Category: Politics As Usual

Allyson Schwartz

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

allyson

Why would any progressive support her?

Look, this is a tough one. One of the worst features of Pennsylvania politics is our state’s dismal track record in electing women candidates, so a female governor would be a giant breakthrough. Still, if your goal is to make Pennsylvania a more progressive place, it would be less important to elect a woman than to elect someone who is actually progressive.

Schwartz’s mediocre track record make you think that she is not that person. Instead, she comes across as one of a new disturbing new breed of uptown/suburban politico — typified by New York’s Michael Bloomberg and his likely successor as mayor, Christine Quinn. They are 100 percent true-blue liberal on social issues like gay marriage and a woman’s right to choose, but take pro-business stances that aren’t helpful to the struggling middle class, and don’t seem much troubled by creeping police-statism to protect what the affluent have in 21st Century America.

Yesterday was rock-bottom for Schwartz, as she joined with a rag-tag army of Republican neo-conservatives and some Obama-loyal flip-floppers in defeating a House amendment that would have defunded the Natural Security Administration’s spying overreach on Americans’ phone records, a measure that would have been a dramatic statement that Congress is listening to the voice of the people who are tired of the growing power of the surveillance state. You can run for higher office as “a progressive” — or you can support a government that operates in violation of the 4th Amendment. I don’t understand how you can do both.

And Schwartz’ unprogressive vote on the NSA might be excusable is it were a one-time thing — but there are other questions. In a time when fracking is ruining the rural environment across Pennsylvania, Schwartz has taken a surprisingly business-friendly (and future campaign-contributor friendly?) stance. Upon taking office in 2005, Schwartz had a choice between the Big Banks or the middle class on a bankruptcy bill — and she voted with the banks. She’s a leader of something called the New Democrat Coalition — which ProPublica recently described as “a group of 69 lawmakers whose close relationship with several hundred Washington lobbyists makes them one of the most successful money machines since the K Street Project collapsed.” Again…ugh. Democrats do have other choices.

One candidate whose energy level has been remarkable, and who has taken consistently progressive stances on the issues facing Pennsylvania, is the former Environmental Protection commissioner, John Hanger. Hanger is also problematic — he’s completely lacking in name recognition, and he’s also not perfect. But the point is that Schwartz’s bad vote yesterday on government spying is another reason why Democrats would be smart to have a real primary, and not a coronation. The fact that Corbett couldn’t be elected Harrisburg dog-catcher right now means that Dems can relax and focus on the best candidate for a change, and not try to guess who they think will win (which never works, anyway). If progressives are determined to vote for Allyson Y. Schwartz, they should stop and ask themselves…why?

Leadership

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

Such brave, brave leaders!

Tax reform is apparently so treacherous for senators these days that they require the utmost protection from the public — half a century’s worth.

The leaders of the Senate Finance Committee last month asked senators to submit written proposals detailing tax breaks they’d like to see preserved once the tax code is reformed and explain why. The point was to help inform committee leaders in their efforts to craft a tax reform bill.

The request apparently wasn’t embraced, and the committee has now promised skittish senators that their proposals will be kept secret for 50 years.

A memo sent out on July 19 promised to mark all submissions “COMMITTEE CONFIDENTIAL. NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. DO NOT COPY. These materials may not be released to the public from the National Archives or by the Finance Committee prior to December 31, 2064.”

What’s more, the memo said that in addition to the committee’s chairman and top Republican, only 10 staffers would be authorized to see the proposals. Only two digital copies of them would be made. Each would be saved on a secure, password-protected server. Paper copies would be kept in locked safes.

The only way a proposal could be made public before Dec. 31, 2064, is if it “has been modified in such a manner that it could not potentially identify the source of a submission.”

Cenk: ‘It’s over’

~ susie ~ 2 Comments

Cenk Uygur:

No one can claim President Barack Obama is a progressive if Larry Summers ends up at the Federal Reserve, Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks said on Thursday.

“If he appoints Larry Summers it is over,” he remarked. “There is no one that can make the case that President Obama is actually a progressive at heart. ‘Oh, wait for the second term. In the second term he’ll be really progressive.’ Then why would he take the guy most responsible for deregulation, for agreeing with the Republicans, for giving the banks everything they wanted and give him the most powerful position? Because he’s not a progressive.

“If Larry Summers is appointed, it’s the final nail in that coffin. No one in their right mind could call President Obama a progressive.”

Good

~ susie ~ 3 Comments

It’s about time:

The Justice Department is preparing to take fresh legal action in a string of voting rights cases across the nation, U.S. officials said, part of a new attempt to blunt the impact of a Supreme Court ruling that the Obama administration has warned will imperil minority representation.

The decision to challenge state officials marks an aggressive effort to continue policing voting rights issues and follows a ruling by the court last month that invalidated a critical part of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Justices threw out Section 5 of the landmark act, which protects minority voters by requiring certain states with a history of discrimination to be granted Justice Department or court approval before making voting law changes.

In the coming weeks, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. is expected to announce that the Justice Department is using other sections of the Voting Rights Act to bring lawsuits or take other legal action to prevent states from implementing certain laws, including requirements to present certain kinds of identification in order to vote. The department is also expected to try and force certain states to get approval, or “pre-clearance,” before they can change their election laws.

Are Dems going to shift to populism?

~ susie ~ 5 Comments

Back in 2010, Alexander Zaitchik and Rick Perlstein discuss how much attention should be paid to Glenn Beck, and why Democrats seem to have ceded the field on populism.

The fact that this story even appears in the NY Times says that the winds have shifted. I have to assume that even Beltway types notice the growing popularity of figures like Elizabeth Warren and Alan Grayson and figured out why. But it really sets my teeth on edge when they keep referring to the administration and its officials as “center-left”. Show me anything left about these corporate toadies:

With Mr. Obama experiencing a difficult first year of his second term and his lame-duck status growing ever nearer, his speech underscored the stirrings of a debate inside the Democratic Party about the party’s economic approach, given the halting recovery.

If positions on foreign policy and specifically the Iraq war marked the dividing line in the Democrats’ last fierce internal debate, issues related to banks, entitlements and the rights of consumers broadly could shape the party’s next search for an identity.

Liberals, pointing to a bankrupt Detroit and new reports of diminished class mobility, believe the plight of lower-income and young Americans is so severe that the party must shift away from the center-left consensus that has shaped its fiscal politics since Bill Clinton’s 1992 election and push more aggressively to reduce income disparity.

“The sooner we get back to a good, progressive, populist message, the better off we’re going to be as Democrats,” said Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.

The growing intraparty economic debate comes even as there is increasing cohesion on the cultural issues that once divided Democrats. Many in the party see progress on matters like gay rights, gun control and immigration, topics that Mr. Obama has spent time on this year but mentioned only glancingly in his address Wednesday at Knox College, in Galesburg, Ill.

The votes and stances on these issues among Democrats in Congress are now far more uniform than they were as late as the 1990s. And it is unthinkable that — whether their 2016 standard-bearer is Hillary Rodham Clinton or somebody else — every major contender in the next Democratic primary season will not be down-the-line progressive on cultural issues.

But there is a growing frustration among progressives who are now saying the party must move toward a more populist position on the issue that many on the left see as the great unfinished business of the Obama years: economic fairness.

Go read the rest. And don’t underestimate the significance of this story running on the front page.

The GOP tries, tries again

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

To kill Elizabeth Warren’s consumer watchdog agency:

In the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats, Republicans don’t have the votes for their more ambitious bills, explains Ross Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “I think it would be most unlikely,” he says. “They’re trying to do death of a thousand cuts on the agency but… I don’t think it will get very far.”

Von Spakovsky agrees. “Having anything happen is going to depend on… the 2014 elections,” he says, “And whether Republicans can take over the Senate and drive through legislation to change this.” But even if Republicans take control of the Senate in 2014, Obama will still be in the White House—and he has threatened to veto bills aimed at weakening the agency.

A few bills affecting the CFPB have the potential to garner a little more Democratic support, says Baker. One, which is co-sponsored by Democrats Gwen Moore (D-Wisc.), and Ed Perlmutter (D-Colo.), would subject the agency’s operations to more judicial review. Another would require the CFPB to get consumer consent before collecting Americans’ financial data. But neither would kneecap the agency the way blocking Cordray would have.

Baker predicts that Senate Republicans may pipe down about the CFPB because there’s little they can do to damage the agency without gaining control of the Senate and the White House. “I don’t see this as enough of an issue for [Senate] Republicans to unanimously rally around,” he says. Republicans have pledged to keep fighting, but at least for now, Warren and the Democrats have won.

PA Supreme Court stops plan to close state health centers

~ susie

They finally do something right:

Earlier this year, the administration of Republican PA Governor Tom Corbett announced a plan to close nearly half of the state’s health centers by the end of the summer. SEIU Healthcare PA and some Democratic members of the General Assembly challenged the plan’s constitutionality in court on the grounds that the executive doesn’t have the power to make that policy decision without the legislature, but a Commonwealth Court ruled in favor of the Corbett Administration, choosing not to stop the plan. The plan’s opponents appealed that ruling and now the highest court in the state, the PA Supreme Court, has ruled in their favor, temporarily halting the health center closings and asking for a speedy hearing on the issue. Many Pennsylvanians who would have lost their only means of accessing health care services are in luck – for now.

The Corbett Administration plan in question would close 26 of Pennsylvania’s 60 health centers, where people who are sick or injured but don’t have health insurance or the money to pay for the care they need out-of-pocket can go for some health care services, and eliminate 73 jobs in the PA Department of Health. Of course, the Corbett Administration says this will save over $3 million, but that isn’t the whole picture. As I pointed out when I wrote about this case when it was in Commonwealth Court earlier this year, community health nurse of Lebanon County Rosemary Birtsays:

For months we have been educating our lawmakers that the proposed savings from Governor Corbett’s plan does not justify the potential public health risk for communities across Pennsylvania. It could take as little as twelve cases of multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis to wipe out the three and a half million dollars Corbett claims we would save by closing these centers.

UN asked to investigate

~ susie ~ 1 Comment

Do you ever get the feeling we’ve turned into the Soviet Union?

Chicago-based human rights advocates have sent a letter to the United Nations’ Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights asking the international body to monitor Chicago’s school closings.

The “letter of allegation” sent Tuesday evening to Geneva, Switzerland, asks U.N. officials to investigate whether the closing of 49 Chicago elementary schools violates children’s human rights.

“The United Nations taking this issue up and giving it serious attention will really bring home to Chicago and the United States that there are violations occurring here of human rights, potentially, not just about a budget crisis,” said Sital Kalantry, the University of Chicago law professor who filed the letter on behalf of the Midwest Coalition for Human Rights.

“(It’s) not just about closing schools to save money, but you need to be concerned about the rights of children when you close schools,” said Kalantry.

The letter argues the closings violate the human right to equality and nondiscrimination by disproportionately affecting African American students. About 40 percent of the district’s students are black, but 80 percent of students impacted by this year’s historic number of school closings are black. The school district has said the closings are driven by population declines in African American neighborhoods.