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Its bold, yes, and we can get it done. So declared President Joe Biden launching his $2tn plan last week to overhaul US infrastructure ranging from fixing 20,000 miles of roads to remaking bridges, ports, water systems and the care economy, care now defined as part of the countrys infrastructure. Also included is a vast uplift in research spending on eliminating carbon emissions and on artificial intelligence. And up to another $2tn is to follow on childcare, education and healthcare, all hot on the heels of the $1.9tn American Rescue Plan, passed just three weeks ago.

Cumulatively, the scale is head-spinning. Historians and politicians are already comparing the ambition with Roosevelts New Deal or Lyndon Johnsons Great Society programme. In British terms, its as though an incoming Labour government pledged to spend 500bn over the next decade with a focus on left-behind Britain in all its manifestations real commitments to levelling up, racial equity, net zero and becoming a scientific superpower.

Mainstream and left-of-centre Democrats are as incredulous as they are joyful. Bernie Sanders, congratulating Biden, declared that the American Rescue Plan is the most significant legislation for working people that has been passed in decades. It was the moment when Democrats recovered their soul, writes Robert Kuttner, co-editor of the progressive magazine the American Prospect, ending a 45-year embrace of Wall Street neoliberalism. He concludes: I am not especially religious, but I am reminded of my favourite Jewish prayer, the Shehecheyanu, which gives thanks to the Almighty for allowing us to reach this day.

What amazes the party and commentators alike is why a 78-year-old moderate stalwart such as Biden has suddenly become so audacious. After all, he backed Bill Clintons Third Way and was a cheerleader for fiscal responsibility under both him and Barack Obama, when the stock of federal debt was two-thirds of what it is today.

Now, the debt is no longer to be a veto to delivering crucial economic and social aims. If Trump and the Republicans can disregard it in their quest to cut taxes for the super-rich, Democrats can disregard it to give every American child $3,000 a year.

It is not, in truth, a complete disregard. Under pressure from centrist Democrats, the infrastructure proposals over the next 15 years are to be paid for by tax rises, even if in the first stages they are financed by borrowing. Corporation tax will be raised progressively to 28%, a minimum tax is to be levied on all worldwide company profits, along with assaults on tax loopholes and tax havens.

If others have better ideas, says Biden, come forward, but there must be no additional taxing of individual Americans whose income is below $400,000 a year. Its an expansive definition of the middle class, witness to the breadth of the coalition he is building. But even these are tax hikes that Democrats would have shunned a decade ago.

It is high risk, especially given the wafer-thin majorities in both the House of Representatives and Senate. With implacable Republican opposition, it requires a united Democratic party, which Biden is orchestrating with some brilliance, his long years in Washington having taught him how to cut deals, when and with whom. He judiciously pays tribute to Sanders, on the left, for laying the foundations of the programme and flatters a conservative Democrat centrist such as West Virginias Joe Manchin, who insists on tax rises to pay for the infrastructure bill. What will be truly radical is getting the programme into law.

Yet, still: why, and why now? The answer is the man, the people round him, the gift of Donald Trump and, above all, the moment the challenge of recovering from Covid. Bidens roots are working class; beset by personal tragedies, charged by his Catholicism, his politics are driven by a profound empathy for the lot of ordinary people. He may have surrounded himself with superb economists the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, Cecilia Rouse and Jared Bernstein at the Council of Economic Advisers, Brian Deese at the National Economic Council, Lina Khan at the Federal Trade Commission who are the intellectual driving forces, but he himself will have been influenced as much by the Catholic churchs increasingly radical social policy, represented by Pope Benedict XVIs revision of the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum.

What makes the politics work so well is Trumps legacy in uniting Democrats as never before while dividing Republicans. Biden knows the danger of the midterm elections in 2022, having seen his Democrat predecessors lose control of the Senate, House or both, so introducing gridlock. His bet is that his popular programme, proving that big government works for the mass of Americans, rather than wayward government by tweet, will keep divided Republicans at bay. Better that than betting, like Clinton and Obama, on the merits of fiscal responsibility, which Republicans, if they win power, will torch to serve their own constituency.

But the overriding driver is the pandemic and the way it has exposed the precariousness of many Americans lives. It has re-legitimised the very idea of government: it is government that has procured and delivered mass vaccination and government that is supporting the incomes of ordinary Americans. Unconstrained US capitalism has become too monopolistic; too keen on promoting fortunes for insiders; too neglectful of the interests, incomes and hopes of most of the people. An astute politician, Biden has read the runes and acted to launch a monumental reset. Expect more to come on trade, company and finance reform and the promotion of trade unions.

The chances are he will get his programmes through and they will substantially work. The lessons for the British left are clear. Left firebrands, however good their programmes, may appeal to the party faithful. But it takes a Biden to win elections and then deliver. With that lesson learned, we, too, may one day be able to invoke the Shehecheyanu.

Will Hutton is an Observer columnist

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With Joe Bidens own audacious New Deal, the democratic left rediscovers its soul - The Guardian

Last month, the Census Bureau announced that it won't be delivering data that state lawmakers and redistricting commissions use to redraw legislative districts until the end of September 2021.

Threadgill-Matthews is a board member for her local branch of the Alabama New South Coalition, an organization that works to mobilize Black voters in Alabama. Her concerns come as her home state's neighbor, Georgia, is the center of the national conversation over voting rights after Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed SB 202, which voting rights groups have said would target Black residents and other voters of color in the state.

"If this is enacted in Alabama, you can probably come back and cover the story because I'm going to jail," Threadgill-Matthews told CNN. "I've been thinking of going to Georgia to offer (voters) some water because I feel like it's ridiculous," she said, referring to a provision in the law that makes it illegal to hand out food or water to people standing in line to vote.

Georgia's SB 202 offers a glimpse into how certain laws can reduce voting accessibility for communities of color across the Southeast, some experts say. It also serves as a warning for what could come next. Many advocates currently have their eyes on the chance for decreased transparency due to the possibility of a shorter redistricting process because of the data delay.

"Unfortunately, a pattern we have seen over and over again, is that when incumbents view a community as a threat to their maintenance of political power, they will use their own power to push back against that threat," said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School.

Redistricting data, originally due at the end of 2020, is late due to complications stemming from the coronavirus pandemic as well as the Trump administration's push to exclude undocumented immigrants from being counted.

For Chavi Khanna Koneru, this has everything to do with how much influence the state's Asian American vote will have. As the executive director of North Carolina Asian Americans Together, she works with organizations to increase the political participation of the state's AAPI community.

"The time crunch is going to make everyone use that as a justification for having to move faster and not being as transparent. Because the community has grown, it really does impact our ability to have an impact on who gets elected and what that representation looks like."

The ripple effects

Threadgill-Matthews worries that the delay in redistricting data will lead to voter apathy in some cases.

"Questions about redistricting and not knowing who's going to be the representative or what district voters might be in would cause some apathy. When voters get used to representation from one person they are familiar with it's easy," she said. "If someone got thrown into a district with an unknown candidate or someone that's been in office that's not known to us, that may cause some apathy and some low voter turnout."

However, Alabama state Sen. Linda Coleman Madison is hopeful that voter apathy in the Black community will not be an issue, but she said that above all, she wants an accurate count.

"I don't think a delay will cause further voter apathy. We in the Black community are always concerned with gerrymandering, stacking and packing. My district is 32% White and 65% Black," she said. "When lines were redrawn after the last census I picked up areas that were traditionally White and I've worked to represent all areas fairly and get to know local leaders. I think people are beginning to look at what the person can bring and their commitment to overall good government."

As in the previous decade, Republicans are set to control the redistricting process in Alabama and North Carolina, something that worries Democrats regarding the implications of how maps could be drawn.

Threadgill-Matthews worries splitting up congressional districts in Alabama's "Black Belt" would lead to vote dilution and disruption in relationships between representatives and constituents that have been years in the making.

Black voters in Alabama tend to vote Democratic. And although it hasn't posed a serious long-term threat to the "hegemony of the Republican Party" in the state, there have been repeated concerns with incumbents using "the mechanisms of rules for how ballots are cast and counted ... and drawing lines in order to diminish the voices of groups they disfavor for whatever reason," Levitt, the law professor, said.

Threadgill-Matthews lives in the state's 7th Congressional District, which is 62% Black, with 45% of active voters self-reporting as Black in 2020, according to data from the Alabama secretary of state.

In 2019, federal trials were held over claims that Alabama's 2011 congressional redistricting map packed one-third of the state's African American population into the 7th District, instead of creating two majority African American districts. The current maps remain unchanged and the way in which they will be drawn this time around will greatly impact constituents.

"When it comes to the questions of redistricting, the linking thread, whether it's suffrage restriction, or polling place restrictions, or redistricting questions, what they all come down to are questions of democracy, anti-democracy, and anti-democratic tendencies," said R. Volney Riser, a history professor at the University of West Alabama.

"In American politics, because political partisanship tends to be so closely aligned with race, anything that involves one partisan seeking advantage over another partisan has the potential to introduce race into the equation," Riser added.

In North Carolina, the Asian American and Pacific Islander electorate shares similar concerns over redistricting. Koneru said she has witnessed the rapid increase of the Asian American population in the past decade, which has grown by 154% since 2000.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders accounted for 3.5% of the state's electorate in the 2020 elections, according to data provided by non-profit APIA Vote.

This means that close to 88,000 Asian Americans voted in the 2020 general election, Koneru said.

Much of the state's Asian American population are concentrated in three counties that encompass North Carolina's primary metro areas. Koneru says that if districts are drawn fairly, Asian Americans have the potential to sizably impact the vote in these areas.

Despite the growth in Asian American voters, gerrymandering threatens to reduce the political impact they can have.

"We're finally in a place where we have a seat at the table, are getting our voices heard. Politicians or elected officials who aren't happy with that turnout will certainly push for gerrymandered districts," Koneru said.

The Covid-19 pandemic motivated Asian American voters in North Carolina to become more politically engaged to combat the uptick in discrimination, Koneru said. The turnout of the AAPI voting-eligible population in North Carolina in 2020 was 62%, compared to 39% in 2016.

"We talked to a lot of people who were first-time voters, even though they had been registered for a while. It was really about wanting to have their voices heard because discrimination was impacting them economically," Koneru said.

It can be difficult to address redistricting concerns

Not everyone believes that these concerns surrounding redistricting are warranted.

Patrick Ryan, a spokesperson from the office of state Sen. Phil Berger, president pro tempore of the North Carolina General Assembly, issued a statement on behalf of North Carolina Senate Republicans saying that in 2019, "The legislature conducted all map-drawing in a committee room fully open to the public, and the computers used to draw the maps were livestreamed for any and all to observe."

"It's difficult to specifically address anonymous criticisms of a process that hasn't even begun, and it would seem that those lodging complaints are unaware of the widely praised model employed just two years ago," he said.

North Carolina state Sen. Wiley Nickel, a Democrat, disagrees.

"The issue of fair maps is especially important at a time when Asian Americans are facing increased discrimination and xenophobia across the country because of false COVID-19 related claims."

The 2020 election produced a more conservative state Supreme Court that is likely to influence redistricting this time around, Nickel and others fear.

State Sen. Ben Clark has been leading the effort in the Senate's Democratic caucus to monitor the redistricting process and the census data in North Carolina.

"The delay in receiving census data coupled with the adverse impact of extreme partisan gerrymandering should be of great concern to all North Carolinians," he said. "It is my hope that the condensed timeline will not be used as justification to obscure the redistricting process from engaged citizens who deserve an opportunity to choose their representatives, rather than allowing representatives to 'choose their voters.'"

Continued here:
Democrats fear a delay in redistricting threatens Black and Asian residents in two southern states - CNN

Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime HarrisonJaime HarrisonDemocrats bet on stimulus bill to boost them in 2022 The Hill's Morning Report - Presented by Facebook - Biden to hit road, tout COVID-19 relief law DNC gears up for midterm push MORE said his party must battle the damage to the Democratic brand.

Its not even just with Republicans, the Democrat brand with some of the folks who are core at the base of our party is not the greatest. And so I want to spend a lot of time, energy, and effort understanding why the brand is where it is, what it is and how, and what we can do in order to improve it, Harrison toldThe Daily Beasts podcast The New Abnormal.

Harrison, who ran an unsuccessful campaign in 2020 to unseat Rep. Lindsey GrahamLindsey Olin GrahamLawmakers say fixing border crisis is Biden's job Graham cites Hurricane Katrina as reason to own AR-15 Hunter Biden blasts Trump in new book: 'A vile man with a vile mission' MORE (R-S.C.), spoke about his own experience battling the tarnished Democratic brand in South Carolina.

I experienced it on my own race, Lindsey [Graham] and his crew of dark money effectively labeled me as somebody who believed in defunding the police. My grandfather on my stepfathers side was in the Detroit police department for 40 years. So I dont believe in that, Harrison said.

But they were able to do it because the Democratic brand had been so tarnished in South Carolina that people would believe anything. If they said, Jamie kicked a puppy the other day, they would have believed it, he added.

Harrison stressed the importance of selling Democrats' accomplishments and focusingonrural and red-state America, where he says the American Rescue Plan will help constituents.

We have to take credit and claim the things that we will have gotten done over the course of this next two years. Were going to do a lot for rural America, Harrison said.

The American Rescue Plan has so much in there for rural communities across this country. And it will have a huge benefit, this infrastructure plan, when we get this done. The broadband component in it alone will totally transform rural America, he added.

Harrison said listening to and delivering for rural and red-state America will in turn help grow the base, and persuade a few other folks to take a look at us.

Those communities are also just as diverse as urban communities. We also need to make sure that were listening to them, Harrison said.

And then, in the end, weve got to deliver and I believe we can do those things. Not only will we grow our base, but I think we also persuade a few other folks to take a look at us, he added.

Thecomments from Harrison come as the DNC is beginning to gear up for the 2022 midterm elections. While in past years the DNC has tended to take a less-active role in midterm elections, the committee announced a coordinated campaign last month to sell President BidenJoe BidenLawmakers say fixing border crisis is Biden's job Trump calls for Republicans to boycott companies amid voting law controversy White House: GOP has 'struggled to articulate a reason' to oppose infrastructure plan MOREs coronavirus relief package to battleground state voters.

The committee also distributed a message guide to state party officials and national Democrats on how to promote the legislation.

Read more:
DNC chair: We have to 'battle the damage to the Democratic brand' | TheHill - The Hill

Amazon has apologized to the congressman Mark Pocan, admitting to scoring an own goal in its initial denial of his suggestion its drivers were sometimes forced to urinate in bottles during delivery rounds.

We know that drivers can and do have trouble finding restrooms because of traffic or sometimes rural routes, and this has been especially the case during Covid when many public restrooms have been closed, the company said in a blogpost.

Its admission came a week after the Wisconsin Democrat criticised working conditions for Amazon staff, saying in a tweet: Paying workers $15 [an hour] doesnt make you a progressive workplace when you union-bust and make workers urinate in water bottles.

Amazon responded: You dont really believe the peeing in bottles thing, do you? If that were true, nobody would work for us.

It subsequently walked back that comment.

This was an own goal, were unhappy about it, and we owe an apology to Representative Pocan, Amazon said in its blogpost, adding that its previous response only referred to staff at warehouses and fulfilment centers.

In response, Pocan tweeted: Sigh. This is not about me, this is about your workers who you dont treat with enough respect or dignity.

Amazon said urinating in bottles was an industry-wide problem and shared links to news articles about drivers for other delivery companies who have had to do so.

Regardless of the fact that this is industry-wide, we would like to solve it, the company said. We dont yet know how, but will look for solutions.

The apology comes as workers at an Alabama warehouse are waiting for a vote count that could result in the online retailers first unionized facility in the US, which would be a watershed moment for organized labor.

Amazon has long discouraged attempts among its more than 800,000 US employees to organize. Allegations by many workers of a grueling or unsafe workplace have turned unionizing the company into a key goal for the US labor movement.

Pocan tweeted that the company should acknowledge the inadequate working conditions youve created for all your workers, then fix that for everyone and finally, let them unionize without interference.

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Amazon apology to Democrat includes admission drivers urinate in bottles - The Guardian

Former President Donald Trump's appeal to Latino voters may have been more widespread than originally thought, according to new research.

Democratstouted their focus on increasing turnout among minority voters for the 2020 elections, but Latino voters with low involvement in politics shifted toward Trump, according a new report from Equis Labs, which describes itself as focused on the "Latinx community."

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"Trump gains seemed to be unique among those identifying as Latino across geography and place of origin," the researchers wrote.

Trump also "galvanized" conservative Latinas, while liberal Latinas lost enthusiasm about voting, according to the report.

FILE - Trump give a thumbs up to the cheering crowd after a Latinos for Trump Coalition roundtable in Phoenix, in this Sept. 14, 2020 file photo. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

Democrat-linked Equis Labs offered various theories about why Trump appealed to Latino voters, including "dog whistle politics & racial status anxiety" and "activation around religion, SCOTUS and QAnon."

"Neither party should assume that a Hispanic voter who cast a ballot for Trump in 2020 is locked in as a Republican going forward," the researchers wrote."Nor can we assume this shift was exclusive to Trump and will revert back on its own."

Trump's increased support from Latino voters in 2020 to 2016 was not enough to win him the election, however. President Biden won Latinos by a roughly two-to-one margin, while Trump had the support of roughly one in three, according to exit polls.

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The Trump campaign was outspending the Biden campaign on Spanish-language ads in the run-up to the election.

Nearly 17 million Latinos voted in the 2020 general election, a more than 30% increase compared to 2016, according to UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative data cited by The New York Times.

Original post:
Democrats still searching for answers on Trump's appeal to Latinos in 2020 election - Fox News