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Its a remarkable pitch for a party that will retain full control of Washington, at least through the end of the year. But many lawmakers on the left the progressive wing, the Black Caucus and even some members of leadership say they have little choice after theyve passed bills on almost every piece of Bidens agenda, only to see them languish or outright die in the Senate.

And for many Democrats who are retiring or may lose their seats, this year is their last chance to see their priorities advance.

People are realizing that, at this point in the cycle, executive order is probably where youre going to start seeing more things get done, said Rep. Anthony Brown (D-Md.), ticking off still unfinished items, including voting reforms and a policing overhaul bill named for George Floyd. Browns among the Democrats eyeing the congressional exits this year; hes running for attorney general of his state.

The legislative window is rapidly closing ahead of the November elections, which threaten to send House Democrats back to the minority before theyve achieved some of their loftiest campaign promises. While they still say the Senate could take up more of Bidens goals, the new widespread focus on executive actions illustrates their intense anxiety that Congress may not deliver leaving them with nothing new to tout to voters this fall.

Senior Democrats say the shift is not a reflection of the party adopting a minority mindset, but rather an evolution toward whats more achievable with a 50-50 Senate and margins in the House that are nearly as tight.

And not all Democrats are on board, insisting they must focus on passing more party-line policies this year using the Senate filibuster workarounds of the annual budget, as well as notching bipartisan wins that can outlast a Republican taking over the White House.

But three months after Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) knifed a House-passed social spending package that liberals packed with legislative dreams such as universal pre-K and paid leave, key factions of the House Democratic caucus have been plotting exactly what Biden can do while their own hands remain tied.

As senior Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) quipped: Youve seen how easy thats been, right?

Executive action, its a last resort. This is a legislative body, Larson said. But there are other important issues that need to be discussed. And if the Senate isnt going to vote, theyre not going to vote.

For some liberal Democrats, its also a reflection of how many of their dearly held aims required a filibuster overhaul to get done including reforms to elections and gun control, areas where bipartisan deal-making efforts have always fallen short. And dreams of weakening the filibuster got effectively squashed last year by resistance from Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.).

Three months after Sen. Joe Manchin knifed a House-passed social spending package, key factions of the House Democratic caucus have been plotting exactly what Biden can do while their own hands remain tied.|(J. Scott Applewhite/AP Photo)

Other Democrats say executive actions are a chance for Biden to use his presidential pen to give the party a quick lift ahead of the midterms. Even if more bills are passed this Congress, they question if the benefits would make a tangible difference back home before November.

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said she wanted to provide options for the White House to act right now to cut costs for Americans as gas prices are going up and other things are uncertain for people. The progressive group released its full slate of executive actions on Thursday, tackling federal student debt, criminal justice and prescription drug prices, among other issues.

Jayapals isnt the only influential House Democratic group preparing lists of potential actions for the Biden administration to take on priorities that have stalled out in Congress. That group also includes leaders of the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus and the Asian Pacific American Caucus, whose leaders are talking with the White House about the policy areas where theyd like to see change.

Some of those Democrats have brought their requests to Biden himself during talks with him after the State of the Union. The Asian and Black Caucuses, who met with Biden and senior White House staff last week, raised concerns about everything from voting reform to the implementation of anti-hate crime legislation. The Hispanic Caucus, which is likely to meet with Biden soon, is drawing up executive orders to address immigration issues, both related to Ukraine and at the southern border.

Its not clear exactly which executive orders Biden might consider, and the White House did not offer a comment for this story.

If we could do voting rights whether its executive order or any way we can I think its something that we should not walk away from, Black Caucus Chair Joyce Beatty (D-Ohio) said. Her group met Wednesday to discuss potential executive actions related to voting rights and criminal justice, among other issues, and plans to discuss them further on Thursday, she said in a brief interview.

Lawmakers acknowledge the orders are hardly a substitute for legislation and could easily be undone by the next administration. Despite the prospect of legal challenges, some view Bidens executive powers as perhaps their best chance to spur immediate action.

We all agree theres no substitute for legislation and passing bills that can become laws ... but occasionally there will be needs to address this through executive action, Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.), vice chair of the caucus, said Wednesday.

Other Democrats, however, are adamant that the party shouldnt shift its focus away from Congress, particularly while they hold all levers of power.

If were talking about long-term durable policy that helps people, Congress needs to act, said Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.), who leads the centrist New Democrats Coalition. Thats our job.

Still, the push for executive actions emerged as a dominant theme at House Democrats retreat in Philadelphia last week. There, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed the idea, even noting that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, too, acknowledged the role of presidential powers, though she reiterated the need for Congress to pass its own bills.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed the idea of executive actions, even noting that the Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order.|Kevin Dietsch/AP Photo

The pressure on Biden to take action has been building for months within a frustrated House Democratic caucus, where some more liberal lawmakers have privately described him as overly cautious in wielding presidential authority.

That includes the progressive call for cancellation of student loan debt, a critical topic for younger voters. As many Democrats have beseeched Biden to act on his own to erase tens of thousands of dollars in student debt, White House press secretary Jen Psaki recently told reporters that the president is waiting for Congress to send him a bill on the subject.

But the failed push on student debt, like much of the partys to-do list, has House Democrats again pointing to the Senate.

Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) joked perhaps with a scrap of seriousness that one-third of House members would like to have legislation over here to do away with the Senate. And one House Democrat could barely contain his sarcasm after the Senate, following months of delay on Bidens social spending plan, unanimously cleared a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent.

I was so concerned about the inflation we were dealing with, Larson said after the Senates surprise vote. But you know what? They fixed daylight saving time. God bless. My life has just been made.

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House liberals start asking Biden to sidestep Congress months before the midterms - POLITICO

Making use of a time-honored tradition in government communications, Canadas Department of Finance last Friday afternoon released its amended proposal for a tax on luxury goods. Outside of tax season, of course, most people dont visit government websites on the regular. But burying an official release in the wee hours of the working week makes it even less likely anyone will notice something potentially controversial or embarrassing. In this case, the governments timing is almost certainly owed to a new provision added to the legislation since its initial drafting last year, which reads as follows: Relief for aircraft is proposed to be expanded to take into account qualifying flights that are conducted in the course of a business with a reasonable expectation of profit.

Its a pretty soporific sequence of words, even with more context. But what it appears to mean is that Canadas governing Liberal Party plans to amend their proposed tax on new luxury cars and aircraft so that private jets used in the course of business can be written off. Revisit the language in the Liberals 2021 budget and the more detailed backgrounder published in August, and the word profit does not appear. Some possible exemptions to the tax are mentioned, but they mostly have to do with planes imported for use by hospitals, local governments, or police and fire departments.

In other words: in the roughly seven months since the government published its previous version of the legislation, a major carveout has been added that quite visibly opens the door to all kinds of avoidance by wealthy individuals. According to its Friday release, the amended draft reflect[s], and respond[s] to, input received during consultations with stakeholders, which very likely means that the owners of private jets agitated for an exemption.

It would hardly be the first time Canadas wealthy have successfully advocated for obscene carveouts in tax policy. In breaking his promise to close a $750 million stock-option loophole used almost exclusively by CEOs and other executives, former finance minister Bill Morneau claimed hed received input from many small firms and innovators to the effect that they use stock options as a legitimate form of compensation. Documents published by PressProgress, however, found that Morneau (himself a wealthy former executive) had been aggressively lobbied by corporate Canada to maintain a loophole used almost exclusively by eight thousand of the countrys wealthiest people.

Canadas tax system is riddled with absurd exemptions like this. They may be completely indefensible as extensions of the public interest, though theyre also par for the course given the imbalances of power inherent in who lobbies the government and the resources different groups have at their disposal to do so. Its a clear case of special-interest capture and class bias in policymaking but also a reminder of one of the cardinal flaws in how the liberal state conceives neutrality. On paper at least, liberal states in a representative democracy act as neutral arbiters of the public interest. Sometimes, of course, this requires policy trade-offs or the balancing of competing demands. Regardless, what emerges is supposed to be autonomous from the particularist considerations of one interest group or another.

Even in the case of something entirely noncontroversial such as a luxury-goods or stock-option-compensation tax, however, it quickly becomes obvious that many policies are rarely assembled this way. In the course of policymaking, various stakeholders lobby, agitate, and put pressure on the government, but those with the means to do so most effectively are most often monied private actors rather than public interest groups or concerned citizens. Especially when it comes to tax policies or large expenditures, the former generally have an army of lawyers, lobbyists, and PR professionals at their disposal not to mention considerable influence by virtue of their location in the economy. Except in a few exceptional cases, the latter are unlikely to be able to mobilize anything like the same reach or pressure.

The result, as looks evident here, is often policy with no significant popular buy-in and that no sensible person not being paid to think otherwise could convincingly defend.

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Canada's Liberals Are Letting the Wealthy Write Their Own Tax Policy - Jacobin magazine

What emerged was an entire branch of liberalism and a whole universe of activist organizations and even laws dedicated to criticizing and then suing and restraining government. Sabin writes:

Litigation by leading public interest environmental law firms in the early 1970s almost exclusively targeted the government for legal action. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund boasted of 77 legal accomplishments between 1971 and 1973. Approximately 70 sought to block government actions or to intervene in public proceedings to influence government regulatory and permitting practices. The Environmental Defense Fund similarly began its 1972 case summary with a list of acronyms for the 10 federal agencies named in its legal interventions. In more than 60 of its 65 listed legal actions, the Environmental Defense Fund either intervened in public proceedings, such as government permitting processes for private projects, or directly assailed a government-led initiative. Fewer than five of E.D.F.s legal actions directly targeted companies or private parties. Similarly, only three out of 29 of N.R.D.C.s legal action initiatives from its first seven months directly named a corporate defendant.

I want to say this as clearly as I can: Carson and Nader and those who followed them were, in important respects, right. The bills they helped pass from the Clean Air Act to the National Environmental Policy Act were passed for good reason and have succeeded brilliantly in many of their goals. That its easy to breathe the air in Los Angeles today is their legacy, and they should be honored for it.

But as so often happens, one generations solutions have become the next generations problems. Processes meant to promote citizen involvement have themselves been captured by corporate interests and rich NIMBYs. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially. It was as if liberals took a bicycle apart to fix it but never quite figured out how to get it running properly again, Sabin writes.

These bills were built for an era when the issue was that the government was building too much, with too little environmental analysis. The core problem of this era is that the government is building too little, in defiance of all serious environmental analysis. This is the maddening inversion climate change imposes upon us: To conserve anything close to the climate weve had, we need to build as weve never built before, electrifying everything and constructing the green energy infrastructure to generate that electricity cleanly. As the climate writer Julian Brave NoiseCat once put it to me, If you want to stand athwart the history of emissions and yell stop, you need to do really transformational things.

Thats where the environmental victories of yesteryear have become the obstacles of this year. Too many of the tactics and strategies and statutes are designed to stop transformational or even incremental projects from happening. Modest expansions to affordable housing or bus service are forced to answer for their environmental impact. But the status quo doesnt have to win any lawsuits or fill out any forms to persist.

The problem is a bunch of the regulatory law doesnt penalize or regulate pollution, Alex Trembath, the deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank that favors technological solutions, told me. It penalizes and regulates technology, infrastructure and growth often quite explicitly. Thats how putatively environmental regulations are used to block laws that would lower pollution or make society more resource efficient.

Its not just the laws that act in this way. A similar logic pervades the permitting processes and political structures. Change is discouraged; stasis is encouraged. Leah Stokes, a political scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies the politics of climate change, told me a story both revealing and familiar. Im trying to electrify my home in Santa Barbara, she said. The time it takes to get permits to change my house is about a year. Im still burning gas in my house for that year. Now were going back and forth about what kind of heat pump I can use. None of the system is oriented around climate being the most important thing. If you look at how planes were built in World War II, it wasnt like this.

Ive heard anecdotes like that from a lot of people who work on climate policy. Theyre easy to write off as picayune complaints. But their smallness is the point. If its so difficult for a climate expert to electrify her own house in a jurisdiction that believes itself terrified of climate change, how hard is it going to be to decarbonize the country?

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Opinion | Government Is Flailing, in Part Because Liberals Hobbled It - The New York Times

None of this should be surprising: Its always been the case that a liberal society depends for unity and vigor on not entirely liberal forces religious piety, nationalist pride, a sense of providential mission, a certain degree of ethnic solidarity and, of course, the fear of some external adversary. Liberalism at its best works to guide and channel these forces; liberalism at its worst veers between ignoring them and being overwhelmed by them.

Among the optimistic liberals of the current moment, you can see how that veering happens. A Russian defeat will make possible a new birth of freedom, Francis Fukuyama wrote last week, and get us out of our funk about the declining state of global democracy. The spirit of 1989 will live on. Following up in an interview with The Washington Posts Greg Sargent, Fukuyama framed the current moment as an opportunity for Americans and other Westerners to choose liberalism anew, out of a recognition that the nationalist alternative is pretty awful.

But one of the key lessons of recent years is that the spirit of 1989 was itself as much a spirit of revived Eastern European nationalism as of liberalism alone. Which is one reason countries like Poland and Hungary have sorely disappointed liberals in their subsequent development up until now, of course, when Polish nationalism is suddenly a crucial bulwark for the liberal democratic West.

So liberals watching the floundering of populism need a balanced understanding of their own position, their dependence on nationalism and particularism and even chauvinism, their obligation to sift those forces so that the good (admiration for the patriotism of Ukrainians and the heroic masculinity of Volodymyr Zelensky) outweighs the bad (boycotts of a Russian piano prodigy, a rush toward nuclear war).

And they also need to avoid the delusion that Putins wicked and incompetent invasion means that all complaints about the Wests internal problems can safely be dismissed as empty, false, self-hating.

Last week, for instance, the Russia scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorkers David Remnick that Putins invasion disproves all the nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in decline, how its a multipolar world and the rise of China. With the West rallying to a resilient Ukraine, all of that turned out to be bunk.

What was bunk was the idea that Putins Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American power is in relative decline, Chinas power has dramatically increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide have somehow gone away just because Moscows military is failing outside Kyiv.

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Opinion | Will the Ukraine War End the Age of Populism? - The New York Times

March 16, 2022

March 16, 2022

The invasion of Ukraine is only in its third week and far from resolution. But it's already launched thousands of essays, podcasts, and tweets. While the inhabitants of Mariupol, Kyiv, and other cities face bombardment, writers and scholars in the peaceful capitals of North America and Europe lob words at each other. As we try to figure out what it all means, it's important to remember the difference between intellectual if not always civil disagreement and the reality of war and enmity.

In the spirit of honesty, I should acknowledge that some of those salvos were mine. The day after Russian President Vladimir Putin announced the commencement of operations, I published a column proclaiming the end of the so-called liberal international order (or its common synonyms). That argument provoked a critical response from my colleague David Faris. Noting the coordination and severity of American, European, and NATO responses, Faris contended that the basic premise of the post-Cold War politics that interstate aggression is wrong and must be punished remains in place.

It's fair to conclude that reports of liberalism's death have turned out to be premature. The Stanford historian Stephen Kotkin and other scholars have argued that the last few weeks have exposed the gap between Russian aspirations and capabilities.Even if Russia defeats Ukrainian forces in the field, thatlesson may infuence other states that hope to dominate hostile territory. Although the available reports are hard to assess, it appears that the Chinese Communist Party is worried about the implications of Russia's unanticipated political and military struggles for its own efforts to capture Taiwan.

But there's also a sense in which eulogists for the liberal world order and optimists about its prospects can both be partly right. One of the notable features of international opposition to Russian is how limited it is. China's not the only player to opt out of sanctions. India, Brazil, and (until recently) even Israel, have objected to aspects of the campaign to isolate Russia.

Rather than an assertion of global liberalism, we may be seeing the return of a concept that's become unfashionable over the last few decades. In an underappreciated recent book, historian Michael Kimmage shows how "the West" became a central concept in American foreign policy for much of the 20th century before falling into disrepute. The whole point of the "new world order" announced by President George H.W. Bush in 1990 was that liberal practices and ideals would no longer be associated with one culture or region. Instead, they would become truly global norms and universal rights, administered partly, if not entirely, by transnational institutions.

That's the expectation, perhaps utopian, the Russian invasion and varied responses around the world seems to refute. Some states mostly, if not exclusively those linked to the Western alliance of the 20th century reject Russian aggression and the vision of great power competition that inspires it. But others, including population and economic giants, are either morally indifferent or give precedence to other interests.

Yet the popularity and sometimesirrational intensity of opposition to Russia in the "Anglosphere" and Europe suggests a residual solidarity that belies the revival of illiberal nationalism within those regions. As William Galston observed in The Wall Street Journal, Western admirers of Putin including Italy's Matteo Salvini, France's Eric Zemmour, and our Donald Trump have all had to distance themselves from the Russian dictator in the face of overwhelming criticism even from their own supporters. Ordinary Americans and Europeans with populist sympathies, who were far from philosophical liberals before the invasion, haven't turned into Kantians overnight, and it's naive to imagine they ever will. But many hold assumptions about the purposes of violence and requirements of political legitimacy that are implicit in liberal societies and questionable or even alien outside them.

In more abstract terms, then, we may be witnessing an emerging synthesis between two rival theories that captivated political intellectuals in the beginning of the period of hegemonic liberalism that now seems to be in its twilight. One was the "end of history" thesis developed by Francis Fukuyama. Contrary to popular misinterpretations, Fukuyama did not claim that the resolution of the Cold War meant nothing unpleasant, difficult, or surprising would ever happen again. What he did argue was that there were no longer systematic alternatives to liberal democracy capable of achieving broad popular support.

Fukuyama was challenged by his former teacher Samuel Huntington. According to Huntington, the future would not be characterized by consensus around liberal institutions and human rights, but rivalry between distinct cultural groups. That rivalry was likely to turn violent at "bloody borders" at the overlapping periphery of those civilizations that is, places like Eastern Europe.

But what if they're both right? In other words, what if the West really has reached the end of history but other parts of the world are following a different script? That would involve closer ties, even homogenization, among liberal states bad news for advocates of sharply differentiated national identities. At the same time, the influence of that quasi-integrated bloc over the rest of the world might diminish as rivals develop their own cultural, economic, and military resources, contrary to liberal hopes. That could lead to new and different conflicts in the future, increasing strife while belying neat distinctions between democracies and autocracies. To different degrees, India and China both support Russia. But they don't exactly get along with each other.

Writing in The New York Times, journalist Thomas Meaney recently consideredthe limitations and risks of this scenario. He noted that the boundaries of the West are, at best, fuzzy (I made a partial attempt at definition here); that the concept tends to subordinate Europe to the United States; and that appeals to civilizational differences can exacerbate conflict and justify atrocities. In themselves, all these criticisms are fair enough. But the fact that countries including Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, India, and of course China have been so skeptical of American and Europeans efforts to constrain Russia underscores the continuing relevance of the idea of the West rather than demonstrating the availability of some alternative form of truly cosmopolitan affinity. History may not be over, but the West is likely to stick around for a while.

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The West vs. the world? - The Week