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Congressional Democrats are introducing legislation to transfer $1bn in funding from a controversial new intercontinental ballistic missile to the development of a universal Covid vaccine.

The Investing in Cures Before Missiles (ICBM) Act, introduced in the House and Senate on Friday, would stop funding on the proposed new missile, known as the ground-based strategic deterrent (GBSD) which is projected to cost a total of $264bn over its projected lifespan, and discontinue spending on a linked warhead modification program.

Instead, the life of the existing US intercontinental ballistic missile, the Minuteman III, would be extended until 2050, and an independent study commissioned on how best to do that.

The United States should invest in a vaccine of mass prevention before another new land-based weapon of mass destruction, Senator Edward Markey of Massachusetts, co-author of the bill, said.

The ICBM Act makes clear that we can begin to phase out the cold-war nuclear posture that risks accidental nuclear war while still deterring adversaries and assuring allies, and redirect those savings to the clear and present dangers presented by coronaviruses and other emerging and infectious diseases.

Arms control experts say static intercontinental ballistic missiles, of which the US has 400 in silos across the northern midwest, are inherently destabilizing and dangerous, because a president would have just a few minutes to launch them on the basis of early warning signals of an impending enemy attack, or risk losing them to a pre-emptive strike. They point to a history of near-launches based on defective data, and the risk of cyber-attacks distorting early warning systems.

With all of the global challenges we face, the last thing we should be doing is giving billions to defense contractors to build missiles we dont need to keep as a strong nuclear deterrence, Ro Khanna, Democratic congressman from California and the bills co-author in the House, said.

In September 2020, Northrop Grumman was awarded an uncontested bid for the $13.3bn engineering, manufacturing and development phase of GBSD, after its only rival for the vast contract, Boeing, pulled out of the race complaining of a rigged competition.

The Biden administrations intentions on the GBSDs future are unclear, but an early signal may come in its first defence budget expected in the next few weeks.

The new ICBM bill would transfer of $1bn in funding for the GBSD to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (Niaid) for development work on a universal coronavirus vaccine. It would also divert money from the program to modify the W87-1 nuclear warhead to fit the GBSD, and dedicate it to research and preparations to combat future bio-threats. And it would launch an independent study to explore viable technical solutions to extend the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile to 2050.

When Khanna tried to introduce a similar bill last July it was killed in the House armed services committee by a decisive bipartisan vote of 44-12. A proposed Minuteman extension study was also voted down.

Rarely is a congressional study controversial. This just shows how afraid Northrop Grumman is about the results of the independent study, Khanna told the Guardian. They lobbied to kill a simple study, to see if the Minuteman III could be extended.

The congressman said he was optimistic the new administration would support the bill.

This will remain an uphill battle. Northrop Grumman is lobbying hard against this bill, Khanna said. Given we have Democratic majorities in both chambers and a Democrat in the White House, we think our chances are better, particularly by putting pressure on the administration to pause GBSD and consider extending Minuteman III.

Jessica Sleight, the program director at Global Zero, a disarmament advocacy group, said: The US nuclear arsenal far exceeds any plausible mission requirements put forth by the Pentagon. Even in the best of times, $264bn for new nuclear missiles is money we cant spare for weapons we dont need. In the middle of a devastating pandemic, its irresponsible.

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Democrats call for $1bn shift from weapons of mass destruction to 'vaccine of mass prevention' - The Guardian

Crime tape surrounds a King Soopers grocery store on March 24 in Boulder, Colo where ten people were killed in a shooting on Monday. State Democrats now say they will consider a statewide assault weapons ban. Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images hide caption

Crime tape surrounds a King Soopers grocery store on March 24 in Boulder, Colo where ten people were killed in a shooting on Monday. State Democrats now say they will consider a statewide assault weapons ban.

Colorado could be the next state to consider a ban on "assault-style" weapons, Colorado Public Radio has learned, although discussions are still in the preliminary stages at the state capitol and no legislation has been introduced yet.

Ten people were killed in Monday's mass shooting at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder and state lawmakers are grappling with what else could be done to prevent these types of shootings from happening. In Colorado, Democrats control the legislative and executive branches of the state government.

"I'm devastated," says Democratic Senate Majority Leader Steve Fenberg. He was born and raised in Boulder and represents the state Senate district where the shooting occurred.

"This is my grocery store. This is blocks from where my wife teaches middle school and her students go on their lunch break," says Fenberg. "It is my job to solve solutions through policy. And that's why it's not too soon. It's frankly too late, especially for these 10 innocent lives."

Fenberg and other Democratic state leaders say they are eager for a federal assault weapons ban. Even though President Biden called for that on Tuesday, Fenberg isn't optimistic Congress will act. The U.S. Senate is currently considering two less sweeping measures.

"There's no question that the real solution has to come from the federal government. A patchwork of laws is better than nothing, but clearly, if someone is intent on causing harm and we have strict regulations in Colorado, somebody can drive an hour and a half to Wyoming," says Fenberg. "The point is to not end gun violence tomorrow, but to prevent some of these tragedies from happening and making it so we can go longer than a week before the next tragedy."

Gun laws Colorado has passed so far

Colorado has already passed several gun laws within the last decade: a high-capacity magazine ban, universal background checks and a so-called "red flag" gun law. Opponents of stricter laws say those measures infringe on Second Amendment rights, placing burdens on law-abiding gun owners, while failing to prevent mass shootings.

Historically, opponents of bans on specific types of weapons have criticized them as unenforceable and often out of touch with the nuances of firearm styles.

"We haven't seen any bill text from Democrats on assault weapons, but I will say that we find bans to be ineffective and that they end up punishing good, law-abiding Coloradans," says Republican Sen. John Cooke, a former sheriff.

According to Cooke, Senate Republicans plan to respond to the Boulder shooting by pushing for a "massive investment" in mental health services.

"Something is troubled in the collective American psyche," says state Sen. Paul Lundeen, a Republican. "People are hurting and we need to do all we can to address that."

Republican state Rep. Matt Soper says that after the Boulder shooting, he started to hear chatter about a possible bill to ban certain types of guns statewide. He said there would be strong opposition from the GOP.

"We shouldn't have a knee-jerk reaction to these tragedies," he says, warning such a ban would likely be unconstitutional. "The political divide has grown even wider on the issue of guns and there's a lot of emotion involved on both sides."

Colorado's own constitution protects individual gun ownership: "The right of no person to keep and bear arms in defense of his home, person and property, or in aid of the civil power when thereto legally summoned, shall be called in question."

However, the state Supreme Court has upheld past gun laws as legal under that provision.

Two gun bills are making their way through this year's legislative session. One proposal would require safe storage of firearms in many instances and the other would require people to report lost and stolen guns. Both have passed their first chamber, so far on almost entirely on party-line votes.

The Boulder shooting is the largest mass shooting in Colorado since 2012. The state has some of the highest numbers of mass shootings in the country, beginning in 1999 with the attack on Columbine High School.

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Assault Weapons Ban Could Be In Colorado's Future - NPR

Contents

The Democratic Party is one of the two major political parties in the United States, and the nations oldest existing political party. After the Civil War, the party dominated in the South due to its opposition to civil and political rights for African Americans. After a major shift in the 20th century, todays Democrats are known for their association with a strong federal government and support for minority, womens and labor rights, environmental protection and progressive reforms.

Though the U.S. Constitution doesnt mention political parties, factions soon developed among the new nations founding fathers.

The Federalists, including George Washington, John Adams and Alexander Hamilton, favored a strong central government and a national banking system, masterminded by Hamilton.

But in 1792, supporters of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who favored decentralized, limited government, formed an opposition faction that would become known as the Democratic-Republicans.

Despite Washingtons warning against the danger of political parties in his famous farewell address, the power struggle between Federalists and the Democratic-Republican Party dominated the early government, with Jefferson and his supporters emerging largely triumphant after 1800.

The Federalists steadily lost ground in the early 19th century, and dissolved completely after the War of 1812.

In the highly controversial presidential election of 1824, four Democratic-Republican candidates ran against each other. Though Andrew Jackson won the popular vote and 99 electoral votes, the lack of an electoral majority threw the election to the House of Representatives, which ended up giving the victory to John Quincy Adams.

In response, New York Senator Martin van Buren helped build a new political organization, the Democratic Party, to back Jackson, who defeated Adams easily in 1828.

After Jackson vetoed a bill renewing the charter of the Bank of the United States in 1832, his opponents founded the Whig Party, led by Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky. By the 1840s, Democrats and Whigs were both national parties, with supporters from various regions of the country, and dominated the U.S. political system; Democrats would win all but two presidential elections from 1828 to 1856.

In the 1850s, the debate over whether slavery should be extended into new Western territories split these political coalitions. Southern Democrats favored slavery in all territories, while their Northern counterparts thought each territory should decide for itself via popular referendum.

At the partys national convention in 1860, Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge, while Northern Democrats backed Stephen Douglas. The split helped Abraham Lincoln, candidate of the newly formed Republican Party, to victory in the 1860 election, though he won only 40 percent of the popular vote.

The Union victory in the Civil War left Republicans in control of Congress, where they would dominate for the rest of the 19th century. During the Reconstruction era, the Democratic Party solidified its hold on the South, as most white Southerners opposed the Republican measures protecting civil and voting rights for African Americans.

By the mid-1870s, Southern state legislatures had succeeded in rolling back many of the Republican reforms, and Jim Crow laws enforcing segregation and suppressing Black voting rights would remain in place for the better part of a century.

As the 19th century drew to a close, the Republicans had been firmly established as the party of big business during the Gilded Age, while the Democratic Party strongly identified with rural agrarianism and conservative values.

But during the Progressive Era, which spanned the turn of the century, the Democrats saw a split between its conservative and more progressive members. As the Democratic nominee for president in 1896, William Jennings Bryan advocated for an expanded role of government in ensuring social justice. Though he lost, Bryans advocacy of bigger government would influence the Democratic ideology going forward.

Republicans again dominated national politics during the prosperous 1920s, but faltered after the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first Democrat to win the White House since Woodrow Wilson.

In his first 100 days, Roosevelt launched an ambitious slate of federal relief programs known as the New Deal, beginning an era of Democratic dominance that would last, with few exceptions, for nearly 60 years.

Roosevelts reforms raised hackles across the South, which generally didnt favor the expansion of labor unions or federal power, and many Southern Democrats gradually joined Republicans in opposing further government expansion.

Then in 1948, after President Harry Truman (himself a Southern Democrat) introduced a pro-civil rights platform, a group of Southerners walked out of the partys national convention. These so-called Dixiecrats ran their own candidate for president (Strom Thurmond, governor of South Carolina) on a segregationist States Rights ticket that year; he got more than 1 million votes.

Most Dixiecrats returned to the Democratic fold, but the incident marked the beginning of a seismic shift in the partys demographics. At the same time, many Black voters who had remained loyal to the Republican Party since the Civil War began voting Democratic during the Depression, and would continue to do so in greater numbers with the dawn of the civil rights movement.

Although Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed civil rights legislation (and sent federal troops to integrate a Little Rock high school in 1954), it was Lyndon B. Johnson, a Democrat from Texas, who would eventually sign the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law.

Upon signing the former bill, Johnson reportedly told his aide Bill Moyers that I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.

Over the course of the late 1960s and 1970s, more and more white Southerners voted Republican, driven not only by the issue of race, but also by white evangelical Christians opposition to abortion and other culture war issues.

After losing five out of six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, Democrats captured the White House in 1992 with Arkansas Governor Bill Clintons defeat of the incumbent, George H.W. Bush, as well as third-party candidate Ross Perot.

Clintons eight years in office saw the country through a period of economic prosperity but ended in a scandal involving the presidents relationship with a young intern, Monica Lewinsky. Clintons conduct in the affair eventually led to his impeachmentby the House in 1998; the Senate acquitted him the following year.

Al Gore, Clintons vice president, narrowly captured the popular vote in the general election in 2000, but lost to George W. Bush in the electoral college, after the U.S. Supreme Court called a halt to a manual recount of disputed Florida ballots.

Midway through Bushs second term, Democrats capitalized on popular opposition to the ongoing Iraq War and regained control of the House and Senate.

In 2008, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois rode a wave of popular discontent and economic concerns during the Great Recession to become the first African-American U.S. president.

Opposition to Obama and his policies, particularly health care reform, fueled the growth of the conservative, populist Tea Party movement, helping Republicans make huge gains in Congress during his two terms in office.

And in 2016, after a tough primary battle with Vermontsenator Bernie Sanders, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton captured the Democratic nomination, becoming the first female presidential nominee of any major party in U.S. history.

But against most expectations, Clinton lost in the general election that November to reality TV star Donald Trump, while Republican gains in congressional elections left Democrats in the minority in both the House and Senate.

The slate of candidates running for president from the Democratic Party in the 2020 election was historically large and diverse. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, Beto ORourke, Corey Booker, Andrew Yang, Amy Klobuchar, Tulsi Gabbard and Tom Steyer were among the major candidates aiming to take on President Trump.

After a slow start to his campaign, former Vice President Joe Biden won his party's nomination.Biden chose California senatorKamala Harris as his vice presidential running mate, making Harris the first Black and Asian American woman to be named on a major party's ticket.Biden ran as a moderate, and pledged to unify the country after a divisive four years under President Trump. On November 7, Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election; he took office as the 46th U.S. president on January 20, 2021, alongside a fully Democratic Congress.

Political Parties in Congress, The Oxford Guide to the United States Government.Eric Rauchway, When and (to an extent) why did the parties switch places? Chronicle Blog Network (May 20, 2010).

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Democratic Party - HISTORY

The first year of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States was characterized by sharp partisan differences in public attitudes on a wide range of pandemic issues. But in views of some aspects of COVID-19, there is little, or only modest, partisan difference. Heres what Pew Research Center surveys have found about partisan views of pandemic issues.

As the coronavirus pandemic enters its second year, public opinion on the outbreak and its handling continues to be marked by wide partisan divisions. We chose to highlight some of the areas where Democrats and Republicans views are closer together. All findings are based on surveys conducted by Pew Research Center between September 2020 and February 2021.

Most of the findings here are based on a survey of 10,121 U.S. adults conducted from Feb. 16 to 21, 2021. Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of Pew Research Centers American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATPs methodology.

Here arethe questions askedin the February survey, along with responses, andits methodology.

Note: Most of these findings are from a February survey; here arethe questions askedfor that survey, along with responses, andits methodology.

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Where Democrats and Republicans align and differ on COVID-19 issues - Pew Research Center

Democratic candidates are already starting to pop up for a 2022 run for U.S. Senate, all aiming for a seat held now by Republican Ron Johnson, who has not said if hell seek a third term.

And it doesnt look like the race will be a friendly one.

Johnson was already a top target of Democrats before he said the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol wasnt an armed insurrection ( a claim we rated Pants on Fire) and before he forced a full-reading of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief plan advanced by Democrats and President Joe Biden (we rated his stance on full readings a Full Flop).

One of the Democratic candidates, Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, has been taking shots at Johnson, but also took aim recently toward Milwaukee Bucks executive Aex Lasry, who has also announced his Democratic campaign.

During a March 7, 2021 interview on WISN TVs UPFRONT, Nelson said he had asked Lasry to not self-fund his campaign.

"I think whats really important here is you listen to what the people want, I think the last thing people want is for someone to come in and self-fund," Nelson said. "Right now, two-thirds of the U.S. Senate is composed of millionaires. We need someone who is in touch with the people."

For this fact-check, we are focusing on the part of Nelsons claim that two-thirds those in the Senate are millionaires.

Is he right?

Most senators worth millions

When asked for backup for the claim, the Nelson campaign pointed to an August 2020 fact-check of U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who claimed, in part, the Senate was "dominated by millionaires." PolitiFact National rated that claim True.

That fact-check relied on an analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics, which examined net-worth data for senators from 2018 -- still the most recent data available.

The data comes from financial disclosure forms, which lawmakers are required to fill out. Because the forms dont require exact values, only a range, the center calculated net worth for lawmakers by adding their assets, subtracting their liabilities and calculating the midpoint of the resulting range.

In all, 61 of the 100 senators had a net worth of at least $1 million -- with some having a net worth many times that amount.

For example, Republican Kelly Loeffler of Georgia had a net worth of more than $500 million and Republican Rick Scott of Floridas net worth was nearly $260 million. Also among the top: Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia (more than $214 million) and Republican Mitt Romney of Utah (about $174 million).

Both Wisconsin senators met the threshold: Johnson was listed at $39 million, while Democrat Tammy Baldwin was listed at $1.1 million.

Of course, since the Centers report last year, 10 seats changed. Of the 10 senators who were replaced, eight were millionaires. We could not locate recent net worth estimates for all of their replacements.

That said, many of the new members are also millionaires.

Democrat Mark Kelly of Arizona is worth between $10.8 million and $28 million, according to a January 2021 Newsweek report, while Democrat John Hickenlooper of Colorado is worth between $9 million and $27 million. Several others are also listed as worth more than $1 million.

According to a December 2020 report from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Georgia Democrats John Ossof and Raphael Warnock each have net worths well over $1 million as well. They replaced Republicans Loeffler and David Perdue, worth nearly $26 million.

Experts have noted in recent years that the cost of running for office -- in Wisconsin and across the nation -- has become increasingly difficult for candidates who cannot bring their own money to the table.

Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, said campaigns have become more expensive to run. Having money to start off a campaign can lead to better political consultants working on a campaign and likely even having wealthy friends willing to contribute large amounts, he said.

The 2020 election is a good example of the escalating price, with seven campaigns bringing in $100 million or more in contributions -- more than ever before.

Yablon also noted that the Senate tends to attract people who have seen success in their life, whether in business or celebrity, which was likely lucrative.

"There is a long history of very wealthy people in the Senate," he said. "The phenomenon is not new."

Our ruling

Nelson, a Democrat running for US. Senate, said that two-thirds of those in the Senate were millionaires.

Based on data from 2018, last year of financial disclosures available, 61 Senators had an average net worth of more than $1 million, according to one estimate. So, that is nearly two-thirds.

Many of the 10 newly elected senators also have high net worths, but an updated tally is not yet available.

Nevertheless, political experts say the Senate is likely to attract campaigns from wealthier people, contributing to the high number of millionaires who currently hold seats.

We rate this claim Mostly True.

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Democrat Tom Nelson right on claim that two thirds of US senators are millionaires - PolitiFact