Category: 2020 Election

Unemployment benefits to expire as coronavirus talks deadlock

The Hill logoEnhanced unemployment benefits are set to expire as congressional negotiators are deadlocked over a coronavirus relief deal.

The additional $600 a week in unemployment insurance that Congress provided in late March will sunset on Friday at midnight, dealing a significant financial blow to millions of jobless Americans amid a weakening labor market.

Lawmakers had hoped the deadline, which was known for months, would result in the kind of eleventh-hour agreement that was once commonplace in Washington. But in a sign of how far apart negotiators are, the Senate left town for the week on Thursday, ensuring Congress will careen over the fast-approaching unemployment cliff. Continue reading.

Three presidents embrace the struggle for rights. Trump suggests postponing the election.

Washington Post logoThree presidents spoke in poetry, paying tribute to a fallen hero who believed — often against evidence to the contrary, including the cracking of his skull by state troopers — that America was good, its people driven by love to do right by one another.

One president, the current commander in chief, did not attend the funeral of Rep. John Lewis but instead spoke of dark forces in the country and suggested that the United States not hold its next presidential election on time.

In a country cleaved by political differences, paralyzed by a pernicious virus and suffering from a plunging economy, Thursday presented painful contrasts. It was a day of soaring tributes to the first Black lawmaker to lie in state in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, offered from the pulpit of the mother church of the modern civil rights movement. And it was a day of pointed reminders that the nation is struggling, even after 244 years, to define itself, to decide what freedom and equality will mean. Continue reading.

Too Big to Contest

Trump has hinted the election won’t be legitimate because of cheating. Democratic activists say a decisive victory would overrule his objections.

EMBOLDENED BY SURGING polling advantages and alarmed at President Donald Trump’s taunting talk about delaying the elections, many Democrats are changing their goal for this November.

It’s not sufficient to just win enough Electoral College votes to elect Democrat Joe Biden as the next president, their argument goes. They have to wallop Trump – widening the Democrats’ political footprint after four tumultuous years and discouraging Trump from trying to challenge the election results.

Democratic activists and state party officials emphasize that they aren’t taking anything for granted. And many rank-and-file Democrats feel burned by 2016, when political prognosticators – but not polls, which were fairly accurate – predicted an easy win by Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Continue reading.

Millions to lose $600 weekly jobless aid amid Senate stalemate

A late night meeting with negotiators yielded little progress.

With federal unemployment benefits expiring on Friday — a serious blow to millions of Americans who lost jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic — the Senate became bogged down in partisan fighting and left town without a resolution to the crisis.

And two more hours of high-level talks on Thursday night between Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on one side and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) on the other yielded almost no progress. The talks will continue through the weekend, but a deal seems far off at this point.

“We had a long discussion,” Schumer told reporters after the meeting ended late Thursday night. “And we just don’t think they understand the gravity of the problem. The bottom line is this is the most serious health problem and economic problem we’ve had in a century and 75 years, and it takes really good strong bold action, and they don’t quite get that.” Continue reading.

A Collapse That Wiped Out 5 Years of Growth, With No Bounce in Sight

New York Times logoThe second-quarter contraction set a grim record, and it would have been worse without government aid that is expiring.

The coronavirus pandemic’s toll on the nation’s economy became emphatically clearer Thursday as the government detailed the most devastating three-month collapse on record, which wiped away nearly five years of growth.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced, fell 9.5 percent in the second quarter of the year as consumers cut back spending, businesses pared investments and global trade dried up, the Commerce Department said.

The drop — the equivalent of a 32.9 percent annual rate of decline — would have been even more severe without trillions of dollars in government aid to households and businesses. Continue reading.

Postal Service backlog sparks worries that ballot delivery could be delayed in November

Washington Post logoThe U.S. Postal Service is experiencing days-long backlogs of mail across the country after a top Trump donor running the agency put in place new procedures described as cost-cutting efforts, alarming postal workers who warn that the policies could undermine their ability to deliver ballots on time for the November election.

As President Trump ramps up his unfounded attacks on mail balloting as being susceptible to widespread fraud, postal employees and union officials say the changes implemented by Trump fundraiser-turned-postmaster general Louis DeJoy are contributing to a growing perception that mail delays are the result of a political effort to undermine absentee voting.

The backlog comes as the president, who is trailing presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in the polls, has escalated his efforts to cast doubt about the integrity of the November vote, which is expected to yield record numbers of mail ballots because of the coronavirus pandemic. Continue reading.

A Half-Century After Wallace, Trump Echoes the Politics of Division

New York Times logoGeorge Wallace’s speeches and interviews from his 1968 campaign feature language and appeals that sound familiar again as the “law and order” president sends federal forces into the streets.

WASHINGTON — The nation’s cities were in flames amid protests against racial injustice and the fiery presidential candidate vowed to use force. He would authorize the police to “knock somebody in the head” and “call out 30,000 troops and equip them with two-foot-long bayonets and station them every few feet apart.”

The moment was 1968 and the “law and order” candidate was George C. Wallace, the former governor of Alabama running on a third-party ticket. Fifty-two years later, in another moment of social unrest, the “law and order” candidate is already in the Oval Office and the politics of division and race ring through the generations as President Trump tries to do what Wallace could not.

Comparisons between the two men stretch back to 2015 when Mr. Trump ran for the White House denouncing Mexicans illegally crossing the border as rapists and pledging to bar all Muslims from entering the country. But the parallels have become even more pronounced in recent weeks after the killing of George Floyd as Mr. Trump has responded to demonstrations by sending federal forces into the streets to take down “anarchists and agitators.” The Wallace-style tactics were on display again on Wednesday as Mr. Trump stirred racist fears about low-income housing moving into the suburbs. Continue reading.

Trump tests GOP loyalty with election tweet and stimulus strategy

The Hill logoPresident Trump is testing the loyalty of his Republican allies on Capitol Hill at a time when his weak job approval numbers have GOP lawmakers increasingly concerned that he may lose reelection and drag down their Senate majority with him.

Senate Republicans have largely stuck by Trump during his tumultuous time in office.

While they criticize the president from time to time, they mostly avoid publicly confrontations, even though a good number of GOP lawmakers are willing to express their critical judgments privately. Continue reading.

Barack Obama calls out Trump and GOP’s brutal crackdowns and voter suppression in powerful John Lewis eulogy

AlterNet logoFormer President Barack Obama delivered an impassioned, rousing, and at times blistering eulogy on Thursday at a memorial service for Rep. John Lewis. Instead of showing the usual reserve and hesitancy to criticize that has characterized most of his post-presidency, Obama took inspiration from the fallen civil rights hero and aimed his fury specifically at the myriad abuses of the Trump administration and the Republican Party on American freedoms and fair elections.

“George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators,” he said, drawing cheers and applause from the attendees. “We may no longer have to guess the number of jelly beans in a jar to cast a ballot, but even as we sit here, there are those in power doing their darndest to discourage people from voting, by closing polling locations and targeting minorities and students with restrictive ID laws, and attacking our voting rights with surgical precision. Even undermining the postal service in the run-up to an election that’s going to be dependent on mail-in ballots so people don’t get sick!”

For those who might criticize such direct denunciations of the GOP and the president’s actions at a memorial service, Obama had a brilliant prepared response. Continue reading.

Obama calls filibuster ‘Jim Crow relic,’ backs new Voting Rights Act bill

The Hill logoFormer President Obama on Thursday called the Senate filibuster rule a “Jim Crow relic” and said it should be ended to help pass legislation that would restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.

Obama made the remarks while delivering a eulogy for civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who died earlier this month at the age of 80. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act would make it harder for states to enact racially suspect voting restrictions.

“Once we pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, we should keep marching,” Obama said. “And if all this takes eliminating the filibuster — another Jim Crow relic — in order to secure the God-given rights of every American, then that’s what we should do.” Continue reading.