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Speaker Kevin McCarthys demand that any deal to raise the debt limit must include stricter work requirements for social safety net programs and President Bidens hints that he might be willing to accept such a bargain has drawn a backlash from liberal Democrats in Congress, underscoring the tricky politics at play in bipartisan talks to avert a default.

The proposal has become a central issue in negotiations between Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy, which entered a new phase this week as the two offered glimmers of hope that they could reach a deal to increase the borrowing limit, now projected to be reached as early as June 1, and avoid an economic catastrophe.

House Republicans debt limit bill, approved last month along party lines, would impose stricter work requirements for beneficiaries of food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the speaker said this week that Republicans would insist on such a provision as part of any deal. Mr. Biden has pointedly left the door open to the idea, noting that he voted for work requirements as a senator.

Talk of such a compromise has set off a wave of anger among liberals on Capitol Hill, who have begun openly fretting that the president might agree to a deal they cannot accept.

I cannot in good conscience support a debt ceiling proposal that pushes people into poverty, said Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania.

The pushback reflects the political crosscurrents at play in the talks between Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy, both of whom have to contend with slim majorities in Congress and uncompromising political bases that will find any agreement hard to swallow.

The hard-right Freedom Caucus called on Mr. McCarthy on Thursday to stop negotiating with White House officials until the Senate passed House Republicans debt ceiling bill legislation that would slash federal spending by an average of 18 percent over the next decade and is anathema to Democrats.No more discussion on watering it down, the group tweeted. Period.

The growing unhappiness in both flanks highlighted how difficult it will be for negotiators to cobble together a debt limit bill that can win the votes to pass both chambers. Lawmakers on both the hard left and right may end up withholding their support, with conservatives arguing thatthe deal does not go far enough in reducing spending and liberals arguing thatit goes too far.

Mr. McCarthy was unusually upbeat on Thursday about the state of the talks, telling reporters that negotiators could reach a deal in principle as early as this weekend.

Were not there, we havent agreed to anything yet, but I see the path that we can come to an agreement, he said.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly shown an openness to negotiating with Republicans on work requirements. The president told reporters on Wednesday before he left for Japan that it was possible he would accept some G.O.P. proposals on the issue, but that he would not agree to making changes of any consequence.

Im not going to accept any work requirements thats going to have an impact on the medical health needs of people, Mr. Biden said.

Mr. McCarthy has not been precise about what kind of work requirements he would demand, suggesting that he might be willing to narrow the scope of those included in the House Republican bill. Republicans have long pushed for more stringent work requirements, arguing that they lift Americans out of poverty and increasethe labor force participation rate, and there has been little in the way of bipartisan consensus on the issue since President Bill Clintons welfare overhaul.

While no agreements have been reached in the current round of debt talks, work requirements are among the issues negotiators on both sides have agreed to discuss, which also include capping federal spending, clawing back unspent funds allocated to address the coronavirus pandemic and loosening restrictions on domestic energy projects.

The bill House Republicans passed in April would make able-bodied adults without dependents who receive food benefits subject to work requirements until they are 55 years old, raising the current age from 49. It would require Medicaid recipients between the ages of 19 and 55 who are able-bodied and do not have dependents to either work, engage in community service or participate in a work-training program for at least 80 hours per month to remain eligible for benefits.

Liberal Democrat dismiss the idea as draconian.

Its absurd to come up with a proposal that will result in children being thrown off of child care, off of health care, be devastating to elderly people, said Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. We cannot be blackmailed into balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable and leaving the most affluent alone.

Instead, progressives have increasingly rallied around the idea that Mr. Biden should invoke the 14th Amendment, which says that the validity of the United States public debt shall not be questioned, to continue issuing new debt to pay bondholders, Social Security recipients, government employees and others even if Congress fails to extend the governments borrowing authority when the limit is reached.

A group of 11 senators led by Mr. Sanders wrote to Mr. Biden on Thursday urging him to prepare to exercise your authority under the 14th Amendment.

Republicans unwillingness to consider one penny in new revenue from the wealthy and large corporations, they wrote,along with their diminishment of the disastrous consequences of default, have made it seemingly impossible to enact a bipartisan budget deal at this time.

That would amount to a constitutional challenge to the existence of the debt limit, arguing that language in the 14th Amendment overrides the statutory borrowing limit, which currently caps federal debt at $31.4 trillion and requires congressional approval to raise or lift.

If members of his hard-right flank balk at voting for a deal he negotiates, Mr. McCarthy would need Democratic votes to pass the bill in the House.

Russell T. Vought, the former Trump administration budget director who now leads the far-right Center for Renewing America and has become a guru for Freedom Caucus lawmakers, has begun to show signs of unease with the talks. Any deal that tosses the Houses first year cut to 22 spending levels ($150 billion cut to nondefense spending) is unacceptable, he wrote on Twitter.

Democrats, too, threw cold water on the negotiations, saying their side should not compromise given that Republicans would need their votes to pass any final compromise.

McCarthy has nowhere near the votes for a deal and therefore cannot negotiate debt ceiling, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter. You need 218 votes. GOP has maybe ~150. They will need anywhere from 50-100 House Dems to pass anything.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

Originally posted here:
Liberals Balk at G.O.P. Push for Stricter Work Requirements in Debt Limit Talks - The New York Times

The federal Liberals 2019 election pledge to plant two billion trees in 10 years has barely sprouted.

A recent audit found the program has missed its targets to date, with less than 3 per cent of the promised total in the ground, and far too many are ending up in single-species tree farms, rather than future forests.

Tellingly, the endeavour is expected to create more greenhouse gas emissions than it captures until 2031.

The 2 Billion Trees program is an important commitment, and Ottawa needs to make adjustments to succeed. As auditor Jerry DeMarco, the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, noted, there is no solution to climate change and biodiversity loss that does not involve our forests.

To plant a tree or two billion is an action for future generations. But like so many Liberal promises on climate action, ambition has not been matched by sufficient action. This initiative is supposed to use the power of nature to help fight climate change: New forests can absorb carbon, and they can enhance biodiversity. In urban areas, tree canopies can mitigate against extreme heat, improving human health.

The $3.2-billion program formally launched in 2021 and although it was expected that it would take time to line up land, seedlings and tree planters, even the modest targets for the first two years have not been reached.

The targets were not unreasonable: In the time since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his plan, British Columbia has planted about one billion trees, separate from the federal initiative. With the massive forest losses owing to beetle kill and wildfires, the provinces land base could easily accommodate far more. Before this seasons wildfires began, B.C. had about 2.7 million hectares waiting to be replanted half the size Nova Scotia, and close to the same as burned in 2017 and 2018, two of B.Cs worst-ever fire years.

The vast wilderness in B.C., waiting for replanting, is just one province. There are opportunities across the country.

The federal plan hinges mostly on cost-shared partnerships, and that has proved to be a vulnerability. To achieve its goals, Ottawa needs co-operation from provinces, territories, local governments, Indigenous communities, plus farmers and other private landowners. The key partnerships are with the provinces, and those have been slow to blossom. B.C. and Alberta have recently signed on. Ontario and Quebec are among the holdouts, a major risk to the programs success.

In the best-case scenario, the audit found, the program was only expected to reach 2.3 per cent of its overall goal after the first two years. And the delays will just compound. Canadian nurseries told the auditors that they would require up to two years of preparation before planting seeds, and one to eight more years before seedlings would be available for planting. They need commitments before ramping up.

Once in the ground, it takes another decade before the new trees start to deliver net benefits to Canadas greenhouse gas reduction ambitions. Ottawas targets, set at the beginning of the program, were to reduce emissions by up to two megatonnes annually by 2030. Since then, Natural Resources Canada has concluded the program would be a net greenhouse gas source until 2031, because of initial emissions caused by site preparation and planting activities. The goal by 2050 is to cut emissions by 12 MT a year 1.8 per cent of Canadas current level of 670 MT.

Since nature can be capricious, the audit called for more consistent monitoring to be sure that seedlings are thriving after planting.

Finally, plantations of a single species of tree are handy for the forest industry if the intent is to cut the trees down in the future. But one of the goals of this program is to preserve and protect biodiversity, and that means Canada needs to be more thoughtful about what it is planting.

A report by the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, released in March, warned that almost one in four tree species in Canada is now at risk. The threats include pests and diseases, land development, and the growing impacts of climate change. This only underscores the urgency to get this program right.

This week, much of Western Canada is facing extreme wildfire hazards, with smoke from numerous out of control fires choking the skies in Calgary and thousands evacuated from their homes. There is work to be do. Ottawa needs to motivate the provinces to start putting shovels in the ground.

The Decibel: The missing two billion trees Trudeau promised

Tree-planting drones seed the dangerous places where human planters cant tread

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Globe editorial: The Liberals promised two billion trees by 2030. Only 2 per cent have been planted. What's going ... - The Globe and Mail

Riley Gaines, the former college championship swimmer who competed against transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, said Wednesday that her advocacy in support of womens sports has earned "amazing" support among liberals.

"I have gotten messages from women and men who are lifelong liberals, who once prided themselves, especially women, on the original feminist movement, who are seeing what's happening with the Democrat party now," Gaines, a spokeswoman for Independent Women's Voice, told Fox News Digital.

"Just a few weeks ago, all [Democrats] in the U.S. House voted no on protecting women and girls in sports," Gaines said. "And these women, they're seeing this and they're fed up."

"The amount of support that I've had from liberal women who, again, consider themselves feminists, is amazing. These are women who are sick of their own party. These representatives are not listening to their constituents, and these women have had enough," said Gaines.

RILEY GAINES URGES FEMALE ATHLETES TO BOYCOTT COMPETING AGAINST TRANS GIRLS: DONT RUNDON'T SWIM'

Riley Gaines said Wednesday that her advocacy in support of womens sports has earned "amazing" support among liberals. (Reuters/Go Nakamura)

Gaines also accused Democrats in Washington of "ignoring" women over the Biden administrations pro-transgender inclusion policies in schools.

"The people in charge, the governing bodies, the representatives, the senators, especially on the left, they are ignoring the demands of women," Gaines said. "We're asking for the bare minimum. We want fairness, we want privacy, we want safety, and we want respect, and they're ignoring that."

Gaines was on Capitol Hill for the unveiling of House Republicans Women Bill of Rights legislation. During a press conference Wednesday morning, she explained the bill would define the word "woman" in federal law in order to bolster other bills like the Houses recently passed Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.

KATIE PORTER, PIERS MORGAN CLASH OVER RILEY GAINES' EFFORTS TO KEEP WOMEN'S SPORTS FAIR

Gaines famously tied with transgender swimmer Lia Thomas in an NCAA competition. (Rich von Biberstein/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

"It doesn't prevent any laws from being passed for any other protected group, it doesn't change any pre-existing laws. It simply defines the word woman, codifies the term," she said.

As an example, she said the House-passed Fairness In Women's Sports Act was "phenomenal," but asked, "what longevity does it have if we cant define the word woman? And that's what this does. It gives longevity to bills such as the sports bill."

The House bill is unlikely to get through the Democrat-controlled Senate, and if it did, President Biden is likely to veto it. He said last month that he would veto the womens sports bill if it came to his desk.

RILEY GAINES CALLS ON FAMOUS FEMALE ATHLETES TO CHOOSE A SIDE IN TRANS DEBATE. HERE'S WHO SHE'S STARTING WITH

Rep. Debbie Lesko, R-Ariz., the Womens Bill of Rights lead sponsor, acknowledged this likelihood as she introduced Gaines.

Rep. Debbie Lesko is leading the bill in the 118th Congress.

"It's a frustrating place We don't always get our legislation through, but this is really an important issue," Lesko said.

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Throughout the event, multiple Republicans called on Democrats to take up the bill.

"We call on the House, the Senate, and the Democrats who care about the future of women to come together and pass this bill," said Republican Study Committee Chair Kevin Hern, R-Okla.

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Riley Gaines says liberals are supporting her activism to protect womens sports: Sick of their own party - Fox News

On Wednesday night, Sen. J.D. Vance (ROhio) took the stage at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and declaredto the astonishment of many who subsequently read the quote onlinethat "there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime."

The remark came during a panel discussion about Regime Change, a new book by the "post-liberal" Notre Dame political scientist Patrick Deneen, in which Deneen argues that classical liberals and left-progressives are all pushing the same agenda and need to be "replaced" by a new conservative elite. (Keep an eye out for a review in the August/September issue of Reason.)

A longer version of the Vance quote gives the context:

One of the really bad hangovers from that uniparty that Patrick talked about is this idea that there is this extremely strong division between the public sector and the private sector. You know, the public sector is the necessary evil of government. We want to limit it as much as possible, because to the extent that we don't limit it, it's going to do a lot of terrible things. And then you have the private sector, that which comes from spontaneous order. It's organic. It's very Burkean. And we want to let people do as much free exchange within that realm as possible. And the reality of politics as I've seen it practiced, the way that lobbyists interact with bureaucrats interact with corporations, there is no meaningful distinction between the public and the private sector in the American regime. It is all fused together, it is all melded together, and it is all, in my view, very much aligned against the people who I represent in the state of Ohio.

I will give you a couple of examples here. One, when I talk to sort of more traditionalist economic conservatives, what Patrick would call economic liberals, when I talk to these guys about, for example, why has corporate America gone so woke, I see in their eyes this desperate desire to think that it's all just coming from the [Securities and Exchange Commission]. That there are a couple of bad regulations at the SEC, and that in fact [BlackRock CEO] Larry Fink would love to not be a super woke driver of American enterprise, and that Budweiser has no desire to put out a series of advertisements that alienate half their customer base. They're just being forced to do it by evil bureaucrats. And there is an element of truth to that. The element of truth is that the regime is the public and private sector. It's the corporate CEOs, it's the H.R. professionals at Budweiser, and they are working together, not against one another, in a way that destroys the American common good. That is the fact that we are dealing with.

There are, of course, countless ways that the public sectorgovernmenthas its tentacles in private sector affairs. Through taxation and regulation; through the subsidies and targeted benefits that are a mainstay of the industrial policy that so many on the New Right want to double down on; and, yes, through insidious pressure campaigns like those uncovered through the Twitter and Facebook Files, state power is routinely brought to bear to nudge or compel private actors into doing what those holding the power want. Needless to say, we should be skeptical, if not hostile, toward all such efforts.

Interestingly, this does not appear to be what Vance is referring to. If anything, he's saying it's naive to focus on instances of state coercion. Instead, Vance seems upset that some business executives share the same "woke" values that government actors express. (They are, after all, highly educated fellow members of the professional managerial class!) And because they believe in radical environmentalism, trans-inclusive politics, and all the rest, according to Vance, these private sector leaders are all too happy to collaborate with lawmakers and federal bureaucrats to put those values into practice.

Vance here is channeling the neoreactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. Mencius Moldbug, who has popularized the idea that "all the modern world's legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure" with "one clear doctrine or perspective." He calls this decentralized entity "the Cathedral" and argues that the only way to combat it is by replacing America's liberal democratic regime with an absolute monarchy or (benevolent, one hopes) dictatorship.

But Vance goes further even than Yarvin, who defines the Cathedral as consisting of the mainstream media and the universities; Vance insists that government officials are also implicated. This step is critical, because the New Right, rejecting the classical liberal commitment to limited government and rule of law, openly calls on conservatives to wield state power against their domestic political "enemies," among whom it counts lefty corporations, universities, and nonprofits.

I've made this point almost ad nauseam by now, but if you need a refresher, look no further than this illustrative quote from Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts: "This is our moment," he recently told The American Conservative, "to demand that our politicians use the power they have. This is the moment for us to demand of companies, whether they're Google, or Facebook, or Disney, that you listen to us, rather than ram down our throats and into our own families all of the garbage that you've been pushing on us. This is our time to demand that you do what we say. And it's glorious."

For an even more concrete example, consider the time Vance went on live TV and proposed targeting left-wing institutions such as the Ford Foundation and Harvard for their political views. "Why don't we seize the assets," he asked, "tax their assets, and give it to the people who've had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda?"

This is obviously contrary to the laws of our land. The American constitutional system "protects private actors," says Notre Dame law professor Richard W. Garnett, while constraining how government officials can exercise their power. "Private actors have free speech rights. The government doesn't. Private actors have freedom of religion. Government doesn't. Private schools can train kids for their sacraments. Government schools can't. The whole landscape of our constitutionally protected freedoms depends on this conceptual distinction between state power and the nonstate sphere."

But that distinction is an obstacle preventing post-liberals such as Vance from using the government to punish private entities who express views or implement policies that they, the post-liberals, dislike. And so, to give themselves permission to do what they want, they have to get people to believe that the distinction is already obsolete.

It's not. In fact, the "collusion" that Vance would use as justification to strip private actors of their rights consists of some of the very activities named in the First Amendment: voicing political opinions and advocating for changes to public policy. That some business executives happen to agree with some federal bureaucrats on some topics does nothing to transform private entities into public ones or to erase the distinction between the two spheres. (And that assumes Vance et al. are correct about the scope of the overlap, which they've thus far made little effort to demonstrate.)

None of this means you have to like the way companies use their rights. "If there are large private entities that are engaging in speech that some might find offensive," Garnett says, "you can boycott them, you can not patronize them, you can criticize them, you can set up your own businesses" to compete with them. But the New Right appears to be "impatient" with these remedies.

"It seems to me that it's perfectly appropriate to point out, as Deneen and Vance are doing, that a lot of corporate America seems to be going outside of its lane in very ideological ways," Garnett says. "But it doesn't follow from that that the government can silence them or punish them."

Read more:
Post-Liberal Authoritarians Want You To Forget That Private Companies Have Rights - Reason

If you want to understand why public debate is so screwed up, turn your mind back to the divorce referendum campaign in 1995. It is a somewhat arbitrary starting point but deeply symbolic for me. Why? Because I remember opening a Sunday newspaper and reading a prominent opinion piece tearing into the No campaign. I dont recall the headline verbatim but it was along the lines of Dont listen to what the No camp has to say. Just look at who is in it.

The author was a standard-bearer of liberal-left exactly where I fancied myself to be on the political spectrum and I was never going to do anything other than vote Yes (supporting the legalisation of divorce). However, the article deeply disturbed me because there was a No campaigner who I happened to know and love someone who I knew to be a compassionate, open-minded and sincere individual and that person was my father.

Identity politics has been around for aeons in different guises but that article crystallised for me a new approach to moral disagreement: dont judge someone elses viewpoint on its merits, just ask what tribe the speaker came from. My father was, like hundreds of thousands of people in Ireland, firmly in the conservative Catholic camp, against which the winds of change were then blowing.

The same tactic would be repeated again and again in subsequent campaigns around social and moral issues. Not every campaigner on the liberal agenda took an absolutist approach to conservatism but all too often people dissenting from progressive causes were pigeonholed as depending on the issue homophobic, misogynistic, sexist or just plain nuts.

This pattern continued for years until something quite curious occurred: some card-carrying members of the left, along with libertarians and a cohort of feminists, started to come under attack for perceived backwardness on certain progressive issues, notably critical race theory, hate speech and transgenderism.

[Teenage anxiety and smartphones: Is the answer to ban social media?]

This shifting landscape is examined in fascinating detail by Bryan Fanning, the University College Dublin professor of migration and social policy, in a new book, Public Morality and the Culture Wars. A dichotomy between conservatives and liberals that dominated public debate for decades has now been displaced by a triple divide between three sets of protagonists each with distinct perspectives on social and moral issues, Fanning writes. What makes this so disorientating for what might be called traditional liberals those who fought long and hard against clerics trying to control peoples thoughts and actions is that some progressives are using tactics from not only the liberal playbook but also the conservative one by seeking to police public speech and moderate public behaviour.

My contention is that the culture wars of the 21st century have become asymmetric, Fanning declares. Throughout the 20th century, these appeared to express dualistic conflicts between conservatives and an alliance of progressives and those committed to classic liberal values. However, new alliances can be identified between conservatives and liberals against progressives who now appear to be sufficiently influential to enforce their values as public morality.

Conservatives may take some pleasure from the discomfort of their traditional rivals its as though liberals didnt realise the importance of freedom of conscience until they were the ones being cancelled but Fanning rightly highlights that were all vulnerable in a society of mutual moral incomprehension.

Fannings book is rich with ideas and ambitious in scope. He tracks the evolution of moral philosophy from the Enlightenment to the present day, identifying a number of key factors of special relevance to our current predicament.

One of these has been a broadening of the definition of harm beyond physical harm to include psychological harm or harming someones feelings. What Fanning calls therapeutic individualism breaks with the liberal understanding of the primacy of free speech because it advocates curbing speech that might challenge somebodys subjective sense of self.

Another turning point has been the rise of social media, which has undoubtedly fuelled tribalism, intolerance and conformity within groups.

But perhaps the most crucial development identified by Fanning is the ascendancy of post-Christian secularism. This is dramatised in the book as the triumph of Richard Rorty, an influential American atheist who advocated a dismissal of religion, over Charles Taylor, a liberal Catholic philosopher who lamented the disappearance of religious thinking entirely from public life.

Heavily influenced by Friedrich Nietzsche, Rorty argued that liberal progressives should kick away the ladder from Christian theology and allied modes of thinking stretching back to antiquity. However, Taylor believed this would badly handicap moral debate. In particular, Taylor highlighted how liberal concepts like freedom and rights only got you so far in terms of resolving moral dilemmas.

[If you were in Zelenskiys shoes, would you have fled your country?]

In sexual relations, for example, consenting adults are free to do what they want. But can liberalism tell us whether promiscuity is bad? Or consider the consumption of alcohol something Fanning astutely examines in the context of the prohibition movement: Adults are free to consume what they wish but can liberalism tell us whether people should stupefy themselves with drugs? In trying to answer such questions, we tend to reach for medical advice promiscuity carries a higher risk of disease, drug-taking damages the body, and so on but science can only inform moral argument, it cant resolve it.

Another downside from kicking away the ladder is that it cuts us off from the foundational school of all moral thinking, namely virtue theory. An assumption that each one of us has a moral duty to cultivate virtues virtues like honesty, compassion and mercy nourished the first democracies of Ancient Greece and underpinned social revolutions that have brought us the very freedoms we enjoy today. Would there be any culture wars if we learned to be better listeners, or to practise forgiveness?

An irony is that, for all the demonisation of the Catholic Church in recent years, religion is a significant repository of mercy a virtue that is in short supply as we try to address new and complex ethical questions. Fanning points out that western liberalisms core value was tolerance but it has proven to be more than capable of being intolerant towards certain groups. It is easy to tolerate those who agree with you but, as Pope Francis declared on a visit to the Middle East last year, the real challenge is to learn how to love everyone, even our enemies.

My late father, incidentally, was a teetotaller and a member of the Pioneers but he was tolerant of drinkers. So tolerant in fact that he bought me my first legal beer when I challenged him to take me to the pub when Id turned 18 (he had a Coke). As it happened, he worshipped in the same parish as Fr Tony Coote, who died in 2019 after being diagnosed with motor neurone disease. One of the priests many progressive campaigns was to fight for the establishment of an LGBT+ group in the parish. A banner that he commissioned still hangs in the local church. It reads: Love not judgement.

* Public Morality and the Culture Wars: The Triple Divide by Bryan Fanning is published by Emerald (24)

Love not judgement: A banner commissioned by campaigning priest Fr Tony Coote hangs in the Church of St Thrse, Mount Merrion, Dublin where he worked before his death in 2019

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Lessons for liberals now that it's their turn to be cancelled - The Irish Times