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Hector Sanchez Barba, head of Mi Familia Vota, who has criticized Biden on immigration policy in the past, wouldnt share specific details discussed in the private meeting. Still, he said, Bidens plan is the most aggressive agenda that I have seen on immigration reform from day one not only the legislative package, but also executive orders.

In the meeting, Susan Rice, who will lead Bidens Domestic Policy Council, was adamant that the incoming administration wasnt about to introduce comprehensive immigration reform to simply let it sit on a shelf, said Jess Morales Rocketto, executive director of Care in Action.

We were totally floored by the immigration plan and the level of clarity, she said.

Domingo Garcia, president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said Bidens team told attendees of the meeting the bill would give 11 million undocumented immigrants a pathway for citizenship, with an eight-year wait as a permanent resident. Biden also plans an executive order instituting a four-year extension of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.

The eight-year time frame, outlined by Harris during an interview with Univision this week, was a disappointment for Garcia who said he plans to push for a five-year wait instead. During the meeting, Biden also told advocates not to hold him to 100 days to pass immigration legislation because impeachment proceedings in the Senate could slow things down, said Garcia.

Some on the call, like Garcia, thought Biden was attempting to lower expectations. But others on the call, Morales Rocketto said, thought Biden was making a good-natured joke about pushing legislation through a jam-packed calendar during the impeachment process.

And Democrats, aware of the difficulties, are split on the best way to proceed. Democratic lawmakers expect Bidens proposal to establish a starting point. But big questions remain about what could be included in a coronavirus recovery package instead of an expansive immigration bill. Some lawmakers say they want Biden to get whatever he can get passed as soon as possible, even if it means adopting a more piecemeal approach. Others argue a true overhaul of the nations immigration system can only happen in one large package forcing Congress to meet the issue head-on.

Meanwhile, Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), backed by more than a dozen labor and immigrant rights groups, said he is planning to introduce legislation allowing undocumented essential workers to apply for permanent resident status. Under the bill, those workers would be eligible to apply for citizenship in five years. In a press call on Friday, incoming Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said undocumented immigrants on the frontlines "deserve not just Covid protections and labor protections but the security of a pathway to citizenship."

I hope the Congress and our nation will recognize that these immigrants stepped up when the United States needed the most and put themselves in danger every day by serving as essential workers during this deadly pandemic, Castro said in an interview.

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas) said a piecemeal approach is not an option. The administration has a very limited window of opportunity before House members begin running for reelection, she said. Every day that passes is a day that the window shuts just an inch more...Weve got to get it done in one fell swoop.

Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) agreed. Taking a step-by-step approach, such as attaching legal status for select groups to must-pass bills poses a great risk one that would leave some undocumented immigrants uncovered.

Still, soon-to-be Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin acknowledged the dicey road ahead with a tied Senate and slim majority in the House. I am realistic. I have been in the middle of this battle for two decades, said Durbin, adding that he has to take Bidens immigration goals and translate them into a 50-50 Senate and a 50-50 Senate Judiciary committee.

I'm not ruling out a larger bill, but I want to take it a step at a time, said Durbin (D-Ill.), who along with Menendez, has started conversations with his GOP colleagues. I don't want to overplay my hand. I want to be mindful that bipartisan support is essential to victory in the Senate.

Key Democratic lawmakers and congressional staff have been in constant communication with Bidens transition team and policy writers about the immigration plan, said Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Calif.), chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. We're going to have to be flexible in our strategic approach and with the ultimate objective of getting legislation signed into law.

Castros coming bill establishes a broad definition for essential workers that could cover some 5 million undocumented immigrants, including Dreamers and Temporary Protected Status recipients, according to an outline first shared with POLITICO. And it could be passed as a standalone bill, or as part of coronavirus relief or an immigration package, Castro said.

The measure will define essential workers as any worker who has performed any service or labor during the pandemic including in sanitation, health care, retail and construction, and any worker deemed essential by state or local entities. It would also provide a pathway for the family members whove had to stand in for any essential worker who died due to Covid-19 and promotes a pathway for relatives to promote family unity.

Bidens proposal is expected to provide an avenue for some essential undocumented workers but whether it goes as far as Castros proposal is uncertain.

Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) said she supports including status protections in a coronavirus relief bill for agriculture and meatpacking workers who are undocumented. Democratic lawmakers and advocates said based on conversations with Bidens team as well as Bidens comments -- they are confident Biden will take a different approach to immigration than President Barack Obama. The immigration policy advisers Bidens added to his team from advocacy groups like Americas Voice and The Immigration Hub are a positive sign, they said.

Were all ready to work and take our marching orders, said Garcia.

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Democrats ready immigration push for Bidens early days - POLITICO

In taking the Senate majority, Democrats are newly empowered to undo Trump-era policies through a seldom-used tool that allows Congress to reverse federal rules, NBC News reports.

But the tool, known as the Congressional Review Act, has limits: It applies only to recently finalized rules, and when Congress uses it to reverse a rule, it places new restrictions on federal agencies ability to issue similar rules going forward, raising questions about how broadly Democrats will use it to take Trump policies off the books.

Usually, its only possible to reverse federal rules with a court decision or the lengthy rule-making process a formidable undertaking that can take years. Under the 1996 Congressional Review Act, however, Congress can quickly overturn a rule through a fast-track vote of disapproval and a simple majority in the House and the Senate lower than the 60-vote threshold needed to pass most legislation in the Senate.

The day's top national and international news.

Its the quickest way for rules to get off the books, said Richard Revesz, a law professor at New York University and a regulatory expert. They can use it to clear the underbrush.

Read the full story on NBCNews.com

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The Democrats Could Deploy a Rarely Used Act to Reverse Trump's Midnight Rule-Making' - NBC4 Washington

Democrats have argued for more generous pandemic relief, more pressure on drugmakers to lower prices and more attention to systemic racism in health care. On Jan. 20, with control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, theyll have the power to choose which health care proposals get a vote in Congress.

The victories of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia last week gave Democrats two more Senate seats and the upper hand in the Senates now 50-50 split. After Vice President-elect Kamala Harris takes the oath of office, she will serve as the tiebreaker as needed in effect, Democrats 51st vote.

But that vote count is too small to eliminate the filibuster, meaning Democrats will not have enough votes to pass many of their plans without Republicans. That will likely doom many Democratic health care proposals, like offering Americans a government-sponsored public insurance option, and complicate efforts to pass further pandemic relief.

It remains to be seen how willing lawmakers are to compromise with one another in the aftermath of a pro-Trump mobs breach of the Capitol on Wednesday. Thursday, Democrats demanded the presidents removal for inciting rioters who disrupted the certification of President-elect Joe Bidens victory, assaulted Capitol Police officers and damaged federal property. One demonstrator and a police officer were killed, and three demonstrators died of medical emergencies.

Democrats slim margins in the Senate and the House where they can afford to lose only four votes and still pass legislation will also give individual lawmakers more leverage, handing those who disagree with party leaders an incentive to push their own priorities in exchange for their votes. There will be little room for intraparty disagreements, and Democrats made it clear during the presidential primaries that they disagree about how to achieve their health care goals.

In less than two weeks, Democrats will lead the committees charged with marking up health care legislation and vetting Bidens health nominees.

The change will hand control of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee to Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), who brokered the 2013 agreement with then-House Speaker Paul Ryan that ended a long government shutdown, among other bipartisan deals.

In 2019, Murray and the committees Republican chairman, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, introduced a wide-ranging package to lower health costs for consumers. Among its proposals was an initiative to lower prescription drug prices by eliminating loopholes that allow brand-name drugmakers to block competition.

In an interview before Democrats secured the Senate, Murray said her committee work will be focused on the problems that prevent all Americans from receiving equitable, affordable treatment in health care. Racial disparities, evidenced by disproportionate mortality rates among Black mothers and among communities of color suffering the worst impacts of the pandemic, will be a priority, she said.

Not everybody goes into the doctor and gets the same advice, feels the same comfort level and is believed, Murray said.

Murray said she will press for senators to consider how any piece of legislation will affect communities of color. It will be the question I ask about every step we take, she said.

On Wednesday, she called out Republicans for standing in the way of fighting the pandemic with policies that would directly help those struggling the most and would help us build back from this crisis stronger and fairer.

With a Biden-Harris Administration and a Senate Democratic majority, the challenges we face wont get any less tough but weve finally got the opportunity to face them head on and start taking action, Murray said in a statement. I cant wait to start getting things done.

The Senate Finance Committee, which oversees Medicare, Medicaid and health-related tax policies, will be run by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.). While the HELP committee will also hold a confirmation hearing for Bidens nominee for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Xavier Becerra, it is the Finance Committee that will vote to advance his confirmation.

Senate Republicans signaled they would delay considering Becerras nomination before Biden officially announced his name last month. Calling him unqualified due to his lack of a health care background, they questioned his support for a single-payer health care system and opposed his efforts to preserve abortion rights. As Californias attorney general, Becerra led efforts to fight lawsuits brought by Republican state officials against the Affordable Care Act.

But Democrats slim edge in the Senate is expected to be enough to drown out Republicans objections to the nomination. Last month, praising Becerras commitment to responding to the pandemic, protecting health care coverage and addressing racial disparities, Wyden said he looked forward to Becerras hearing so he can get on the job and start helping people during this unprecedented crisis.

Also, after months of decrying the Trump administrations failures managing the pandemic, Democrats will control which relief bills get a vote.

Last months package did not include their demands for more funding for state and local governments, and House Republicans blocked a Democratic effort to increase stimulus checks to $2,000, from $600.

Democrats have been united in their calls for more assistance, though they have disagreed at times about how to push for it.

In the fall, with the election approaching and no deal in sight, moderate Democrats in tough races pushed for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to abandon negotiations for a $2.2 trillion relief package that Republicans called a nonstarter in favor of passing more modest but desperately needed relief.

Every member of the leadership team, Democrats and Republicans, have messed up. Everyone is accountable, Rep. Max Rose (D-N.Y.) told Politico. Get something done. Get something done! He lost his bid for reelection.

More progressive voices like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) have been a force for more generous aid, particularly larger stimulus checks.

Beyond the pandemic, top Democrats have mentioned drug pricing as another area ripe for action. But one of their most popular proposals, which would authorize the federal government to negotiate drug prices for those on Medicare, is unlikely to attract the Republican votes it would need. When House Democrats passed one such proposal in 2019, Senate Republicans vowed it would never pass.

Members of Democrats more progressive wing, for their part, argued the proposal may not go far enough.

After years of Republican efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, though, it looks likely that efforts to stabilize the law could gain more traction under a Democratic-controlled Congress. The House passed legislation last summer aimed at increasing coverage and affordability, including by capping insurance costs at no more than 8.5% of income and expanding subsidies.

Lawmakers like Murray and Wyden have been quick to point out that the pandemics devastating consequences lost jobs and lost insurance coverage, to name just a couple have only underscored the need to strengthen the health care system.

Emmarie Huetteman: ehuetteman@kff.org,@emmarieDC

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Even With Senate Control, Democrats Will Need Buy-In From GOP on Key Health Priorities - Kaiser Health News

In leaked audio of a Zoom meeting between Biden and civil rights leaders obtained by The Intercept, the president-elect said that in order for Democrats to win elections, activists must stop calling for the defunding of police. Biden goes as far as to say that anti-police activism is the reason Republicans "beat the living hell out of us across the country," in November.

Biden's suggestionthat Democrats faced losses due to anti-police activism is shared by other powerful Democrats. Rep.Jim Clyburn of South Carolina is among those who share this view. "'Defund the police' is killing our party, and we've got to stop it," he told CBS News. Even former President Obama said "defund the police" is a "snappy slogan" that could cost Democrats votes.

Despite the persistence of this argument, media critic Adam Johnson pointed out he could find no empirical evidence to support the claim. I couldn't either. As Johnson and co-host Nima Shirazi demonstrate convincingly on their podcast Citations Needed, liberals have historically scapegoated Black activists, suggesting that their demands would hinder the electoral chances of the Democratic party.

The hosts cite a 1964 headline of this trend: "Negro Extremists Aid Wallace" (Alabama Governor George Wallace was a right-wing segregationist) and another from 1966: "Failure To Stop Mobs Will Cost Democrats Votes."

After telling civil rights leaders to wait on calls for police reform until after the Georgia runoffs, Biden promised the civil rights leaders that he would look into issues surrounding policing in a new commission.

"I just raise it with you to think about how much do we push between now and January 5 we need those two seats about police reform. But I guarantee you, there will be a full-blown commission. I guarantee you it's a major, major, major element," Biden said on the call.

Now that Democrats have prevailed in the Georgia runoffs, will Biden's administration with a resounding mandate to act meaningfully take on the police?

But like the historical examples show about the rhetoric used to scapegoat demands for justice, the same is also true with commissions. Even when the president creates one to study uprisings, the recommendations have historically been ignored, the most notorious example being the 1968 Kerner Commission.

Over the course of the 1960s, race riots over police violence and inadequate access to jobs, education, housing, and other markers of racist inequalities, sent people into the streets. First in Brooklyn, then in Los Angeles, and by the summer of 1967, in over 150 cities all over the country.

Soon after, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Illinois Governor Otto Kerner to head the now famous commission, which set out to understand the root causes of the riots that were occurring at the time and how to prevent them in the future. Kerner's conclusion was blunt: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal," it said. In order to remedy this, it recommended investments in jobs, education, and housing. It also was direct about the need to reign in police abuses and called on departments to stop random "stop and frisk style" searches.

As the New York Times wrote about the commission, "The report left scant doubt that it regarded white racism as the tinder igniting those 1960s fires."

But Johnson, despite passing landmark civil rights and anti-poverty legislation, stopped short of carrying out the Commission's recommendations. So did every ensuing presidential administration.

More recently, President Obama launched a commission in the wake of the uprisings over Michael Brown's death in 2014, called the President's Task Force on 21st Century Policing. It called for modest procedural reforms to further professionalize police departments and de-escalate their most wonton tendencies, including better transparency, more "community policing," and implicit bias training.

An op-ed in the New York Times by the commission's authors this summer laments that if only more of their recommendations had been carried out, the uprisings in response to George Floyd's death wouldn't have occurred. They write, "The problem is not that we lack a playbook for fixing the police. We have one. The problem is that we have not successfully followed the one we have."

Biden's commission will only be successful if its recommendations are carried out. We can't afford to placate the country with endless commissions as more Black people are killed by the police. Will these ideas ever be implemented, or will there just be a new commission next time people take to the streets to protest the savage brutality of the police?

This year's protests have called to defund the policethe implication being that instead of funding law enforcement, our tax dollars should be invested in social services, jobs, education, and non-punitive measures that improve social life in communities most impacted by police violence.

The Movement for Black Lives created a list of policy demands that has been updated and revised as of 2020. The group, composed of 50 organizations focused on ending violence against Black people, has already issued recommendations. But politicians refuse to hear them: "We have taken to the streets, launched massive campaigns, and impacted elections, but our elected leaders have failed to address the legitimate demands of our Movement. We can no longer wait."

But instead of taking the advice of Movement's demands, or the Kerner Commission for that matter, Democrats are demonizing a movement for justice they purportedly support and simultaneously are failing to make the case they have a better plan. Maybe this time a Commission will reconcile these contradictions. And if that doesn't work they can always blame movements for racial justice on their electoral shortcomings.

Will Meyer is a freelance writer and co-editor of The Shoestring in western Massachusetts. His writing has appeared in The Baffler, The New Republic, CJR, and many other publications. Find him on Twitter@willinabucket.

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Democrat leaders hate defund the police but have no alternative - Business Insider - Business Insider

The old saying Revenge is a dish best served cold is understood to mean it is better to deliver retribution for a perceived or actual injustice after time has passed, in order for it to be done dispassionately. Sometimes it is better not to serve that dish at all. Like perishable food left unrefrigerated, a different kind of bacteria can infect the nation.

Dispassion is in retreat in Washington and instead of revenge being served cold, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and many other Democrats are turning up the heat.

Some conservatives I hear from believe Democrats are trying to impeach President Trump for a second time and even deny him the right to ever hold public office again because they fear his policy successes and the 74 million who voted for him.

They are after more than revenge. They are engaging in vindictiveness.

President-elect Joe Biden has called for healing and unity, but he, too, has contributed to turning up the heat with some of his anti-Trump and anti-Republican comments. This proves a point I have previously made. The antithesis of the Proverb a soft answer turns away wrath is that a hard answer increases wrath. It can be argued that all of Trumps personal insults of others have now circled back to attack him.

If Pelosi and her fellow Democrats proceed with their threats to impeach, it will only further divide the country, deepen conspiracy theories, possibly lead to more violence and hinder the confirmation of Bidens nominees for critical offices. It could also embolden our enemies.

The model for dealing with a president many feel has disgraced himself and the office of the presidency is what Gerald Ford did for former President Richard Nixon following Nixons resignation over the Watergate affair.

On Sept. 8, 1974, Ford pardoned Nixon. He said among his reasons was a Senate trial would take up to a year and in the meantime the tranquility to which this nation has been restored by the events of recent weeks -- meaning Nixons resignation -- could be irreparably lost by the prospects of bringing to trial a former president of the United States.

Ford continued in his pardon announcement: The prospects of such a trial will cause prolonged and divisive debate over the propriety of exposing to further punishment and degradation a man who has already paid the unprecedented penalty of relinquishing the highest office of the United States.

True, President Trumps situation is different. He hasnt resigned or suffered from his actions, real and alleged. But the principle is the same.

This vindictiveness has spread to members of the White House staff and even to Trump supporters in Congress. There have been calls, including from Forbes magazine, for such people to be denied future employment as punishment for their association with Trump. Forbes editor, Randall Lane, warns companies that might hire Trump press secretaries they should assume everything they say is a lie.

This is reminiscent of the Hollywood blacklist, the Red Scare, and the McCarthy era. Where are the principled people who courageously stood up against those smears? If they dont stand up again now, they risk possible future harm to themselves and to the country.

Corporations, like Deutsche Bank, have announced they will no longer do business with Trump. For them he has the equivalent of a scarlet letter stamped indelibly on his chest.

The best policy to follow is to allow Trump to leave office and let the justice system work. If crimes have been committed let them be dealt with in the courts, but it is better to build a better future than to dwell on a bitter past. Vindictiveness will only turn him into a martyr in the minds of his supporters. That, too, will not be good for the country.

Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com.

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Column: Democrats, unity and revenge - The Oakland Press