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White House press secretary Jen Psaki holds a press briefing at the White House on Monday. Reporters asked about the administration's next steps on voting rights. Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images hide caption

White House press secretary Jen Psaki holds a press briefing at the White House on Monday. Reporters asked about the administration's next steps on voting rights.

The White House on Monday opened the door to revisiting the filibuster a hotly contested issue across political lines setting the stage for a bitter congressional fight to do away with the controversial debate tactic.

Responding to a question about Tuesday's Senate debate on voting rights legislation, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said: "As it relates to the filibuster, I don't think you have to take it from us, that would be Congress moving forward or making a decision. If the vote is unsuccessful tomorrow, we suspect it will prompt a new conversation about the path forward. And we'll see where that goes."

The filibuster is a long-standing Senate practice used to delay a proposed law from being brought to a vote a tactic that has picked up steam over the last 10 years. It has only been used once so far this session, to block a vote on a bipartisan commission investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Senate Democrats will on Tuesday begin debate in pursuit of sweeping overhauls to current voting laws. The proposal is called the For the People Act.

The bill comes as Republican-led states nationwide seek to implement a number of restrictive voting measures that opponents say could significantly curtail the ability of minorities and lower-income Americans to cast ballots. Republicans defend these measures as necessary to safeguard the security of U.S. elections.

After President Biden's 2020 presidential win, many Republicans, at the urging of former President Donald Trump, launched a smear campaign, falsely alleging that ballot irregularities were the cause of their White House defeat.

In order for the party to be successful in advancing a federal voting rights bill, Democrats would have to vote in lockstep support of the measure and get the support of 10 Senate Republicans. Some Democrats and outside advocates say without any likely backing of GOP senators, Democratic leaders should change Senate rules getting rid of the filibuster, which requires 60 votes to end debate.

Party moderates including Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have opposed both measures, leading to significant infighting among Democrats about next steps.

The White House said Biden spoke to both senators Monday Manchin on voting rights and infrastructure, and Sinema in regards to infrastructure and thanked them both for their "engagement."

Biden, himself formerly a member of the Senate, in March endorsed changing the filibuster to "what it used to be," requiring senators to physically take to the floor and speak ceaselessly in order to delay a vote.

Despite the common misconception, as it stands now, a Senate staffer can send an email registering a senator's objection and triggering a 60-vote requirement to advance a bill to a final up-or-down vote without having to make a speech or any other effort.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has warned of a logistical nightmare if those rules were to change and lawmakers were constantly required to be physically present at the Capitol. Plus, he's said that when Republicans regain majority control of the chamber, "We wouldn't just erase every liberal change that hurt the country. We'd strengthen America with all kinds of conservative policies with zero input from the other side."

Even with Biden's cosignature, Democrats have been unable to unanimously reach an agreement on either voting rights reform or the filibuster.

Vice President Harris was tapped to lead the administration's strategy on voting rights but so far hasn't come forward with concrete steps on the issue.

Former President Barack Obama, under whom Biden served as vice president and who remains a popular figure among Democrats, on Monday expressed his support for overhauling the filibuster during a conference call with voting rights activists and former Attorney General Eric Holder.

"Unfortunately, right now at least, Republicans in the Senate are right now lining up to try to use the filibuster to stop the For the People Act from even being debated," Obama said.

"Think about this: In the aftermath of an insurrection, with our democracy on the line, and many of these same Republican senators going along with the notion that somehow there were irregularities and problems with legitimacy in our most recent election they're suddenly afraid to even talk about these issues and figure out solutions on the floor of the Senate. They don't even want to talk about voting," he said, referencing the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

"That's not acceptable."

Read the rest here:
Filibuster Rules Debated Again With Voting Rights Bill Vote - NPR

To the editor: There seems to be an accountability loophole when it comes to white collar crime.

Former President Barack Obama and former Attorney General Eric Holder allowed Wall Street criminals to escape untouched back in 2008. When pressed on the subject, I remember Obama saying that we should look forward, not backward. That meant, of course, that other than a few civil penalties, they were not going to prosecute anyone criminally on Wall Street. Of course their crimes brought us just hours from the complete destruction of the global financial system. But Obama and his Justice Department made the decision to let them get away with their unspeakable crimes. Let you or I go 30 mph in a 25 mph zone or the wrong person gets caught with a ounce of marijuana, etc., and for some reason those individuals cant seem to utilize the accountability loophole.

Is the same thing going to happen with Donald Trump and his corrupt organization, the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, the stealing of information from members and staff of the Democratic Intelligence Committee, the disgraceful handling of the pandemic, etc.? My guess is yes.

Why? Because the minority party is running the government. Joe Biden, who has the bully pulpit at his disposal, should be making frequent addresses to the nation in order to make it clear to the American people what the Republicans, the party of no, are doing to our democracy by suppressing the vote which is, after all, the essence of democracy. He should articulate to the country how the Republicans, who were elected to work for the people, do nothing but lie and seek power.

The time has come for the president to stop the nonsense about seeking bipartisanship with the Republicans. Mitch McConnell has made it clear for months now that they will obstruct anything that Biden wants to accomplish just as they did to Obama. And as for what AG Merrick Garland is doing, I keep getting the feeling that we just might be dealing with another Eric Holder. After all, he has allowed high-level members of Trumps Department of Justice to remain in their positions. And there has been no hint of action from the Justice Department.

If the Republicans are allowed to lie and cheat their way to victory in the 2022 elections, then you can kiss our 400-year democracy goodbye.

Charles Steinhacker, Great Barrington

Excerpt from:
Letter: The opposition is running the country | Letters To Editor | berkshireeagle.com - Berkshire Eagle

Manhattan District Attorney candidate Tali Farhadian Weinstein was not a regular voter until 2016, records show and did not register as a Democrat until October 2017.

All seven other candidates for the Democratic nomination to replace outgoing DA Cyrus Vance in the June 22 primary have been consistent voters and registered Democrats for years, New York Focus review found.

Farhadian Weinstein, 45, one of the more moderate candidates in a generally progressive field, registered in New York as an unaffiliated voter in August 2008, before re-registering as a Democrat in October 2017.

In the intervening years, she voted only in general elections in presidential election years skipping votes for mayor, governor, Congress and the 2009 election of Vance, records show.

New Yorks closed primary system, in which only registered members of a political party are allowed to vote in that partys primaries, prevented Farhadian Weinstein from casting a ballot in any primary elections during that time.

Asked about her voting record by New York Focus while taking questions at the end of a June 10 campaign event, Farhadian Weinstein promised to return to the question, but her spokesperson discouraged her from doing so.

The spokesperson, Jennifer Blatus, later chastised a New York Focus reporter for asking a question unrelated to the main focus of the event, which centered on gender-based violence. She did not directly address Weinsteins voting record.

Heavily funded by Wall Street executives, Farhadian Weinsteins campaign has struck a more moderate tone than many rivals.

For instance, she supports allowing judges to take public safety into consideration in deciding whether and how high to set bail a power New Yorks bail law prohibits and that Vance advocated against.

In recent weeks, Farhadian Weinsteins campaign was also boosted by $8.2 million worth of donations from her own personal wealth, a sum greater than the total amount raised by any other DA candidate.

The New York Times reported earlier this month that Farhadian Weinstein interviewed with officials in the Trump administration for a federal judgeship in 2017, just before she first registered as a Democrat.

At the time, according to her LinkedIn, Farhadian Weinstein was working for the Justice Department as an assistant U.S. attorney, having joined under Obama-era Attorney General Eric Holder. She focused on public integrity, organized crime and gangs.

The following year, months after her registration as a Democrat, she went to work for Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez as his general counsel.

Farhadian Weinstein financially supported Democrats during the years she was registered unaffiliated giving substantial sums to presidential candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, as well as to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.).

But earlier in her career, Farhadian Weinstein maintained close affiliations with high-powered Republicans in the legal world.

She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day OConnor during the Courts 2004 term. OConnor, who became the first woman on the high court when President Ronald Reagan appointed her 40 years ago, was part of the majority in Bush v. Gore, the case that awarded George W. Bush the presidency in 2000.

In late 2004, Farhadian Weinstein attended the annual convention of the Federalist Society, the conservative legal group that counts as current or former members all six of the Republican-appointed justices currently on the Supreme Court.

And her campaign for DA has received substantial contributions from major donors to Republican candidates and PACs, including Kenneth Griffin, Robert Granieri, and Bara and Alex Tisch.

Farhadian Weinsteins failure to vote in local elections stands out given her interest in public affairs, but its not unusual in a low-turnout and often confusing election system, said Gerald Benjamin, a professor emeritus of political science at SUNY New Paltz and a scholar of New York politics.

Our system demands more of voters than almost any other, he noted, with election dates, polling places, and offices up for election varying from year to year.

In that light, Benjamin said, he would judge her record in this area as problematic but not seriously disabling.

A rival candidate criticized Farhadian Weinsteins voting record.

We have had DAs who are disconnected and out of touch with Manhattanites for years, said Dan Quart, a New York State Assembly member. If Ms. Farhadian Weinstein couldnt do the bare minimum and vote in local elections until 2017, how can voters expect her to represent them?

The head of a Manhattan political club that has endorsed rival Eliza Orlins for DA agreed that Weinsteins absence from local elections should matter to voters.

A meaningful indication of a persons civic commitment and knowledge of and connection to a community is their participation in our electoral process, said Richard Corman, president of the Downtown Independent Democrats.

A voting record represents someones interest in the community, and so I would certainly think that whether or not they have participated in our elections and have voted in the past is a relevant indicator of someones connection, knowledge of, and commitment to a community.

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More here:
Manhattan DA Candidate Tali Weinstein Skipped Years of Voting in Local Elections, Records Show - THE CITY

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The recent news that the Trump Justice Department subpoenaed Apple seeking data from the accounts of Democratic Reps. Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell presumably to spy on two partisan opponents brought howls of outrage from leading Democrats.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called it shocking when the story broke last week. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Dick Durbin demanded an investigation into the appalling politicization of the Justice Department by Donald Trump and his sycophants.

Mr. Schumer and Mr. Durbin are at least as outraged as Republicans were when former Attorney General Eric Holder, President Barack Obamas self-described wing man, authorized wiretaps on journalists critical of his boss. Had the senators condemned Mr. Obama and Mr. Holder for their similar and equally outrageous abuse of power, one might take them more seriously. But they were as silent then as Trump supporters now.

Elected officials shocked only when the opposing party abuses power should be ashamed of their hypocrisy. After the attack on the World Trade Center, I joined liberals critical of the almost mindless escalation in domestic spying in the name of homeland security. My liberal friends were delighted, but I asked what they would do when a Democratic president did something similar. It didnt take long to find out.

These self-proclaimed champions of privacy and a free press fell dutifully silent within a few years as Barack Obama managed to make George W. Bush look like a civil libertarian. They only rediscovered the Bill of Rights after Donald Trump moved into the Oval Office.

The political posturing by the enablers of both parties proves once again that power is as corrupting as Lord Acton warned back in 1887. The fear that power could tempt even good men to abuse their countrymen is what led the delegates gathered in Philadelphia to draft a Constitution for the new American republic to divide power among three equal branches and included Bill of Rights to enumerate individual rights so important that government should forever be denied the power to arbitrarily ignore them.

Nearly a century before Acton, James Madison wrote of the need to circumscribe the power of elected officials to ignore the rights of those who elect them: If men were angels, no government would be necessary. But In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men you must first enable the government to control the governed, and oblige it to control itself. The Constitution was designed with limits that worked well until president after president found loopholes that allowed them to amass more and more power just as Madison and Acton feared.

While Lord Actons observation that power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely is often quoted, what follows is too often ignored. Acton then wrote in the very next sentence that Great men are almost always bad men.

Many good men and women are attracted to politics and run for offices up to and including the presidency for the purest of reasons, but even the best of them once elected too often conclude that those opposed to their vision are not only wrong, but corrupt or evil and must therefore be stopped even if to do so they resort to means they once condemned.

Politicians go after their critics to enhance their own desire to win the next election, to satisfy a personal desire for power, to deny opponents any chance to thwart or roll back their plans for a better future, because they are thin-skinned or sometimes just because they can. The reasons are irrelevant. Once a president, for example, successfully manages to get away with practices that previously seemed unacceptable his successors of both parties, since they are unlikely to be angels, will do the same.

Many today consider former Presidents Barack Obama or Donald Trump great men, but it is becoming increasingly obvious that Lord Acton would have also described both as bad men. Whatever the value of their quite different visions, they both illegitimately used power to attempt to silence their critics. Earlier presidents from Woodrow Wilson to Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson did the same in an earlier day and were defended by those who supported them and attacked by those who didnt.

Partisans of the left and right are all too willing to defend their own right or wrong. Those who excused Barack Obamas misuse of the Justice Department to go after his opponents and to intimidate reporters he didnt like are this week appalled that Donald Trump did the same thing while those Republicans who were quick to condemn a Democratic president for spying on his opponents are silent in the face of evidence of Mr. Trumps misuse of the same power.

To survive as a free society, America needs public officials who believe in the rights they swore to protect and defend when they took office and have the courage to call out their friends as well as their opponents when they find them misusing the powers with which they have been entrusted by the Constitution and the men and women who elected them.

David A. Keene is an editor at large for the Washington Times.

See the original post:
How hypocrisy thrives when an opposing political party abuses power - Washington Times

This fall, the Supreme Court is due to hear arguments on whether its constitutional for the United States to exclude residents of Puerto Rico from Supplemental Security Income. On Monday, President Joe Biden pretended to sidestep the question entirely.

In a statement declaring the exclusion to be inconsistent with my Administrations policies and values, Biden nonetheless announced that the Justice Department would be filing a brief defending the exclusion, which it did later Monday night. By way of defense, he pointed to the departments longstanding practice of defending the constitutionality of federal statutes, regardless of policy preferences.

That hand wave doesnt erase how Bidens statement and his Justice Departments actions reinforce the racist history that allowed for such exclusion in the first place. The suggestion that the president believes the matter is a policy preference implies that he does not believe the exclusion of an estimated 700,000 Puerto Rico residents United States citizens from SSI is an unconstitutional violation of equal protection guarantees. It also means, in effect, that Biden thinks the Trump administrations position that the disparate treatment of Puerto Rico is constitutional is correct.

That hand wave doesnt erase how Bidens statement and his Justice Departments actions reinforce the racist history that allowed for such exclusion in the first place.

This position, in and of itself, is disturbing. Both the district court and federal appeals court that heard the challenge found against the United States exclusionary policy. In addressing the Trump administrations arguments in the case, Judge Juan Torruella, in his final year on the appeals court bench before his death in October, wrote that the cost of including Puerto Rico's elderly, disabled, and blind in SSI cannot by itself justify their exclusion.

Noting that the appeals court considered even conceivable theoretical reasons for the differential treatment, the three-judge panel nonetheless unanimously concluded that the Constitutions equal protection guarantees even in a territory forbids the arbitrary denial of SSI benefits to residents of Puerto Rico.

As Matt Ford wrote this year in The New Republic, a deeper dive into the case leads back to a line of cases known as the Insular Cases in which racism played an unambiguous factor. The cases, Ford explained, addressed the treatment of territories acquired by the U.S. during the Spanish-American War and use reasoning described by Doug Mack in 2017 as being built on the same racist worldview as Plessy v. Fergusons since-overturned separate but equal. They also form the basis for the two more recent Supreme Court rulings relied on by the Trump administration at the appeals court in its defense of the exclusionary treatment of Puerto Ricans today.

Relying on those more recent rulings, the Biden administrations Justice Department on Monday night continued that argument, telling the Supreme Court that Congresss decision not to extend the SSI program to Puerto Rico complies with the equal-protection component of the Due Process Clause.

Bidens failure here goes beyond his punt to Congress, pressing as he does in his statement for congressional action to fix the exclusionary treatment. He's also holding back on his authority in this matter. Defending the constitutionality of statutes is, as Biden said, critical to the Departments mission of preserving the rule of law. However, there also are exceptions to that practice, exceptions that his statement ignores.

Yes, the Justice Department generally defends statutes whenever a reasonable argument can be made for constitutionality of the statute in question. But there are three main exceptions: when separation of powers questions are at issue (think of a law that purports to limit executive power); when a statute conflicts with Supreme Court precedent; or as Seth Waxman, former solicitor general in the Clinton administration, put it in cases in which it is manifest that the President has concluded that the statute is unconstitutional.

Biden knows that final exception all too well. It was during his time as vice president that the Justice Department had to decide whether to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. On Feb. 23, 2011, President Barack Obama officially made a decision that the relevant part of DOMA was unconstitutional and, as such, his attorney general, Eric Holder, announced that DOJ would no longer be defending part of the law.

Continued here:
Puerto Ricans are Americans. Biden needs to defend their rights. - MSNBC