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WASHINGTON Dozens of U.S. House Democrats, including two Virginians, backed a resolution filed Friday to expel controversial U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress, an extraordinary measure thats only been successfully employed twice since the Civil War.

U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez filed the expulsion resolution, after introducing it in January. The text of the legislation is simple, noting that Greene, a Georgia Republican, is hereby expelled from the House of Representatives.

In a floor speech, the California Democrat cited Greenes role ininciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionand press reports that revealed that before being elected, Greene had expressedsupport online for violence against top Democrats,including former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I take no joy in introducing this resolution, but any member who incites political violence and threatens our lives must be expelled, Gomez said.

The measure is unlikely to go any further, however.

An expulsion resolution requires a two-thirds majority in the House to pass, meaning it would need dozens of Republicans to sign on to be successful even if every Democrat supported it. And although Greenes GOP colleagues have been griping about her use of procedural tactics to grind debate on the House floor to a halt, they are exceedingly unlikely to back a push to remove her from Congress.

Pelosi had driven efforts tostrip Greene from her committee positions, a rare move the Houseapproved last month. Yet even Pelosi, at her weekly press conference on Friday, said shes lukewarm on expelling Greene.

Im not going to get into that, Pelosi told reporters. Members are very unhappy about what happened here and they can express themselves the way they do. What Mr. Gomez did is his own view. That is not a leadership position.

For her part, Greene swatted away the effort, claiming Gomez and the 72 Democrats who cosponsored the bill are radical socialists and have declared me Public Enemy Number One.

When asked for further comment, her spokesman sent along another tweet in which Greene claimed Democrats are threatened by strong Republican Women. Greene has also tweeted that Democrats are trying overturn the will of the People who voted for both her and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, whose November election in the states 2nd Congressional District isbeing challenged by Democrat Rita Hart.

Greene also insinuated that the effort was a conspiracy with social media giant Twitter after the platform suspended her account for 12 hours, a move Greene said she was told was an error.

Greene has also been fundraising off the expulsion effort, asking supporters to text a number and join her communications list. Her campaign sent out an email Thursday asking her supporters to donate $25 so she can have the resources to defend myself in the public sphere.

I must be able to defend myself against these nasty smear tactics and show that you and I and the America First agenda are not going anywhere!, the email read. Make no mistake, the Radical Left, led by AOC and the Squad, are trying to remove me from office for defending President Trump. And as President Trumps biggest supporter, Ive become Enemy #1. But in reality, theyre not after me. Theyre after you. Im just in their way.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and fellow Squad members Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota are indeed cosponsors of the legislation. However, the measure also has support from members across the ideological spectrum in the Democratic caucus.

For instance, the measure had the support of moderate lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; and Pennsylvanias U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle, Matt Cartwright and Susan Wild.

Several Florida lawmakers sponsored the measure: Reps.Kathy Castor, Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Darren Soto, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Frederica Wilson.

Other members to sponsor the resolution include Arizonas U.S. Reps. Ruben Gallego and Ral Grijalva, Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, Virginia Reps. Gerry Connolly and Donald McEachin, Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada, Rep. David Trone of Maryland, Rep. Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania and Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee.

The sole fellow member of Greenes Georgia delegation to co-sign her expulsion was Rep. Nikema Williams, a Democrat who joined Congress this year after the death of Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

Congresswoman Greenes comments and actions are dangerous, unpatriotic, and a clear threat to every Member of Congress, Williams said in January, after backing an effort to censure Greene. It would be irresponsible for us to allow her to use the Peoples House as a platform to peddle discredited conspiracy theories that only fan the flames of hatred and violence.

Several members were expelled from Congress in 1861 and 1862 at the outbreak of the Civil War for supporting the Confederacy and secession. However, since then, only two members of Congress have been successfully expelled, and both were given the boot for financial corruption.

The most recent was Rep. Jim Traficant of Ohio, who was expelled in 2002 after being indicted on several counts, including tax evasion, racketeering and bribery. He served seven years in prison, and passed away in 2014, years after his release.

Before that, Rep. Michael Myers of Pennsylvania was the sole post-Civil War expulsion, after being caught on videotape accepting a $50,000 bribe as part of the Abscam FBI sting operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He served three years in prison.

The only expulsion before the Civil War happened in 1797, when Sen. William Blount of Tennessee was expelled for treason for helping the British in a ploy to conquer parts of Florida and Louisiana to keep them from French conquest.

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Resolution to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene signed by dozens of House Democrats, including two Virginians - Virginia Mercury

Just a year after the Empire State was clobbered by the coronavirus, New Yorks Legislature confronts an embarrassment of revenue riches. State taxes have rebounded more strongly than expected from the pandemic meltdown capped by a massive injection of $12.6 billion in no-strings-attached federal stimulus funds.

Yet among their budget priorities for the fiscal year starting April 1, the Democratic super-majorities in the state Assembly and Senate want to raise $7 billion or $8 billion more in new taxes mostly from a few thousand multimillionaire earners who already generate a disproportionately large share of the states revenue.

Gov. Cuomo opened the door to tax hikes in his mid-January executive budget, which called for a sliding scale of temporary three-year personal-income-tax surcharges on New York taxpayer incomes starting at $5 million.

Although Cuomo said the tax hike was needed to raise $1.5 billion, it has since become clear that receipts through fiscal 2022 will be billions higher than he originally projected. Indeed, his budget would generate a surplus without even counting stimulus payments that are more than twice as much as what he had counted on.

But thats not enough for the Legislature. Lobbied by a coalition of powerful public-employee unions and urban progressive activists touting a confiscatory tax the rich agenda as the solution to every problem, the Assembly and Senate majorities would raise the top income-tax rates to new historic highs.

Under current law, residents of New York City are subject to a combined state and local income-tax rate topping out 12.7percent 3.9 percent in the city, plus a statewide rate of 8.82percent including a supposedly temporary but repeatedly extended millionaire tax surcharge first imposed in 2009.

Both legislative majorities favor raising the top tax rate to nearly 10 percent starting on incomes of $1 million ($2 million for joint filing couples) and to 11.85 percent on incomes of $25million (the Assembly plan) or $50 million (Senate version). The combined marginal rate in New York City would thus rise to nearly 16 percent. On top of all that, lawmakers want to hit high-earners capital gains with a further 1 percent surcharge.

Lawmakers are turning a blind eye to the impact of the 2017 federal tax laws virtual elimination of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which boosted New Yorks effective marginal rate by 43 percent in 2018. The Assembly and Senate plans would raise the effective marginal rate on multimillionaire earners to nearly double the level of just four years ago.

Asked how targeted taxpayers might be expected to respond to this onslaught, legislative sponsors generally echo the complacency of Mayor de Blasio, who testified last month that hes unworried about an uptick in multimillionaire out-migration, because this is the place they want to be despite New York Citys well-documented increase in crime and disorder, the likely shift to more remote work and the tax hikes already resulting from the lost SALT deduction.

More than a few lawmakers probably share the attitude expressed by Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) during an online tax-the-rich pep rally last December.

Millionaires leaving if we increase taxes? Sepulveda said. Well, I say I will open the door and make sure it doesnt hit them on the ass on the way out. Because if youre that wealthy ... and if you dont have the heart to want to say, I will contribute more to help millions of people, then leave the state, find another place to live. Well find other millionaires that are chomping at the bit to move into this state.

Good luck with that, guys.

E.J. McMahon is a senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Read more here:
Democrats' bid to turn screws on New York's richest - New York Post

Had Donald Trump still been president, the stock market would have almost certainly topped his list of glorious achievements. We'd hear popping talk about how our 401(k)s are sizzling and how he is the reason. Sample tweet from August 2017: "Stock market at an all-time high. That doesn't just happen!"

No, Biden last week spoke of "a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us." He spent a good deal of time on the anguish, but then he moved, happily, to his administration's successes -- boosting production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, recruiting armies to give the shots, getting the vaccines into pharmacies.

It was a relief to hear a Democratic president bragging out loud about his accomplishments. But the message must move away from pain to prosperity. Biden has started on that path by touting the massive COVID relief bill that's sending checks to an overwhelmingly supportive public. His self-praise should expand to the stock market.

Democrats seem especially reluctant to use the stock market as a measure of their economic prowess. Under Barack Obama, the Dow hit record highs 118 times. Do you remember him ever talking about it?

Biden was basically right when he said, "Where I come from in Scranton and Claymont, the people don't live off of the stock market."

It's true that the wealthiest 10 percent of American families own 84 percent of Wall Street portfolios' value. The bottom 50 percent -- that's half of American families -- possess none or almost no equities. Last year, gains in the S&P 500 added an estimated $4 trillion to American portfolios, but $3.4 trillion of it went to the top 10 percent.

Many Americans don't understand that reality, as Trump knew well. Those in the middle who own a few shares, perhaps in their retirement accounts, do feel tied to movements in stock prices. Never mind that in 2019, the median portfolio size for households in this group was only $13,000.

Noninvestors, meanwhile, often associate a booming stock market with a good economy, even if they themselves are hurting.

It's odd how Democrats shy away from taking credit for bubbling markets, when, in recent decades, stock returns have done better under their presidents than Republican ones, Trump included. The Dow posted an annualized return of almost 11.8 percent under Trump, according to MarketWatch. That was good but short of Obama's 12.1 percent. And it was nowhere near Bill Clinton's 15.9 percent.

As MarketWatch also noted, even Clinton's numbers were blown away by the 25.5 percent annualized rise under Calvin Coolidge, a Republican. Of course, Coolidge had the Roaring '20s blowing wind in his economy's sails.

We're now in the 2020s. Many economists are predicting that with the virus in retreat, the economy will roar once again. The Financial Times cites such prods as pent-up demand, government spending and savings by the locked-down Americans who kept their jobs but had few places to spend money.

The stock market is off to a hot start in Biden's first year. We won't miss tweets like Trump's "Dow hit a new intraday all-time high! I wonder whether or not the Fake News Media will so report?"

But Democrats would be wise to at least applaud politely when stock markets sing of a new age of abundance now that they're in charge.

Froma Harrop is a nationally syndicated columnist whose work regularly appears in the Grand Forks Herald.

See original here:
Froma Harrop: The Democrats are finally bragging - Grand Forks Herald

Drug companies, including the ones making the vaccines now authorized in the U.S., widely oppose the move, which they say would undermine the global response to the pandemic and not have the intended effect of speeding up production. The Trump administration opposed it at the WTO. But House Democrats say they have already collected close to a hundred signatures on a letter urging Biden to change the U.S. position. Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) also have weighed in. Those critics accuse the drug companies of prioritizing profits over saving lives.

We need to make the vaccines available everywhere if we're going to crush this virus, and we need to make the public policy choices both in the U.S. and at the WTO that puts patients first, said Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), one of the signatories on the House letter and chair of the powerful House Appropriations Committee.

The WTO has been deadlocked on the issue for six months, and so far the appeal from lawmakers and over 400 health, labor, religious and other groups has not persuaded Biden to change the U.S. position against the waiver. Since the WTO operates by consensus, all 164 members would have to agree to support the measure for it to take effect. But backers of the waiver request believe a U.S. switch in their direction would have a transformative effect on other opponents.

For now, Biden administration officials only say they will make a decision based on their analysis of how effective the waiver would be. They also point to Bidens pledge to provide $4 billion in contributions to COVAX, the international alliance to distribute vaccines to 92 low- and middle-income countries.

The top priority of the United States is saving lives and ending the pandemic, including by investing in COVAX and surging vaccine production and delivery, said Adam Hodge, a spokesperson for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative. We are exploring every avenue to coordinate with our global partners and are evaluating the efficacy of this specific proposal by its true potential to save lives.

The Trump administrations opposition to the waiver was a rare instance of solidarity with the European Union, which along with Japan, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and several other WTO members also opposes waiving the intellectual property protections.

However, it is typical of rich countries, which host major pharmaceutical companies, to oppose any challenges to intellectual property rights from poorer nations.

The bloc of mostly developed countries argue strong patent protections have been key to the rapid development of the vaccines, and issuing a broad waiver would undermine the ability of the industry to respond to a future pandemic.

Top executives at 31 pharmaceutical companies, in a letter to Biden earlier this month, said waiver proponents have offered no evidence that patent and other protections are what is currently hindering vaccine availability, rather than the expected lag between developing the products and ramping up production to meet global demand.

"Despite the immense challenge of scaling manufacturing on novel technologies, current estimates are that Covid-19 vaccine manufacturers will supply approximately 10 billion doses by the end of 2021, enough to vaccinate the entire current global vaccine eligible population," they added.

At least two companies AstraZeneca and Novavax have allowed manufacturers in India, Japan and South Korea to produce their vaccines under voluntary licensing agreements.

But the World Health Organization, which supports India and South Africas waiver request, argues the terms of the voluntary license schemes being offered by some patent holders are not sufficient to address the current pandemic.

The Vatican, which has observer status at the WTO, has also jumped into the debate. Quoting Pope Francis, the Holy Sees representative argued during a meeting last month of the WTOs intellectual property council that the world should not allow the law of the marketplace and patents to take precedence over the health of humanity.

Supporters of the waiver hope those and other moral arguments will resonate with Biden, who is the U.S.s second Roman Catholic president and was photographed on his first day in office sitting in front of a picture of himself and the pontiff.

They also make an economic argument, saying any loss of pharmaceutical company profits would be more than offset by global economic gains that come from a quicker recovery, as well as the number of lives saved.

The next meeting to examine the issue at the WTO will take place over two days in mid-April. That gives Katherine Tai, Bidens newly confirmed U.S. trade representative, some time to dig into the issue. If there's no resolution, Biden could confront the issue head on later this year, when G-20 leaders hold their annual meeting in October in Rome. Both South Africa and India are members of the leading economy group, along the United States, China, Germany, France and the EU as a whole. India also could raise the issue when it attends the G7 summit in June as an invited guest.

Among major developing countries, only Brazil is openly opposed, while China has said the waiver request represents a good starting point for talks on any emergency trade measures that should be taken. India, a major generic drug manufacturer, claims the support of more than 100 countries for the proposal.

The WTOs new director general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, former co-chair of the alliance behind COVAX, has suggested a third way solution to encourage vaccine patent holders to enter into voluntary licensing agreements with drug manufacturers around the world in order to scale up production.

A group of four Republican senators led by Tom Cotton of Arkansas also have urged Biden not to support the waiver.

"Waiving all rights to intellectual property would end the innovation pipeline and stop the development of new vaccines or boosters to address variants in the virus. It also wouldnt increase the supply of vaccines because of the tremendous time and resources needed to build new manufacturing plants and acquire the know-how to produce these complex medicines," the senators wrote.

But proponents of the waiver say the drug manufacturers cannot be trusted when they say 10 billion doses will be available by the end of year. Other estimates indicate it could be as late as 2023 or 2024 until there are enough vaccines to treat the worlds population, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) said.

Time is also of the essence right now because there are the variants that are developing, Schakowsky said. The administration has made some moves in the right direction. But the real answer is to allow for the manufacture of these vaccines.

Read more:
Poor countries are fighting with drug companies over vaccines. Now Biden must pick a side. - POLITICO

Its really about Obama versus Bush, and Biden versus Trump, not the other way around, Mr. Emanuel said. We built long-lasting, robust economic growth. And I think comparing one to the other is, is historically not accurate. And also, more importantly, its strategically not advantageous.

David Axelrod, who served as a chief strategist to Mr. Obama, said he believed the current criticism was born of a desire to avoid a midterm shellacking similar to the one Democrats suffered in 2010.

It is irksome only in the sense that it was an entirely different situation, Mr. Axelrod said. If the Obama economic record were deficient, Im pretty sure Joe Biden wouldnt have run on it.

In many ways, the maneuvering is a stand-in for larger tensions within the party. Mr. Obamas close-knit circle is keenly devoted to protecting his policy legacy. A growing left wing wants more investments in health care and combating climate change, and a break from hard-line policy on immigration. Mr. Bidens administration is seeking to chart its own path.

In a recent address to House Democrats, Mr. Biden argued that it was Mr. Obamas humility that cost Democrats at the time, because the president didnt spend enough time explaining the benefits of his stimulus package to the American people.

Barack was so modest, he didnt want to take, as he said, a victory lap, Mr. Biden said. I kept saying, Tell people what we did. He said, We dont have time, Im not going to take a victory lap, and we paid a price for it, ironically, for that humility.

Excerpt from:
Democrats, Pushing Stimulus, Admit to Regrets on Obamas 2009 Response - The New York Times