direction.”

On Thursday, Buttigieg took to a local radio station, WUBS, where he was asked a question by black pastor, the Rev. Sylvester Williams Jr., that seemed to strike closer to the heart of Buttigieg’s record on racial issues. Why, he was asked, were all six of the new officers he had just sworn in white?

***

Buttigieg responded with an apology—“We need people of color on the police department,” Buttigieg said, “and I have failed to get us a more diverse police department”—but that uniformly white array of new cadets wasn’t an aberration under Buttigieg’s administration.

In 2014, during his first term in office, black officers made up more than 10 percent of the 253-person department. By last year, that figure had dwindled to 5 percent. Contrary to its national image as a white, working class, Catholic town, South Bend is 40 percent non-white, comprised of 26 percent blacks and 14 percent Hispanics. And yet its police force each passing year under Buttigieg has looked a little less like the city itself.

While South Bend’s police department problems began long before Buttigieg arrived in office, a decision he made early in his administration set him back. In March 2012, three months into his term, Buttigieg asked for the resignation of his popular police Chief Darryl Boykins, the city’s first black chief. He had learned that Boykins illegally recorded members of the force whom he believed had used racist language, and that Boykins was under investigation by the FBI for it.

Buttigieg phoned Boykins and asked him to resign. (Buttigieg has said that call was a mistake, and that since then he has conducted all personnel changes in person.) “I sat at the end of the conference table in my office, and contemplated which scenario was more likely to tear the community apart—a well-liked African-American police chief potentially being indicted over compliance with a very technical federal law, or me removing him for allowing things to reach this point?” Buttigieg writes in his memoir,Shortest Way Home. “There was no good option: the community would erupt either way.”

Buttigieg’s prediction was right. The backlash was fierce and the storyline virtually swallowed his first year in office.

“This issue, previously an abstraction for me, was now hitting home,” Buttigieg writes in his memoir. “Ferguson and everything that followed in the Black Lives Matter movement came after the tapes controversy exploded locally, but their urgency grew from the same root: the fact that many of the worst historical injustices visited upon black citizens of our country came at the hands of local law enforcement. Like an original sin, this basic fact burdens every police officer, no matter how good, and every neighborhood of color, no matter how safe, to this day.”

The now-infamous tapes case has earned Buttigieg tough press nationally since he entered the crowded presidential race, but it was only one of a series of race-related policing controversies he has faced in office, all of which contributed to the raw emotions that emerged in the wake of the shooting.

The names of the two officers involved in the shooting Sunday were already familiar to many of the city’s black and Hispanic residents and activists. According to court documents, Ryan O’Neill, the officer who fired the fatal shot, had been named in two lawsuits related to racially motivated misconduct. In 2008—several years before Buttigieg took office—a man namedDerrick Burton claimed that O’Neill called him a “stupid n—–” and “tazed me unconscious.” In another 2008 lawsuit against multiple officers, Michael Alexander accused O’Neill of leveling “multiple blows to my head and my back.” Alexander alleged that the officers had tasered him and that he heard them “laughing about how I was flopping like a fish.” Both cases, which were filed while in custody by the men themselves and without legal help, were dismissed by judges.

In July of 2008, South Bend police Lt. David A. Newton wrote in an internal affairs report, which POLITICO has viewed,that O’Neill should be removed as a field training officer because of otherracist remarks he made. Looking at a black woman, O’Neill allegedly asked a fellow officer, “Do you want to get some of that black meat?” O’Neill told the officer that he had dated black women in high school. But when they later saw a black man walking with a white woman, O’Neill remarked to his fellow officer: “Man, I hate seeing that. It makes me sick.” The incident was investigated by an African-American member of the police department. A spokesperson for the South Bend Police Department told POLITICO that the document was “one person’s testimony on an internal affairs investigation. The assertions presented were determined to be ‘not sustained’ at the conclusion of the investigation.”

Last Sunday’s incident also involved a second officer, Aaron Knepper, who drove the wounded man, Eric Logan, to the hospital in a squad car. He had called for an ambulance, but decided not to wait, according the account he gave officials. (Logan, who was shot once in the abdomen, died later.) Knepperalso had a history. In 2016, he was the subject of public protests that called for his dismissal because of a series of incidents over the years. Police Scott Ruszkowski, Buttigieg’s police chief, pulled Knepper off the streets, citing threats to Knepper. Four months later, Knepper was back on the beat.

In August of 2012, Knepper was one of three officers who tricked a mentally disabled 7-Eleven clerk into eating a spoonful of cinnamon in 60 seconds. The man became violently ill. His family sued. The city offered a settlement before trial of $15,000, but the family declined it, and the jury awarded $8,000.

“Obviously I’m not pleased,” Buttigieg said at the time.

That same year, Knepper and other officers entered a black family’s home in the middle of the night, and punched 17-year-old Deshawn Franklin six times and stunned him with a Taser. The officers had mistaken him for someone else. A federal jury decided that Knepper and his fellow officers violated Franklin’s constitutional rights, but awarded him and his family $18. More public outrage ensued.

Buttigieg deflected calls for Knepper’s firing, placing the onus on his police chief and board of public safety, which by state statute is the only entity that has the authority to hire and fire police officers. “Obviously, a firing-level personnel decision is made by the Board of Public Safety,” he said in 2016. “But just to be clear, I accept responsibility for appointments to the Board of Public Safety and (police) chief.”

In the interest of promoting equity, Buttigieg has appointed three African-Americans to the four-member Board of Public Safety (one seat is vacant). At a board meeting in September 2016, protestors interrupted a panel on which Buttigieg sat with Ruszkowski, the former head of the local police union who became police chief in 2015. “I don’t think this can be resolved by targeting any individual,” Buttigieg said. “It can only be resolved by making sure we have a higher level of trust in the community that’s borne out by consistently positive behavior and consistently fair discipline.”

Today, Buttigieg is on his third police chief. After dismissing Boykins, Buttigieg hired Ron Teachman, a white native of Bedford, Massachusetts. Police officers claimed Teachman had “run amok” while Buttigieg, a Navy reserve officer, was on leave from his mayoral duties to serve a nine-month tour in Afghanistan. A local activist accused Teachman of using racist imagery in a sermon, according a local media report. Davin Hackett, a military veteran with expertise in explosives, filed a lawsuit against Teachman for racial discrimination when he was denied a position on the bomb squad. Later, he claimed in a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, that he was passed over for a promotion to sergeant in favor of a less qualified white candidate. In retaliation, Hackett says he was “subjected to unjustified investigations and discipline,” according to local news reports. Two other black officers filed race discrimination suits within the same year.

Asked on Wednesday by reporters what he had learned from tensions erupting over race-related policing issues, Buttigieg nodded to his early lack of deftness handling a complex subject that has ended the careers of other mayors.

“When I first took office almost eight years ago, I may have had a theoretical understanding of what’s at stake in issues of race and racism and policing, but it’s different when you bear responsibility for a police department and for the wellbeing of a community. I’ve learned about how raw these issues are.”

***

By mid-week, it seemed like Buttigieghad been speaking non-stop since he arrived three days earlier—talking publicly and privately, making sweeping statements about the long tail of racial injustice and issuing specific orders about the use of body cameras. He had met privately with Logan’s family and publicly pledged the city’s support for them and his commitment to a thorough investigation of the shooting.

On the night of the shooting, he talked openly about how his response was shaped by past mistakes. “We’ve had prior cases of use of force incidents and officer involved shootings where I hesitated, frankly, to get in front of cameras because we didn’t know very much, and it was out of our hands.”

Buttigieg spent hours on the phone with local leaders. “We don’t want to have to wait for final word from the different investigations to be taking next steps here to fortify community relationships, to keep channels of communication open, and to determine what we can do going forward that will be positive.”

And he sought advice from people he called “experts from around the country.” One of them was the Rev. Al Sharpton, the long-time New York activist who has been at the center of numerous racial controversies over the decades. Sharpton shared the advice he gave Buttigieg with MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “I told him, ‘You’ve got to be very honest. You’ve got to be transparent. And this family wants justice.’”

But Sharpton also made it clear that history, especially involving race and policing, is difficult to shake: “I think the fact that he had a problem with the black police chief in the past—this brings all of this back.”

Buttigieg was not without support from some local leaders. “He’s been methodical about addressing what’s happened since Sunday,” Apostle Michael Patton, president of the local NAACP Chapter, told me. And one of his staunchest critics, City Councilor Regina Williams-Preston, who lost her primary bid to replace Buttigieg in May, even applauded his decision to step away from the campaign. “I think that was the right thing to do to come back and help us through this tragedy.”

On Thursday evening, Buttigieg blasted a lengthy email to supporters about his crisis back home. “Eric’s death,” he wrote, “no matter what details emerge about the circumstances and the actions of the officer involved – shines a bright light on a subject that impacts my life, your life, and the lives of Americans from all walks of life. All police work and all of American life takes place in the shadow of racism, which hurts everyone and everything it touches.”

Through it all there was the sense that despite all that Buttigieg had said, he still was not making headway with some of the most aggrieved of his constituents.

“The family has not had the consoling that they would’ve appreciated,” Oliver Davis, another black city councilor who ran unsuccessfully for Buttigieg’s seat in May, told me. He was shocked that neither Buttigieg nor a member of his administration attended the vigil for the victim Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, Coffman, the Logan family attorney, told POLITICO he planned to file suit against the city on Monday. “There’s several things that don’t add up in the case,” Coffman told me.

Then on Friday, Buttigieg’s campaign announced that he would not attend as planned Rep. Clyburn’s fish fry—a sign of how much he is struggling to extract himself from the crisis and return his focus to the campaign. Though he returned to South Bend for the march on Friday night, he resumed his campaign schedule Saturday to appear at the South Carolina Democratic Party Convention, a Planned Parenthood forum, and then a town hall in North Augusta. He planned to shuttle back to South Bend Saturday night in advance of atown hall of his own he hoped to hold as soon as Sunday. Meanwhile, as the investigators continue their probe of the shooting, the St. Joseph Prosecutor’s Office announced on Thursday that Prosecuting Attorney Kenneth Cotter hasn’t yet decided whether to appoint a special prosecutor in the case. Buttigieg has said he would support an independent investigation by the Department of Justice.

Whatever the outcome, the crisis doesn’t seem likely to be resolved soon.

Back on the basketball court, at the memorial for Eric Logan, in the muggy heat of an Indiana summer, Buttigieg furrowed his brow and placed his thumb and index finger on his chin. He was dressed up in his campaign uniform of white shirt and blue tie with a navy suit jacket. His husband Chasten stood next to him, hands clasped. “We have to learn to listen, as well as to speak,” he told reporters that morning at a press conference outside of South Bend Police Department. And so he was listening.

It was after 6 p.m. by now, the national reporters had left (only temporarily, it turned out). Across the park, black men shoved white styrofoam cups in the gaps of a chain link fence surrounding a baseball field, spelling out Logan’s name.

“We can’t keep getting hurt like this. There’s only so much that we can bear,” said Eli Cantu, the Hispanic activist who organized the memorial, addressing the mayor and other city officials. “This is an opportunity for you, Pete. You can really bridge this gap by addressing this issue correctly. These people need to be held accountable.”

“The officers need to be held accountable,” Cantu told me.

After the last person spoke, Cantu asked people to say something they loved about South Bend.

“The people,” one person said.

“The weather,” said another, causing people to laugh and breaking the tension of the moment.

And then Cantu directed everyone to put their hands in the middle of the circle. “South Bend on three,” he said. Buttigieg and his husband put their hands in the circle.

“South Bend,” they yelled, like it was a team huddle.

As the circle disbanded, and community members milled about, I asked Cantu how Buttigieg was handling the crisis. “I’d give him an ‘E’ for effort,” Cantu told me. “Has it gone somewhere? He’s trying. But is he making the necessary moves? I haven’t seen them yet.”

And Buttigieg kept trying. On Friday night, at the end of the march, he made a promise to the crowd. “I want you to know we’re serious about fixing this.”

There was a smattering of applause.

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