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President Joe Biden is expected to call on Congress in his budget proposal this week to ditch the 45-year-old ban on abortion funding, after supporting that prohibition throughout his career. But Bidens recent reversal on the Hyde amendment wont be enough to overcome the Senate, where moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) oppose repealing the ban and Democrats ultimately need Republican support to enact spending bills.

Every indication is that it has a slim chance in the Senate, Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), a top House appropriator, said of the effort to nix the abortion spending ban in particular. But that doesnt mean that, at certain points, you dont stand up for it.

Democrats are planning budget boosts for sexual and reproductive health services, family planning and teen pregnancy prevention, hoping some of those issues will be more palatable for Republicans and moderates in passing a raft of bipartisan spending bills. Theyre also hoping to build on millions of dollars allocated for gun violence research in recent years, after the long-held Dickey amendment chilled studies on the issue for more than two decades.

Because the Hyde amendment prevents federal money from being spent to perform abortions, it blocks low-income women from paying for the procedure through government programs like Medicaid. The main workaround for pro-choice lawmakers: pour money into grant programs that fund clinics like Planned Parenthood.

Theres a lot we can do without addressing Hyde directly that will be important to supporting womens access to reproductive choices, said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.).

Democrats are now eyeing significant funding increases for the Title X family planning program. Biden has asked for $340 million to that end, a nearly 19 percent increase over current funding.

Shaheen, a member of the spending panel that funds the State Department and foreign programs, also wants Congress to spend more money on international family planning work, including through the U.N. sexual and reproductive health agency currently funded at about $33 million.

Its hard for me to understand why there seems to be such opposition to increasing support for family planning, Shaheen said. It improves the health of mothers and babies around the world. So, Im hopeful we can do that.

Federal cash runs dry on Sept. 30, and House Democrats are expected to pass their initial slate of spending bills in July without the abortion funding ban.

But unlike a massive infrastructure plan which Democrats can try to advance without GOP support any deal to keep the government open will eventually require buy-in from at least 10 Senate Republicans, meaning a fight over scrapping the Hyde and Dickey amendments could stall the annual spending bills or force a government shutdown.

Its a principled choice, Price said of opposing the funding bans. But in the end, there also has to be a practical choice to get the bills through.

Even the return of earmarks isnt enough to get GOP lawmakers to relinquish the longstanding Hyde provision that has largely served as a truce between both parties, smoothing over an issue that could easily throw government funding into chaos.

I could get every earmark I wanted, but if Democrats take the Hyde amendment out of the Labor-H bill, I certainly wouldnt vote for it, and I dont think any pro-life Republican would, said Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the ranking Republican on the House panel that oversees funding for the departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education.

Progressives and abortion rights advocates say even symbolic support for eliminating the Hyde amendment is progress. Congress must begin to lay down markers recognizing that the Democratic base largely wants to toss the provision, said Destiny Lopez, co-president of the abortion rights advocacy group All* Above All.

This is deeply a racial justice and economic justice issue, Lopez said. Its one of the harshest remaining barriers to abortion access that Congress actually controls.

Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who co-chairs the Pro Choice Caucus, said progressive Democrats will keep fighting until they have enough votes in both chambers to torpedo the provision for good.

It affects Black and brown women disproportionately, Lee said of the Hyde amendment. Were not going to stop.

In recent years, progressives have had more success in their effort to diminish the Dickey amendment that debuted in 1996 and has been re-upped every year since. While the amendment bans the CDC from advocating for gun control and has served to stall research on the subject for more than two decades, Democrats in 2018 altered the language to explicitly allow the public health agency to study gun violence.

Then in 2019, Congress for the first time provided funding specifically for that cause, spending $25 million. House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) told CDC officials during a hearing this week that she wants a progress report on those research efforts.

Even though the Dickey amendment remains intact, Democrats say the new language substantially eases the policy that once ground gun violence research to a halt. To build on that victory, they now plan to provide billions of additional dollars across federal agencies to bolster research, gun violence prevention initiatives and background check systems, while encouraging states to adopt gun licensing laws and establish voluntary gun buyback programs.

Gun deaths continue to occur at a staggering rate in our country, Attorney General Merrick Garland told House appropriators this month in asking for $232 million in additional funding to combat gun violence. This is both a law enforcement issue and a public health issue.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this report misstated Sen. Jeanne Shaheen's position on the Senate Appropriations State-Foreign Operations Subcommittee. She is a member of the subcommittee.

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Democrats are stuck on abortion and gun control. They have a backup plan - POLITICO

The issue of public safety may be about to play its most significant role in our politics since the mid-1990s, the beginning of a decadeslong decline in crime that steadily eroded its political salience.

Donald Trump tried to make law and order a defining issue in 2020, but the rioting he so forcefully denounced was, in most places, too transitory to become an overwhelming issue. He was also in the awkward position of trying to run against disorder as an incumbent rather than a challenger, and his chaotic governing style wasnt a good match for a message of orderliness.

But now, more than a year into a serious crime wave, Democrats should bewarethey are fooling themselves if they think they wont be blamed for a rise in violence in Democratic-run cities that clearly, at some level, is a result of police forces feeling beleaguered and overwhelmed.

Overall, murder increased by more than 25 percent in the United States last year, the biggest jump in 60 years. Murders jumped nearly 50 percent in New York City. Crime increased 36 percent in Los Angeles. And the story is the same in city after city.

Surely, the dislocations of the pandemic have been a factor, but its also obvious that anti-police agitation has put the cops on their back feet. Exhibit A is Minneapolis.

In the fevered days and weeks after the killing of Floyd, the City Council pledged to do away with the police department, among the most outlandishly unachievable and self-destructive promises ever made by an elected body. Of course, it couldnt follow through on it, anymore than it could have followed through on a promise to eliminate traffic lights or municipal snow removal.

Still, cops have left the force in droves, while crime has soared. Murders, rapes, robberies and assaults increased 25 percent last year, with the rise much steeper, more than 60 percent, in the neighborhoods surrounding the intersection where Floyd was killed.

The impeccably progressive mayor of Minneapolis, Jacob Fry, who desperately wanted to ingratiate himself at a tribunal-like rally last summer, but, to his credit, wouldnt commit to defunding the police, now occasionally sounds like hes channeling Rudy Giuliani circa 1993.

The violence needs to stop, its unacceptable, he said at a community meeting a couple of weeks ago. We should be holding these perpetrators accountable. He added that when you make big, overarching statements that were going to defund or abolish and dismantle the police department and get rid of all the officers, theres an impact to that.

Another dyed-in-the-wool progressive, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler, faced with ongoing unrest that once was blamed on Trump, has called for the citys residents to take the city back from rioters and for unmasking, arresting, and prosecuting them.

Los Angeles cut its police budget by 8 percent in the wake of the Floyd protests, and now is basically adding the funding right back. In South Los Angeles, the LAPD is increasing patrols and vehicle stops to search for guns and gang members.

Irving Kristol famously said a neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality. If progressive politicians who are now sounding friendlier to the police havent been mugged by reality, they at least have been alarmed by the sound of approaching gunfire.

The turnabout isnt universal. White House press secretary Jen Psaki was asked the other day whether theres a crime problem, and sounding as evasive as when she discusses the border, would only say there is a guns problem. This was a reference to the completely unconvincing argument that increased gun sales have led to the spike in crime, when surges in gun sales since the mid-1990s never before led to higher crime.

The problem that Democrats have is that they have either made themselvesor allied themselves with people makinga comprehensive case against the police as systematically racist. This doesnt naturally allow for nuance, and, in fact, logically entails calling for fewer cops and less police funding.

This is an agenda that will be hard to sell to most people in the best of circumstances, but it is toxic in an environment of rising crime.

Black Lives Matter has already been losing support in the polls, while trust in the police has been rising. Things would have to get orders of magnitude worse for crime to become as central an issue as it was in the 1970s. But safe streets is a non-negotiable expectation of all voters. Its why law and order, whether wielded demagogically by George Wallace or much more responsibly by Ronald Reagan, has such power.

Democrats who arent alarmed that reporters cant do standups at the George Floyd memorial without dodging bullets are tempting political fate.

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Opinion | Democrats Ignore the Crime Spike at Their Own Peril - POLITICO

The latest Democratic battle to expand Medicare access is under way.

A group of more than 150 House Democrats from the progressive and centrist wings of the party are launching a campaign to include an expansion of Medicare in President Joe Biden's infrastructure plan, The New York Times reported.

They sent a letter on Thursday to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris arguing to widen the federal health program so it includes a broader range of Americans, along with growing the range of benefits provided so it includes dental, vision, and hearing aids.

"Medicare expansion means more coverage for more people and by finally allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices, it's at a lower cost for taxpayers," Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus Pramila Jayapal, a leader of the effort, said in a Friday tweet. "Let's get this done."

The plan would cut the eligibility age from 65 to 60, adding roughly 23 million Americans into the government health insurance program. The group projects it would amount to $200 billion over a decade. They say the price tag would be offset with another proposal: empowering Medicare to negotiate the cost of prescription drugs, which Democrats have failed to achieve in the past.

The effort is certain to trigger Republican opposition and potentially reopen a fierce debate among Democrats on healthcare. The last Democratic presidential primary was largely defined by policy brawls over Medicare for All and whether Americans should be able to keep their private coverage in a reform effort.

Expanding Medicare access is popular with voters, however, particularly reducing prescription drug costs. Up to now, however, Biden and Democrats have directed their efforts at expanding the insurance subsidies available under the Affordable Care Act.

Widening Medicare coverage could run into roadblocks in the Senate from centrist Democrats. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia has stated his opposition, complicating the path ahead for other Democrats supportive of the measure. "No, I'm not for it, period," he told The Washington Post last month. It's unclear why Manchin opposes it, although he told The Hill in 2019 the government "can't even pay for Medicare for some."

Biden continues negotiating with Republicans on an infrastructure plan, and the talks are set to stretch into at least early June. The White House did not include a Medicare expansion or a blueprint to cut the price of prescription drugs in its economic plans, though it called on Congress to approve the measures in its budget without laying out specific policies.

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Democrats want to allow 60-year-olds into Medicare as part of Biden's infrastructure package - Business Insider

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Karla Perez and Esperanza Gonzalez warm up by a barbecue grill during the power outage caused by the winter storm on Feb. 16 in Houston.

Texas Democrats are demanding an investigation into the death toll of the catastrophic February storm and power outages after a BuzzFeed News analysis found that hundreds more people likely died from the freezing temperatures than the state has acknowledged.

An official investigation into the true death toll of the power grid collapse is our best shot at guaranteeing accountability for those in power who allowed this to happen, former member of Congress and 2020 presidential candidate Beto ORourke told BuzzFeed News in an email.

The loss of life that is depicted in this story is heartbreaking and the fact that the death toll numbers have been miscalculated is absolutely unacceptable, said Rep. Marc Veasey, a member of the Houses Energy and Commerce Committee, by email. We cant let this stand. We need answers and accountability.

The states official tally of deaths from the storm currently stands at 151. But BuzzFeed News ran an excess deaths analysis of how many more people died during and right after the storm than would have been expected, given long-term demographic and seasonal trends. Our best estimate is that around 700 people were killed in the week of the storm and the worst power outages.

The staggering toll exposes the magnitude of the states failure in preventing the power grids collapse, despite being warned of its vulnerabilities, and adds new pressure to hold local leaders accountable. Moreover, an undercounted death toll creates economic problems for the families of victims. Without an official acknowledgment that their loved ones died due to the storm, relatives were unable to claim federal assistance for funeral costs.

In the wake of this reporting, Texas Republicans have remained silent. Not one contacted for this story responded by deadline. That included Sens. John Cornyn and Ted Cruz, who drew fierce backlash for flying to Cancn while many of his constituents shivered in dark homes without running water.

Sen. Ted Cruz checks in for a flight at Cancn International Airport as Texas endured a fatal winter storm on Feb. 18, 2021.

No Texas Republicans who serve on the Houses climate, energy, infrastructure, and science and technology committees responded to requests for comment. Neither did the Texas Republican Party, nor Republican leaders of the states legislature.

And Gov. Greg Abbott who on the eve of the storm assured Texans that the state would not lose power was also silent when asked if he would call for an investigation into the death toll. Previously, a spokesperson only told BuzzFeed News that he was working collaboratively with the House and Senate to find meaningful and lasting solutions to ensure these tragic events are never repeated.

The February blackouts, which impacted more than 4 million Texans, should not have surprised any official. A 2011 winter storm similarly triggered widespread blackouts and revealed the power grids vulnerability to cold temperatures. But a decade later, when forecasts warned of freezing weather on an unprecedented scale, power providers were still not required to protect their equipment.

Now state lawmakers are debating a proposal that would finally require power plants and some natural gas providers, which power much of the states electricity, to weatherize their equipment to the cold or face some fines. And with the legislative session ending on May 31, they are quickly running out of time.

Im honestly not sure if the bill passes, state Rep. Jon Rosenthal, a Democrat, told BuzzFeed News. But he hopes the discussions about the disasters true death toll add pressure to get the bill over the finish line. I would hope that it provides more drive to really take substantive measures to fix our electrical grid.

And state Sen. Sarah Eckhardt, a Democrat, told BuzzFeed News in an email, "we will be reconvening again in the fall for redistricting and should use that opportunity to address the risks that continue to threaten our grid and the lives of our people."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in September 2020

The Texas Department of State Health Services, which is responsible for the states official count, said it is still working on the tally. But it has no current plans to use statistical methods similar to the BuzzFeed News analysis to investigate the full toll from the storm and power outages, which would include medically vulnerable people whose deaths have been attributed to their underlying conditions.

As is noted on our website, the investigations into deaths related to the February winter storm is ongoing, spokesperson Lara Anton told BuzzFeed News by email. We expect the count to change as more information is reviewed. Our count includes deaths that can be verified as disaster-related rather than estimates of excess deaths from a statistical analysis.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Texas are not only calling for an investigation into the storms death count but are also blaming the catastrophe on Republicans who control the states government.

Texas Democrats will continue to push for real answers on the true scope of this disaster, and will hold Abbott and Texas Republicans accountable for their damaging and deadly failures in leadership, Clare Donohue-Meyer, a spokesperson for the Texas Democratic Party, told BuzzFeed News in an email.

Not only did Republican leadership fail to address the grids vulnerabilities while they still had a chance, said ORourke, but they also refused to adopt any sort of significant disaster response following the blackouts, leaving thousands of Texans without the vital services and medical care they needed to survive in the days and weeks after the storm hit.

Governor Abbott failed Texans miserably, said Julin Castro, the former US secretary of housing and urban development. He failed to prepare and respond to the winter power crisis that left hundreds more dead than his administration has told us. Republicans in the pocket of lobbyists left our state vulnerable to disaster and are now covering up the extent of their failures. Texans deserve an independent investigation to hold public and private sector leaders accountable and ensure this failure never happens again.

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Beto O'Rourke And Texas Democrats Are Demanding An Investigation Into The True Death Count Of The Winter Storm - BuzzFeed News

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Roughly three months ago, Evanna Hu realized something had to change. For months, she and other Asian Americans working in the national security field had heard a startling number of anecdotes about a climate of fear and hostility toward people of Asian heritage. Approval for security clearances were taking a lot longer for some government employees and contractors. At the State Department, more Asian American diplomats are facing restrictions on where they can serve and what positions they can holda process that has grown so dispiriting that one employee told CNN, It helps immensely to change ones last name.

For Hu, the chief executive of an artificial intelligence company that does business with the Defense Department, she began noticing microaggressions and not-so-micro aggressions in her interactions with government officials. There was always this initial skepticism of my citizenship and my loyalty, she recalled. I finally got really fed up with it. Sheturned to several peers and wrote an open letter. Signed by more than 220 people in her field, the letter condemned the xenophobia that is spreading as U.S. policy concentrates on great power competition and warned that it has exacerbated suspicions, microaggressions, discrimination, and blatant accusations of disloyalty simply because of the way we look.

Across the United States, anti-Asian hate crimes have skyrocketed in recent months. The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino found that while hate crimes as a whole largely declined in the largest US cities, anti-Asian hate crimes rose by nearly 150 percent in 2020. Researchers and Asian American community leaders believe the Trump administrations fixation on China as the source of the coronavirusoften with disparaging phrases like China virus or kung flucontributed to an environment in which Asian Americans are more at risk.Trumps use of the term China virus was deadly for the Asian American community because it really did racialize the virus, says San Francisco State University professor Russell Jeung, who co-founded the group Stop AAPI Hate last year. Chinese people were stigmatized.

When discussing China as a rival superpower vying for sway in foreign relations, Republicans were quick to use near-apocalyptic language to characterize the threat. In December, then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe wrote that China poses the greatest threat to America today, and the greatest threat to democracy and freedom world-wide since World War II. In March,Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA), a member of the House committee that approves the Pentagons annual policy priorities, said Chinas goal is nothing less than the complete destruction of the United States.

While Democrats have largely avoided the racistcaricatures that Trump would employ, the emphasis on China as a top threat and rival hasnt changed that much under Joe Biden.The president has made competition with China a key priority for the US military and described the US conflict with China as a great inflection point in history that determines who will win the 21st century. Hes even kept some of Trumps more hawkish policies, including a wave of tariffs affecting Chinese goods, in place for now.

Chinas repressive turn under leader Xi Jinping poses innumerable challenges for the region and for Chinese people themselves, who find their freedoms restricted and their cultural diversity extinguished. In the United States, China poses a much different, multilayered problem. Watch a congressional oversight hearing on nearly any topicfrom espionage to climate change or tradeand China almost always comes up.

This laser-like focus on China comes with its own risks, community leaders and Asian American scholars say. As China becomes a universal bogeyman for US politicians, Chinese Americans can become targets of racism in the same way Muslim Americans were during the War on Terror. How Democrats learn to talk about Chinain all its manifold complexitymay not just be key to the next decade of national security strategy. It will also go a long way toward avoiding the mistakes of the last two decades and show how serious Joe Biden is at confronting anti-Asian violence.

After the murder of eight people in Georgia two months ago, Biden went to Atlanta and said our silence is complicity. To Jessica Lee, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank that advocates military restraint, Bidens remarks missed the mark in an important way. Lee, who has written frequently about the connection between national security policy and anti-Asian violence, wrote that Bidens White House failed to acknowledge that Washingtons over-the-top language about China is fueling an atmosphere of fear and anxiety, which boomerangs in the form of violence against Asian Americans.

If there was any doubt that American foreign policy is domestic policy, she added, these shootings should quell them.

Anti-Asian hate is far from a recent phenomenon in US history. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was one of the first pieces of legislation to explicitly limit immigration and remains to this day the only federal immigration restriction to single out just one specific country or ethnic group.

In 1913, California barred Asian immigrants from owning land, becoming the first of more than a dozen states to impose similar legislation. Japanese Americans, many of whom would be moved to internment camps following Japans attack on Pearl Harbor, were increasingly targeted as well. Later laws that privileged the admittance of Northern Europeans at the expense of Asians and Mexicans solidified the nativist notion of the United States as a white country. President Woodrow Wilson, asked by a supporter in California for his view on Chinese exclusion, responded,We cannot make a homogenous population out of people who do not blend with the Caucasian race.

China and the United Statesallies in World War IIfound themselves on opposite sides of the Korean War and relations between the two countries were not normalized until Richard Nixon visited the country in 1972. China eventually became a global player and successive US presidents bet on its economic opening sparking a kind of social and cultural liberalization. But that bet proved wrong. The Chinese Communist Party has only become more entrenched in its rule as Chinas economy has grown at a faster rate than any other modern country.

Recent hostility toward Chinese Americans corresponds with a rise in the perception of China as a predominant threat to US national security. In 2001, only 14 percent of Americans believed China was the greatest enemy of the United States, according to a Gallup poll. Two decades later, 45 percent of Americans listed China. The prominence of China as a national security talking point has kept Democratic lawmakers and foreign policy activists alert to the potential for the conversation to veer in a racist direction. When this rhetoric gets out of hand and there is intense xenophobia, then there is a blowback on Asian Americans, Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.), himself a Taiwanese immigrant, said at an Asia Society event in April.

The challenge is to separate the actions of Xi Jinpings government, which include the killing and imprisonment of Uyghur Muslims and the eradication of democratic norms in Hong Kong, from the identity of Chinese and Asian Americans. In recent weeks, progressive foreign policy advocacy groups have become especially vocal about establishing this distinction. The relationship between the United States and China is poised to be one of the most pivotal foreign policy issues of the coming decades, begins a memo sent out by one group, Win Without War, earlier this month. Unfortunately, much of the current discourse on the issueon both sides of the aisleis steeped in a dangerous, antagonistic mindset that risks igniting a catastrophic new Cold War. The memo goes on to emphasize the importance of cooperation with China on global issues like climate change and nuclear proliferation and rejects the notion that a threat from China can besolved through further military buildup or economicantagonism.

Lee, the senior research at the Quincy Institute, is one of many progressives and scholars in the antiwar community working to draw attention to examples of overheated rhetoric, especially from Democrats. Last spring, activists flagged a Biden campaign ad that criticized Trumps sluggish response to the coronavirus pandemic. Trump rolled over for the Chinese, the ads narrator says at one point.

Asian American activists were not pleased, asPoliticoreported at the time. Wow @JoeBiden. Already trying to out-Trump Trump, Cecillia Wang, a deputy legal director at the national ACLU tweeted. This kind of fearmongering is causing violent attacks on Asian Americans. When Bidenreleased a follow-up ad weeks later, the tone softened considerably. There was no mention of the Chinese or of Trumps travel ban, which the first ad had maligned as not exactly airtight.

Since taking office, Biden has kept the national security focus on China as congressional Democrats work to pass a bipartisan package of bills aimed at preserving the US supply chaingiven Chinas control of exports crucial to the production of electronics and certain medicinesand countering Chinese influence domestically. This latter bill, known as the Strategic Competition Act, spawned a series of condemnatory articles from Quincy scholars, who said it would effectively constitute a declaration of cold war on China by the U.S. Congress. The legislation, pushed by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), treats Chinese influence as a global terror and includes a $300 million fund to counter the malign influence of the Chinese Communist Party globally.

Even Bidens defense budget uses China as an implicit argument for more funding. When his administration announced its request for $715 billion in defense spending in Aprila rejection of progressive demands to cut the budget from last yeara White House statement said the budget considers the need to counter the threat from China as the Pentagons top challenge.

For Democrats, the relentless focus on competing with China on trade and manufacturing not only creates some common ground with Republicans, but also could interest workers eager for an aggressive attempt to keep jobs in the United States. It also invites other problemswhich progressives are quick to point out. Erica Fein, senior Washington director at Win Without War, says its a big problem that Democrats believe they can score cheap political points by being hawkish towards China.

Not only does it lead to more xenophobia and racism at home, it could even lead to an actual war, she adds. This is one of the biggest challenges for the progressive movement, and its going to take a major shift in priorities to get us where we need to be.

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With Anti-Asian Attacks on the Rise, Democrats Need to Figure Out How to Talk About China Mother Jones - Mother Jones