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There are close to 40 million people in poverty in the US. The Democrats' $3.5 trillion social welfare bill aims to change that, with one proposal aiming to take on the impoverished elderly and disabled communities in the country.

The Urban Institute, a left-leaning nonprofit, released a report on Monday that found Democrats' proposal to boost the Supplemental Security Income (SSI) program would lift 3.3 million people out of poverty and cut the poverty rate of SSI recipients by more than half.

To put that spending in perspective, US GDP in 2020 was $20.9 trillion, while the Treasury Department estimated the tax gap the difference between what's owed to the Internal Revenue Service and what's collected was $600 billion in 2019. If left unaddressed, Treasury says that gap could rise to $7 trillion over the next decade. There's money to pay for lifting people out of poverty, in other words, and the question is whether a fraction of $3.5 trillion is worth it.

The SSI program provides monthly checks to those who have a disability or are over the age of 65 and are low-income, but according to the report, the maximum federal SSI benefit is $794 per month $279 below the federal poverty level. In June, Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown reintroduced the Supplemental Security Income Restoration Act to assist the nearly 8 million Americans relying on those monthly checks, who fell victim to "decades of shameful federal neglect," Brown said in a statement.

According to the Urban Institute, these four measures in Brown's bill would significantly reduce poverty:

"The gains from these policy changes would be highly targeted to a population experiencing serious economic hardship, including children and adults who are blind or have severe disabilities that prevent them from working and people over age 65," the report said.

The Democrats' $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill includes other measures to address poverty, like giving families with children monthly checks through an extended child tax credit. But the size of the bill has some more moderate Democrats concerned, and given that fully funding Brown's bill would require about $510 billion in new spending, according to the Social Security Administration, its inclusion won't be easy.

Insider reported last week that West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat, called on his colleagues to put a "pause" on the bill given its price tag, which could imperil the passage of many proposals, such as an SSI boost, universal pre-K, and free community college.

But, as Brown wrote in a letter to the Social Security Administration, raising asset limits would cost just $8 billion, showing potential for some of the measures in his bill to be included in the spending package if the whole proposal doesn't make the cut.

"The promise of Social Security is to ensure that no one in America should live in poverty least of all our nation's seniors and people with disabilities," Brown said in a statement, adding that "Congress must prioritize these long-overdue reforms as part of upcoming recovery legislation."

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Report: 3.3 million to be lifted out of poverty with Democratic plan - Business Insider

Just two days after the U.S. ended its 20-year war in Afghanistan, more than a dozen Democrats with strong ties to the military establishment defied President Joe Biden and voted to add nearly $24 billion to the defense budget for fiscal year 2022.

On Wednesday,14 Democrats joined 28 Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee to adopt an amendment from Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., to the fiscal year 2022 defense authorization bill that would boost Bidens $715 billion spending proposal to $738.9 billion. The move follows the Senate Armed Services Committees vote to similarly raise the top line to more than $740 billion in its July markup of the bill.

The 14 House Democrats to support the defense spending were Reps. Jim Langevinof Rhode Island; Joe Courtneyof Connecticut; Jared Goldenof Maine; Elaine Luriaof Virginia;Mikie Sherrillof New Jersey; Stephanie Murphyof Florida; Anthony Brownof Maryland; Filemon Velaof Texas; Seth Moultonof Massachusetts; Salud Carbajalof California; Elissa Slotkinof Michigan; Kai Kaheleof Hawaii; Marc Veaseyof Texas; and Steven Horsfordof Nevada.

The decision by these lawmakers to approve the higher budget is not necessarily shocking in a political environmentin which the militarys leaders demand an annual budget growth of 3 to 5 percent above inflation. Bidens $715 billion proposal was a 1.5 percent nonadjusted increase above this years spending level.

One congressional staffer, who was not permitted to speak on the record, said in an email, many Dems, especially when serving [on the House Armed Services Committee] are reluctant to look soft on defense by opposing increases to the defense budget, so in some ways its surprising the majority of Dems still voted against the topline increase. (Seventeen Democrats voted against Rogerss amendment, not enough to prevent its inclusion in the bill.)

Many ofthe Democrats who voted for the $24 billion increase have close ties to the defense establishment. Their districts are home to job-promoting manufacturing sites and military bases, and much of the extra funding will go directly to projects at those locations. Many of the Democrats have also received generous campaign donations from contractors. In fact, Federal Election Commission data shows that in the first six months of this year, the 14 Democrats collectively received at least $135,000 from PACs representing the countrys top 10 defense vendors: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, L3Harris, Huntington Ingalls Industries, Leidos, Honeywell, and Booz Allen Hamilton.

A closer look reveals potentially strong incentives for those Democrats to support an increase in defense spending:

Meanwhile, some of the 14 Democrats who defied Biden to vote for greater defense spending have also tried to blow up their partys efforts to achieve the presidents domestic policy goalsmost notably, Medicare expansion, paid family leave, an extension of the child tax credit, and billions of dollars for clean energy and other climate initiatives. Golden and Vela joined New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer last month to insist that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hold an immediate vote on a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill rather than wait to finish Democrats flagship $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. Murphy later joined that call, airing concerns about the size of the reconciliation bill. Their demands were ultimately unsuccessful.

Despite so many members of Congress voting to add money to the defense budgets, 17 Democrats still opposed Rogerss amendment, including committee chair Adam Smith of Washington, who received $32,000 in donations from the PACs of the top 10 defense contractors in the first half of this year the most of any Democrat on the panel.

Despite disagreeing with the increase, Smith and most of the others still voted to approve the overarching defense legislation and advance it to the floor anyway. (In fact, the 15 Democrats who voted against the higher budget but nevertheless passed the bill collectively received a few thousand dollars more in donations from the top 10 military contractors than the 14 who supported Rogerss amendment.) Only California Reps. Sara Jacobs and Ro Khanna who got no money from the vendors stood their ground and voted against the bills passage.

[A]fter twenty years of war in Afghanistan, twenty years of our servicemembers and their families answering the call, trillions of dollars in funding from the American people, I cant support another misguided effort to overflow the Pentagons budget beyond what our military leaders are even requesting, Jacobs said in a press release.

For Khanna, Wednesday was the first time he voted against moving the annual defense bill out of committee in five years; he argued that the $24 billion would be better spent on helping veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder, resettling Afghan allies and refugees, or vaccinating people against Covid-19.

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Democrats Who Joined Republicans to Increase Military Budget Have Strong Defense Ties - The Intercept

Democrats in Congress are considering a policy that was long unthinkable: a federal requirement that every American show identification before casting a ballot. But as the party tries to pass voting-rights legislation before the next election, it is ignoring a companion proposal that could ensure that a voter-ID law leaves no one behindan idea that is as obvious as it is historically controversial. What if the government simply gave an ID card to every voting-age citizen in the country?

Voter-ID requirements are the norm in many countries, as Republicans are fond of pointing out. But so are national ID cards. In places such as France and Germany, citizens pick up their identity card when they turn 16 and present it once theyre eligible to vote. Out of nearly 200 countries across the world, at least 170 have some form of national ID or are implementing one, according to the political scientist Magdalena Krajewska.

In the American psyche, however, a national ID card conjures images of an all-knowing government, its agents stopping people on the street and demanding to see their papers. Or at least thats what leaders of both parties believe. The idea is presumed to be so toxic that not a single member of Congress is currently carrying its banner. Even those advocates who like the concept in theory will discuss its political prospects only with a knowing chuckle, the kind that signals that the questioner is a bit crazy. There are only three problems with a national ID: Republicans hate it, Libertarians hate it, and Democrats hate it, says Kathleen Unger, the founder of VoteRiders, an organization devoted to helping people obtain ID.

Admittedly, this is probably not the best time to propose a new national ID. A large minority of the country is rebelling against vaccine passports as a form of government coercion. Yet public opposition to a national ID has never been as strong as political leaders assume. The idea has won majority support in polls for much of the past 40 years and spiked to nearly 70 percent in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. In a nationwide survey conducted this summer by Leger for The Atlantic, 51 percent of respondents favored a national ID that could be used for voting, while 49 percent agreed with an opposing statement that a national ID would represent an unnecessary expansion of government power and would be misused to infringe on Americans privacy and personal freedoms. Support was far higher63 percentamong respondents who said they had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 than it was among those who said they had voted for Donald Trump (39 percent).

The best argument for a national ID is that the nations current hodgepodge of identifiers stuffs the wallets of some people but leaves millions of Americans empty-handed and disenfranchised. Studies over the years have found that as many as one in 10 citizens lacks the documentation needed to vote. Those who do are disproportionately Black, Hispanic, poor, or over the age of 65. The Atlantic poll suggests that the gap remains: 9 percent of respondents said they lacked a government-issued ID, although a much smaller share (2 percent) said that was the reason they did not vote in 2020. Because the overwhelming majority of Americans do have IDs, we dont realize theres this whole other side of the country thats facing this massive crisis, says Kat Calvin, who launched the nonprofit Spread the Vote, which helps people obtain IDs.

Read: How voter-ID laws discriminate

The United States gives every citizen a Social Security card with a unique nine-digit number, but the paper cards lack a photograph. Passports have photos, but barely more than one-third of Americans currently have one thats not expired. By far the most common form of photo ID is a state-issued drivers license, but many elderly and poor citizens dont drive, nor do a significant number of Americans who live in large cities and rely on mass transit.

Opposition to national ID remains among groups on the libertarian right, such as the Cato Institute, as well as civil-liberties advocates on the left, such as the ACLU. But even they acknowledge that the fears of an all-knowing government sound a bit ridiculous in an era when Americans freely hand over so much of themselves to companies such as Google, Facebook, and Apple. We do have a national ID, Michael Chertoff, a former secretary of homeland security under President George W. Bush, told me. Its operated by giant tech companies, where every place you are, everything you do, everything you search for is recorded in some fashion and integrated as a matter of managing your data. Were locking the window, and weve got the front door wide open.

The idea of linking voting to a single ID card was not always so far-fetched. In 2005, a bipartisan commission led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker endorsed a federal voter-ID requirement. The panel recommended that the emerging Real ID, a product of one of many security reforms Congress passed after September 11, be used for voting. The Real ID Act set minimum security standards for drivers licenses and other IDs that are used to board flights and enter federal buildings. It wasand is, as the federal government makes clear 16 years laterexplicitly not a national ID. Even in the security-at-any-cost posture of the years following 9/11, there was a general recognition that there was an allergy to a national ID, Chertoff told me.

Some of the Democrats on the commission believed that a national ID was inevitable. The United States is moving toward a national ID, for reasons of homeland security, Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana representative and a member of the commission, wrote to his colleagues in a memo obtained by The Atlantic. That moment was the closest the two parties have come to a consensus on voter ID in the past 20 years. But despite a push by Carter for a unanimous endorsement, three Democrats on the commissionincluding former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschledissented from its headline recommendation.

Democrats in Congress ensured that the idea went nowhere. The day after the commission released its recommendations, Barack Obama, then in his ninth month as a senator, stood alongside Representative John Lewis of Georgia to denounce the ID proposal as a mistake and a solution in search of a problem. The commission had called for voter ID even as it acknowledged within its report that the issue the requirement purports to solvevoter fraudwas extremely rare. Carter defended the proposal as a corrective to the restrictive ID laws that Republican-led states had already begun to pass. Other Democrats, though, now see a damaging legacy for the Carter-Baker commission: It coated the idea of voter-ID laws with a bipartisan gloss, allowing Republican-led states to justify unnecessary restrictions on the liberty of many Americans to cast a ballot, Spencer Overton, one of the panels Democratic dissenters, told me.

The goal of the Carter-Baker commissions recommendation was to endorse a federal ID standard for voting while requiring statesand perhaps, eventually, the federal governmentto make secure IDs available to every citizen free of charge. But thats not what happened. In 2001, just 11 states required ID to vote. The movement has exploded in the two decades since, aided by a Supreme Court ruling in 2008 upholding a voter-ID law in Indiana, the 2010 wave election that empowered Republicans across the country, and the 2013 Supreme Court decision that gutted the Voting Rights Act. Now 36 states have voter-ID laws on the books.

To understand why Democrats have so strenuously opposed voter-ID laws over the past two decades, consider the experience of Spread the Vote. With a staff of 16 and a budget of $1.6 million, the organization now operates in 17 states that require an ID to vote. Calvins staff and volunteers work with peoplemany of whom are homeless or were recently incarceratedto assemble and pay for the necessary documents. Securing just a single valid ID can take days or weeks. In its four years of existence, Spread the Vote has been able to get IDs for about 7,000 people. The organization estimates that the number of eligible voters in the U.S. who lack the IDs they need to cast a ballot is at least 21 million.

Read: How the government learned to waste your time

Generally, Democrats have long believed that negotiating with Republicans over ID laws was pointless because the GOPs insistence on them was less about protecting ballot integrity than about shaping the electorate to its advantage by suppressing the votes of people likely to back its opponents. Its hard not to see it as a part of a comprehensive strategy to engineer outcomes, Deval Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor (and, briefly, a 2020 presidential contender), told me.

The Democratic Party is taking a new look at a federal ID standard this year out of desperation. Democrats in the Senate need Joe Manchin of West Virginia to support their push for voting-rights legislation, and in June, he circulated a set of policies he wanted to see in a revised bill. One would require voter ID with allowable alternatives (utility bill, e.g.) to prove identity to vote. His single-line proposal makes no mention of requiring a photo. Many states, including Texas, already allow alternatives to presenting a photo ID, although the exceptions vary widely.

Read: The strange elegance of Joe Manchins voter-ID deal

The most surprising aspect of Manchins floated idea was the reaction of Democratic leaders. None of them shot it down. Stacey Abrams, who has fought restrictive voting laws nationwide since narrowly losing her 2018 bid to become Georgias governor, said she could absolutely support that provision. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, the Houses third-ranking Democrat and a close ally of President Joe Biden, was also okay with it. Ive never, ever said I was opposed to voters IDing themselves, Clyburn told me. A guy cant just walk off an airplane from a foreign country and walk into a voting booth and say, I want to vote. You have to ID yourself. Clyburn said an ID law just has to be equitable: The government cant, as some red states do, accept a hunting license as a form of ID for voting but not a student ID.

To Calvin, however, the initial acquiescence of Democrats such as Abrams and Clyburn to an ID proposal was a betrayal. My reaction was blinding rage followed by massive heartbreak and disappointment, she told me. A utility bill, she said, was a meaningless alternative for most of the people she tries to assist. My whole job is helping people who dont have utility bills get IDs, she said. What they were saying is: If you dont have a home or an apartment or if your name isnt on the lease on that home or apartment, you dont deserve to vote, you dont deserve to participate in democracy.

Calvin told me she would enthusiastically support a national voter-ID law on one condition: if it followed immediately after the creation of a national ID for everybody, with a plan and a budget to implement it. She suffers no illusions about the likelihood of that happening, however. Its a pipe dream, she said. Calvins right. Democrats may be open to requiring voter ID, but the prospect of a national ID is still too hot to touch.

After Clyburn spent several minutes explaining the kind of ID law he could support, I asked him whether the solution was simply to create an ID for everyone. The lawmaker responsible for counting votes in the House stopped me immediately. Im not into that, he said. I pressed him, bringing up the Carter-Baker commission, the use of national ID in other countries. I know where youre going with this, Clyburn replied. Im not there.

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Voter ID: Why Doesn't America Have a National ID Card? - The Atlantic

In a heavily Democratic state where Gov. Gavin Newsom beat his Republican opponent in 2018 by 3 million votes, the recall stands within a few percentage points of passing next month. | Jeff Chiu/AP Photo

By DAVID SIDERS

08/23/2021 04:56 PM EDT

LOS ANGELES Donald Trump could swing the California governorship to a Republican. Merely by his absence.

Democrats turned out in record numbers when they had Trump to vote against. But in one of the first, large-scale tests of voter enthusiasm for Democrats in the post-Trump era, Californias surprisingly close gubernatorial recall election is laying bare just how hard it may be for the party to motivate its base without Trump as a foil.

Even in this bastion of progressive politics, ominous signs for the Democratic Party are everywhere. A CBS News-YouGov poll last week found voters who cast ballots for Joe Biden were less likely than Trump supporters to be very closely following the recall and less motivated to vote. In a Berkeley-IGS survey, registered Democrats and independent voters were nearly 30 percentage points less likely than Republicans to express a high level of interest in voting in the election.

The lack of enthusiasm is so concerning to Democrats that Gavin Newsom, the states Democratic governor, has been furiously working to yoke his main Republican opponent, Larry Elder, to Trump, while volunteers working with the progressive advocacy group Courage California texted voters a plea last week not to throw their mail ballots away.

Can Democrats win without having Trump as their foil? This is the challenge, said Gray Davis, the former California governor who was recalled in 2003.

Were going to find out pretty soon," he said in an interview.

In a heavily Democratic state where Newsom, a first-term Democrat, beat his Republican opponent in 2018 by 3 million votes and where Joe Biden clobbered Trump by nearly 30 percentage points two years later, the recall stands within a few percentage points of passing next month. That once-unthinkably close margin is almost entirely the result of tepid Democratic interest in the race. And even if Newsom prevails, as is widely expected, the competitiveness of the contest is the latest indicator that turnout gains made by Democrats nationally during the Trump era may be unsustainable with significant implications for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections next year.

It isnt just California. In a special election in May in a Texas House district Trump carried by just 3 percentage points in 2020, the top Democratic candidate in the field failed in a low-turnout contest to even advance from the all-party primary. Last week in Connecticut, a Republican won a special election for a state Senate seat in a district Biden carried by 20 percentage points in November.

As the returns came in from that race in Connecticut, David Keith, a Democratic strategist who has worked on House contests around the country, called it very much a barometer.

Turning out Democratic voters without Trump on the ballot, he said, is is a big deal problem for Democrats They ran as hard as they could run [in Connecticut] and still came up short.

In California, the FiveThirtyEight polling average late last week had Newsom retaining his job, but by a narrow margin, at just more than 1 percentage point. His job approval ratings remain above water, and all registered voters in the state are being mailed a ballot. The widely held belief of political professionals of both parties in California is that Newsom will likely win. But it is far closer than most expected.

I think he pulls it out, Antonio Villaraigosa, the Democratic former mayor of Los Angeles, said of Newsom. But its going to be close. It shouldnt be. But its going to be very, very close because Republicans are animated, and were not.

Explanations for a lackluster Democratic electorate are wide-ranging. Democrats who expect Newsom to win may be complacent. Democrats who object to the recall in the first place may simply not participate. The resurgence of the coronavirus pandemic is consuming public attention. And the election is unfolding in late summer in an off-election year, when voters are not conditioned to be casting ballots.

But the absence of Trump is a significant enough factor that Newsom is working to both raise Elders profile and tie him to the twice-impeached former president. In a recent campaign ad, a narrator highlights Elders opposition to coronavirus restrictions, calls the election a matter of life and death and offers a photograph of Elder standing beside Trump with their thumbs up. Newsom, campaigning recently in San Francisco, called Elder to the right of Donald Trump, and he said, Thats whats at stake in this election.

They want Trump to be on the ballot. Thats the whole thing. Thats the whole premise of the campaign, said Darry Sragow, a longtime Democratic strategist and publisher of the nonpartisan California Target Book, which handicaps elections in the state. From the beginning, the fundamental premise of the anti-recall strategy has been that this is a referendum on Donald Trump, not on Gavin Newsom.

In a normal election with multiple candidates and issues on the ballot, that might be enough. But in the recall, there are only two questions first, whether a voter wants to recall Newsom and second, if he is ousted, which of 46 candidates they want to replace him, including Elder, 2018 Republican candidate John Cox, former San Diego Mayor Kevin Faulconer and reality TV star Caitlyn Jenner. Newsom is encouraging voters who have already received their ballots in the all-by-mail election to check no on the first question and leave the second part blank.

What voters have to take into consideration, and whats at stake in this Sept. 14 recall election, said Mark Gonzalez, chair of the Los Angeles County Democratic Party, is that if Democrats dont vote in the recall election we could wake up with a Trump supporter as governor of California.

Newsom has a massive financial advantage, raising about $57 million since the start of the year, and his campaign says it is assembling the largest in-person get-out-the-vote operation in state history, with more than 600 paid field staff throughout the state. In its internal surveys, the campaign said its seen an uptick in recent days in voter familiarity with the recall and interest in turning out.

Given the fundamentals of the state and the electorate, it would take a remarkable change in voter behavior for the Republicans to recall Newsom, said Rose Kapolczynski, a Democratic strategist and adviser to former Sen. Barbara Boxer.

But Newsom has not run a seamless campaign. There was the dinner party for a top political adviser that he attended last year at the upscale restaurant The French Laundry, just as he was discouraging Californians from gathering for the holidays. There was the error that left him appearing on the ballot without the Democratic Party label after his name. When news broke last week that Newsom had sold his $5.9 million Bay Area home in May, Republicans reading the headlines could hardly believe their good fortune.

The guy is his own worst enemy, said Tom Del Beccaro, a former state Republican Party chairman who now chairs Rescue California, a group that has raised and spent close to $5 million in support of the recall. Whats he doing selling his $5.9 million house in the middle of the recall? He cant help himself.

Del Beccaros Republican Party in California represents less than a quarter of the electorate. But these problems Democrats are having with turnout more than level the playing field, he said.

That is probably overstating Republicans case. But Democrats and political observers in California are no longer laughing the recall off, as many did for much of last year.

One reason its hard to discount the possibility of an upset-inducing swing in voter behavior is that in a post-Trump, off-year election conducted amid a lingering pandemic, its almost impossible to accurately interpret the composition of the vote, even as strategists begin to track the partisan breakdown of mail ballots. Thats because no one knows if voting in the recall or in the midterms in 2022 will follow the pre-Trump template of Republicans turning out in higher numbers earlier than Democrats or if Republicans will hold onto their ballots, as many did in 2020, because of baseless concerns stoked by Trump about the integrity of absentee voting.

We dont know what world were in, said Paul Mitchell, an elections expert who tracks vote-by-mail ballots in California. Are we in the universe of Republicans wanting to vote early because they always vote early or are we in the universe where Republicans vote late because they dont trust vote by mail?

He said, We might think we know something, but we dont even know what universe were in.

Davis, the former governor, cited Newsoms job performance rating, Democrats massive voter registration advantage, the benefit of ballots being mailed to every voter and the endorsements of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, a Californian, in the governors favor.

But no one expects turnout to meet levels they did when Trump was on the ballot and Democrats were paying more attention.

What he has working against him, Davis said of Newsom, is that people are generally tuned out in August.

I doubt if half the people in the state know theres an election in 30 days, Davis said. That is complicating the problem for Democrats.

He said, We have to rise to the challenge.

Colby Bermel and Jeremy B. White contributed to this report.

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Democrats sweat turnout disaster in California without Trump to run against - POLITICO

US Representative Seth Moulton is back to a familiar place in the Massachusetts congressional delegation out there, alone, as he speaks the truth about the chaotic aftermath of President Bidens decision to withdraw American troops from Afghanistan.

To say that today is anything short of a disaster would be dishonest, Moulton said in a statement he also posted on Facebook after the Taliban took over Kabul and scenes of Afghans, desperate to leave their country, took over cable news. When Biden first went on television to defend the withdrawal and blamed the chaos on Afghans who did not want to leave earlier, Moulton called out that presidential excuse as utter BS. He also told CNNs Jake Tapper that the hasty withdrawal could lead to more veteran suicides.

Meanwhile, the rest of the all-Democratic delegation have been tiptoeing down an increasingly uncomfortable line of loyalty to Biden, given the unfolding ugliness. Massachusetts lawmakers are defending Biden for doing his best with an inherited mess and pressing the administration to safely evacuate US staff and Afghan allies while avoiding any honest critiques of the president who got us into the current mess. In an interview with Slate, Representative Jake Auchincloss, an Afghan war veteran, said he had unspecified questions he would like the administration to answer, but praised Biden for having the integrity to tell the truth about the status of the war. Senators Edward J. Markey and Elizabeth Warren signed a bipartisan letter asking the Biden administration to protect Afghan women.

That leaves Moulton on the outside, where he has been ever since he beat Representative John Tierney in a 2015 primary fight. In Washington, he ruffles everyones feathers. When he campaigned to get young Democratic veterans elected to Congress, some on the left were unhappy with him, and when he tried to oust House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in 2016 and 2018, he angered the partys powerful center. His 2020 presidential bid went nowhere, delighting detractors back home.

Moulton has the credentials to call Afghanistan as he sees it. A Harvard graduate, he joined the Marines after the terrorist attacks of 9/11; he served four tours of combat in Iraq and was twice decorated for heroism. At the same time, his critique of the Biden administrations mishandling of the Afghanistan withdrawal feeds into Republican attacks on Biden. It also raises Moultons political profile. Still, Moulton is saying out loud what many Americans, including many Democrats, are thinking. While there might be no right time for withdrawal, as Biden said, the bungled execution of the one that happened on his watch is hard to stomach.

As reported by The New York Times, for months before the scheduled withdrawal, Moulton joined other human rights advocates who told officials in the White House, the State Department, and the Pentagon they need to stop processing visas in Afghanistan and just get people to safety. That didnt happen, and the human toll is there for all to see. Over the weekend, Biden suggested the possibility of keeping an American presence at the airport past the original Aug. 31 deadline, but a Taliban spokesman warned of consequences from such an action.

There was much hand-wringing from Democrats over the decline of Americas standing in the world during Donald Trumps presidency. As Tom Donilon, now a Biden senior adviser, told The Washington Post in July 2020, By almost every measure, Americas standing and influence in the world has been damaged over the last three-and-a-half years. Over the past few days, global reaction to Americas withdrawal from Afghanistan has not been kind and neither has Moulton.

Scott Ferson, a political consultant who advised Moulton during his first congressional run, said that one of his traits, either like it or dislike it, is that hes not afraid to say what he believes. What if that helps to undermine the president Moulton endorsed and supports? Everything is politicized today, said Ferson. But why do we as Democrats think its a good idea to continue to not face the reality of the situation [in Afghanistan]? Its not the withdrawal policy, Ferson said. Its the intelligence failure of the withdrawal that needs to be talked about amongst Democrats.

Moulton started talking about that truth right away. Painful as it is, more Democrats need to join in the conversation.

Joan Vennochi can be reached at joan.vennochi@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @joan_vennochi.

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Seth Moulton, a Democrat who is speaking the truth about Afghanistan and President Biden - The Boston Globe