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The filibuster bothers him so much that he still loses sleep over it. He woke up at 3 a.m. on the day last week that Democrats narrowly failed to install a talking filibuster for elections legislation, going over whether there was some way to sway Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to weaken the 60-vote threshold.Calling it Operation: Last Hope, he privately lobbied Manchin on the floor just before the vote.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) walks to the chamber after a Senate Democratic Caucus meeting at the Capitol in Washington on Nov. 2, 2021.|AP

In the end, Manchin and Sinema sided against Merkley and with the filibuster. Yet unlike his longtime liberal ally Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who hasencouragedpotential primary challengers to the two centrists, the soft-spoken former statehouse speaker is still courting the hold-outs, no matter the Sisyphean appearance of the task ahead.

I have absolutely no interest in that conversation, Merkley said of trying to find more liberal candidates to run against Manchin and Sinema. I want to come back and have conversations with our colleagues to find a path forward.

Its rare that a devastating loss on the Senate floor is a zenith. But for Merkley, the 48-52 failure on a drizzly Wednesday night amounts to a high point in his 13-year career. Theres no one else in the Capitol as focused on changing the way the Senate operates than Merkley, nor more directly tied to a series of rules changes the chamber has undergone over the past decade.

Merkley and former Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) led the Obama-era charge to scrap the 60-vote threshold on most nominees, helping the then-president overcome GOP opposition to fill out the courts and his Cabinet. Four years later, in 2017, Merkleylaunched a filibuster of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch despite Senate Minority Leader MitchMcConnells blockade of Obamas high court nominee Merrick Garland.

Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) speaks during a Senate Committee on Foreign Relations hearing on Capitol Hill on Sept. 24, 2020 in Washington, D.C.|Getty Images

McConnell then promptly changed the rules and eventually confirmed three Supreme Court nominees with simple majorities.

Yet as Merkley sees it, McConnell is unlikely to bend the rules further because his current situation empowerment to block much of Democrats agenda with 41 votes but confirm Supreme Court justices with a simple majority is essentially heads I win, tails you lose for Republicans.

I would be very surprised to see him actually change a situation thats working very well for him, Merkley said of McConnell.

Meanwhile, ever since McConnell eliminated the filibuster for high court nominees, Merkleys worked toward the moment his own partycould go around the opposition leader.

He must be being fed intravenously. Because hes just living on peanut sandwiches and working around the clock, said Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. He laid the foundation on the talking filibuster.

Merkley mulled running for president in 2020 but saw few avenues to distinguish himself in that muddled field. What he saw instead was a wide-open lane to be the Democrats filibuster specialist. In dense, technical presentations to his colleagues, the lanky Oregonian tries to explain whats wrong with the Senate as he hacks through byzantine procedure.

But unlike some progressives, he doesnt support getting rid of the filibuster altogether, reasoning its worth providing protections for the minority party to extend debate. That has helped Merkley make inroads sinceMarch, whenhe started interviewing every single Democratic caucus member on the topic.

Merkley reported back to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer that he sensed an opportunity on the talking filibuster. Put simply, the reform that Merkley envisions would allow the party in power to eventually pass legislation by a simple majority, only after the minority had exhausted itself on debate. Merkley says this reform would still require bipartisan negotiations, because floor fights over controversial votes could tie up the Senate floor for weeks or months. His view resonated in the caucus, and the talking filibuster gained support as a less drastic option.

Under Merkleys vision of the Senate, it will take so long for majority parties to overcome the talking filibuster on contentious legislation that votes on major party-line legislation will be relatively rare. Merkley estimates that GOP senators could use 450 hours of debate time on sweeping reforms like the elections bill: Thatd be longer than the civilrights debate.

The rest of the time, he sees lonely members blocking a majority vote and then quickly backing down on less major pieces of legislation. These days, a single member of the Senate can demand a 60-vote threshold vote on most bills with just a call to the cloakroom.

He has compelling evidence that use of the current no-effort filibuster spiraled out of control over the past 20 years, but its not an easy sell: One Democratic senator described Merkleys presentation as dry and overly technical. Months ago, Merkley offered to give President Joe Biden his slide presentation but they didnt take me up on that, he said.

He instead educated Bidens chief of staff; ultimately, the president sided with Merkley and endorsed a talking filibuster.

When the vote came down, 47 of Merkley's colleagues sided withhim as well. That included his Washington roommate and longtime filibuster defender Chris Coons (D-Del.), who observed that by virtue of living under the same roof during session weeks hes had dozens of conversations with Merkley about the filibuster.

Sen. Merkley is a warm, engaging, thoughtful person. And a great landlord, Coons said.

Coons was among those who endorsed only the narrowest filibuster change, applying it only to the specific voting and elections bill that came before the Senate this month.

Nonetheless, both parties now have Merkleys proposal asa template to run with the next time they get stymied on a keylegislative goal.

McConnell and most Republicans say they wont do it, as Merkley predicts, but having 48 Democrats on record for an end-around the 60-vote requirement will change the playing field going forward.

It sets a precedent, said Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), a member of GOP leadership. I would just remind them that they are the ones that are doing this and that anything goes in the future.

What Ernst sees as a portend, Merkley views as good news. The idea that the minority party can dictate the direction of the Senate is an absolute violation of the philosophy of representative government, he said.

There are now 48 senators deeply convinced that the Senate is broken, he added. It's essential that we fix this. And so, I'm convinced we will.

Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

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Meet the mild-mannered progressive who's breaking the filibuster - POLITICO - POLITICO

This article is part ofTPM Cafe, TPMs home for opinion and news analysis.

If you search for the Civil Division of the Department of Justice (DOJ) on Google, youll find an overwhelming majority of search results are for the Civil Rights Division. Thats unsurprising the average person is typically more aware of the Civil Rights Divisions work. And it makes sense: As the crown jewel of the DOJ, the division performs the crucial work of enforcing the laws that prohibit discrimination.

But progressives and activists should be tuned into both the work of the Civil Rights Division and the Civil Division, the latter of which has just as much potential to align with progressive priorities, like holding corporations accountable. Civil enforcement actions play a significant role in the DOJs larger corporate enforcement efforts. Progressives have justifiably pushed for a civil rights-minded attorney general, an empowered Civil Rights Division, and a whole-of-government approach to civil rights. The sweeping litigation responsibilities of the Civil Division often slip under the radar but theyre just as relevant to the public interest.

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Case in point: two recent lawsuits against Texas. While the Civil Rights Division is handling the lawsuit against Texas for its discriminatory electoral maps, the Civil Division is handling the lawsuit against Texas for its novel abortion ban.

People consistently overlook the breadth of law and policy that the DOJ touches, and the Civil Divisions lack of visibility is a pertinent example. Among the DOJs eight litigating divisions, Civil is the largest, with over 1,000 attorneys working in six different arenas.

Civil Division attorneys represent the United States and federal government departments, agencies, and employees in both civil and criminal court cases. Civil and criminal attorneys are mandated to collaborate with each other, and often undertake parallel actions to hold corporations accountable (or not) on both civil and criminal charges. As civil cases have more discovery tools than criminal cases, and parallel suits have become the norm, the expansive toolkit for civil investigations has ramifications for a vast swath of cases.

The Civil Division takes on many of the longest, most significant and most complex cases that the government sees. It handles the cases which are so massive and span so many years that they would overwhelm the resources and infrastructure of any individual field office. It is also charged with ensuring that the federal government speaks with one voice in its view of the law, preserving the intent of Congress, and advancing the credibility of the government before the courts.

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The way that Civil Division attorneys choose to represent the governments voice and stance before the courts helps define an administration. They consult and advise other DOJ divisions and the more than 200 federal agencies they represent, from the Department of Education to the Federal Trade Commission.

Lawsuits always proliferate with the transition of power between political parties. In the year since Biden replaced Trump, hundreds of court cases have sought to challenge Trump-era policies and their repeal, as well as new Biden policies. The Civil Division is often in the thick of these lawsuits, arguing the governments side. But how theyll argue isnt set in stone. Attorneys within the Civil Division are the ones that build and argue the cases. These attorneys are an under-scrutinized mouthpiece for the administration, and how they articulate the positions of the country, the government and its agencies has lasting impact.

The DOJ was criticized in June as Civil Division attorneys continued to defend Trump against a woman who accused him of raping her, raising the question of how far the DOJ has emerged from the long shadow of its Trump-era malfunction. But even as Attorney General Merrick Garland stresses the DOJs independence from the White House, the DOJs actions are connected to the administrations larger agenda. For example, attorneys from the Civil Division and the Office of the Solicitor General wrestled this summer with whether it should be the position of the Biden administration that Guantnamo detainees have due process rights. Eventually, they took no position, which is itself a position.

The political leanings and industry ties of DOJ officials also deserve scrutiny. The Revolving Door Project has previously criticized Civil Division head Brian Boyntons connections to predatory for-profit colleges, and Civils Federal Programs Branch head Brian Netters record defending corporate wrongdoing. As a basic principle, those in charge of enforcing corporate accountability should not have spent their careers shielding corporations from being held accountable.

It is worth looking more closely at the Civil Divisions internal structure to get a sense of its considerable responsibilities. Civil Division attorneys work across six branches: Federal Programs, the Appellate Staff, Commercial Litigation, the Office of Immigration Litigation, Consumer Protection, and Torts. Each of these branches covers significant ground.

The 120 attorneys of the Federal Programs Branch represent federal agencies in high-profile litigation. They personally handle serious or novel cases in which federal programs are challenged as unconstitutional or unlawful, with potentially far-reaching implications. These attorneys work across twelve different litigation areas, including housing, agriculture, energy, labor, transportation, and veteran affairs. They are currently arguing on the United States behalf that Texas novel abortion ban is unconstitutional. Theyre also representing several government agencies, including ICE, the DHS and FBI, in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the ACLU to oppose the government concealing its surveillance of peoples online speech.

Since the Appellate Staff work on cases sent to courts of appeals, these are often hotly contested and consequential cases. Appellate Staff attorneys also work with the Office of the Solicitor General to draft papers for filing in the Supreme Court on the United States behalf. Appellate Staff attorneys, along with the Solicitor General and head of Civil, defended a doctrine before the Supreme Court this spring that shields the U.S. from liability for sexual assualt in the military. This surprising case saw DOJ lawyers and eight Supreme Court Justices side with the defense, while Clarence Thomas was the sole dissenter on the side of the assaulted West Point student and the ACLU.

The Commercial Litigation Branch is Civils largest branch, with 250 attorneys. It brings claims on the United States behalf, and defends claims against the US. . Commercial Litigation Branch attorneys worked on the opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma and the Sackler familys case, which finally resulted in a controversial $8 billion dollar settlement last fall a vast sum that still pales in comparison to the multi-trillion dollar cost of the opioid epidemic. After the settlement was widely criticized for granting the Sackler family immunity from future opioid lawsuits, Purdue Pharma pressured the DOJ not to appeal the deal. Another branch of the DOJ, the U.S. Trustee program, or the governments bankruptcy watchdog, did appeal. The case is ongoing, and illustrates the DOJs say in whether the government holds corporations and individuals accountable for making illegal profits at the publics expense.

Attorneys with the Office of Immigration Litigation represent the government and relevant agencies in immigration matters, from prosecuting denaturalization cases to defending the decisions reached by the nations immigration courts. Immigration courts arent actually courts within the judicial branch; they are housed within the DOJs Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), and the judges are attorneys appointed by the Attorney General. Reform advocates have been pushing for immigration courts to become real, independent courts for years. Anyone with interest in immigration reform should be scrutinizing EOIR and how the Office of Immigration Litigation defends EOIRs actions.

Civils up-and-coming Consumer Protection Branch, which has tripled in size since 2017, plays a large role in combating pandemic-related fraud. Current cases include fighting fraudulent COVID-19 treatments, and suing Walmart for its role in the opioid crisis.

And finally, Civils largely unpoliticized Torts branch handles claims related to injury and damage to government property. It endured rare scrutiny this year when Torts attorneys intervened on Trumps behalf in the aforementioned case against a woman accusing him of rape, a move which some have tied to a network of former Kirkland & Ellis lawyers appointed to key Civil Division positions during Trumps administration. Torts attorneys were also involved in the liability trial against BP for the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, leading to a record $20 billion dollar settlement. (In that case, Kirkland & Ellis lawyers defended BP.) And Torts attorneys defended the governments actions when victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were exposed to formaldehyde in the Emergency Housing Units FEMA provided to them.

What should be clear from this diverse smattering of cases is that the Civil Division has a hand in some of the most consequential litigation in which the government is involved. More broadly, the Department of Justice should be seen and scrutinized as a powerful arm of the executive branch. Litigation won (and lost) by DOJ attorneys sets legal precedent which defines and outlasts administrations. Even when the DOJ isnt being contorted and manipulated by a corrupt executive like Trump, it has a say in thousands of matters of public interest each year. Progressives and the public alike should look to the DOJ to understand how the Biden administration will interpret and enforce the law, and for the benefit of whom.

Hannah Story Brown is a writer and researcher at the Revolving Door Project at the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

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DOJ Civil: Progressives Should Pay Attention To The Actions Of This Powerful Litigating Division - TPM

Fourth quarter 2021 earnings at Progressive Corp. fell 43% compared with the same time period a year ago to $962.3 million.

The results were despite the personal and commercial property insurer posting an increase of 13% in net premiums written during the last three months of 2021. Progressive said its fourth quarter combined ratio jumped over 6 points to 94.7 compared with the prior year fourth quarter.

Net income for the full year was about $3.35 billion, a 41% drop from about $5.7 billion in 2020, while net premiums written increased 14%. The companys overall combined ratio for 2021 was 95.3 88.9 from its commercial lines business and 115.3 from personal lines.

For the month of December, net income was down 44% to $393.3 million. While the December combined ratio for Progressives commercial lines was a profitable 85.1, its combined ratio for the property business was 112.8, which included 38.2 points from catastrophe losses due to U.S. storms and tornadoes, and wildfires in Colorado.

The insurer plans to release January results on Feb. 16 and has scheduled an earnings call with analysts for Match 1.

Topics Profit Loss

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Progressive Q4, Full Year Net Income Drop Over 40% - Insurance Journal

Recently, Nate Silver found himself in the unenviable role of main character of the day on Twitter because he proposed that school closures were a disastrous, invasion-of-Iraq magnitude (or perhaps greater) policy decision. The comparison generated overwhelming anger and mockery, and it is not an easy one to defend: A fiasco that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths and rearranged the regional power structure is a very high bar to clear. Weighing policy failures in such utterly different realms to each other is so inherently difficult that any discussion quickly devolves into Could Superman beat up Mighty Mouse? territory.

But these complications do not fully explain the sheer rage generated by Silver. The furnace-hot backlash seemed to be triggered by Silvers assumption that school closings were not only a mistake a possibility many progressives have quietly begun to accept but an error of judgment that was sufficiently consequential and foreseeable that we cant just shrug it off as a bad dice roll. It was a historic blunder that reveals some deeper flaw in the methods that produced it and which demands corrective action.

That unnerving implication has a mounting pile of evidence to support it. It is now indisputable, and almost undisputed, that the year and a quarter of virtual school imposed devastating consequences on the students who endured it. Studies have found that virtual school left students nearly half a year behind pace, on average, with the learning loss falling disproportionately on low-income, Latino, and Black students. Perhaps a million students functionally dropped out of school altogether. The social isolation imposed on kids caused a mental health state of emergency, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. The damage to a generation of childrens social development and educational attainment, and particularly to the social mobility prospects of its most marginalized members, will be irrecoverable.

It is nearly as clear that these measures did little to contain the pandemic. Children face little risk of adverse health effects from contracting COVID, and theres almost no evidence that towns that kept schools open had more community spread.

In the panicked early week of the pandemic, the initial decision to close schools seemed like a sensible precaution. Authorities drew on the closest example at hand, the 1918 Spanish flu, which was contained by closing schools.

But in relatively short order, growing evidence showed that the century-old precedent did not offer much useful guidance. While the Spanish flu was especially deadly for children, COVID-19 is just the opposite. By the tail end of spring 2020, it was becoming reasonably clear both that remote education was failing badly and that schools could be reopened safely.

What happened next was truly disturbing: The left by and large rejected this evidence. Progressives were instead carried along by two predominant impulses. One was a zero-COVID policy that refused to weigh the trade-off of any measure that could even plausibly claim to suppress the pandemic. The other was deference to teachers unions, who were organizing to keep schools closed. Those strands combined into a refusal to acknowledge the scale or importance of losing in-person learning with a moralistic insistence that anybody who disagreed was callous about death or motivated by greed.

Social scientists have measured the factors that drove schools to stay closed last year. One study found schools with unionized teachers, more of which were located in more Democratic-voting districts, were more likely to remain all virtual. Another likewise found local political partisanship and union strength, rather than the local severity of COVID, predicted school closing.

It is always easier to diagnose these pathologies when they are taking place on the other side. Youve probably seen the raft of papers showing how vaccine uptake correlates with Democratic voting and COVID deaths correlate with Republican voting. Perhaps you have marveled at the spectacle of Republican elites actively harming their own audience. But the same thing Fox News hosts were doing to their elderly supporters, progressive activists were doing to their sides young ones.

In a big country, there are always going to be crazy people at the margins. You can measure the health of the parties by the degree to which crazy ideas are taken up by powerful people. (This, of course, is why the Republican Party handing the most powerful job in the world to a conspiracy theorist is the grimmest possible sign.) But the Democratic Partys internal debate on school closings was making room at the table for some truly unhinged ideas. The head of the largest states most powerful teachers union insisted on the record there is no such thing as learning loss and described plans to reopen schools as a recipe for propagating structural racism.

Within blue America, transparently irrational ideas like this were able to carry the day for a disturbingly long period of time. In recent days, Angie Schmitt and Rebecca Bodenheimer have both written essays recounting the disorienting and lonely experience they had watching their friends and putative political allies denounce them for supporting a return to in-person learning. Bodenheimers account is especially vivid:

Parents who advocated for school reopening were repeatedly demonized on social media as racist and mischaracterized as Trump supporters. Members of the parent group I helped lead were consistently attacked on Twitter and Facebook by two Oakland moms with ties to the teachers union. They labeled advocates calls for schools reopening white supremacy, called us Karens, and even bizarrely claimed we had allied ourselves with Marjorie Taylor Greenes transphobic agenda.

The fevered climate of opinion ruled out cost-benefit thinking and instead framed the question as a simple moral binary, with the well-being of public schoolchildren somehow excluded from the calculus. Social scientists like Emily Oster who spoke out about the evidence on schools and COVID became hate targets on the left, an intimidating spectacle for other social scientists who might have thought about speaking up.

The failed experiment finally came to an end in the fall of 2021. (A handful of districts have shut down during the Omicron wave, but this is mainly a temporary response to staff shortages rather than another effort to stop community spread.) The Chicago Teachers Union, one of the more radical unions, did stage a strike, but it was met with firm opposition from Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot and ended quickly.

But the source of the sentiment has not disappeared. The Democratic Partys left-wing vanguard is continuing to flay critics of school closings as neoliberal ghouls carrying out the bidding of the billionaire class. Bernie Sanders aide Elizabeth Pancotti claims that the loudest and most ardent supporters of keeping schools oepn [sic] (& those who dismiss legit concerns about teacher/child health risks) are largely those with remote work options/resources for alternative child care arrangements, as if only some selfish motive could explain the desire of an American liberal to maintain public education. A story in Vice praises a student walkout in New York as a national model.

The ideas that produced the catastrophic school-closing era may have suffered a setback, but its strongest advocates hardly feel chastened. Whether educational achievement can or should be measured at all remains a very live debate within the left.

Most progressives arent insisting on refighting the school closing wars. They just want to quietly move on without anybody admitting anybody did anything wrong.

One of the grievances that critics of the Iraq War nursed after the debacle became clear was the failure of the political Establishment to draw any lessons broader than dont invade Iraq without an occupation plan. Their anger was not unfounded. The catastrophe happened in part because the structure of the debate allowed too many uninformed hawkish voices and ignored too many informed dovish ones. (As a chastened Iraq War supporter myself, Ive grown far more cautious about wading into foreign-policy debates for which I lack adequate understanding.)

Many liberals are complaining that the recent debates over short-term closings are creating a hysterical overreaction from people still angry about the 2020-21 school shutdown. Perhaps a first step to building trust that we are not planning to repeat a catastrophic mistake is to admit the mistake in the first place.

Analysis and commentary on the latest political news from New York columnist Jonathan Chait.

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School Closures Were a Catastrophic Error. Progressives Still Havent Reckoned With It. - New York Magazine

By Ronald J. Rosenberg

When U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi announced his Democratic primary run against Gov. Kathy Hochul, it may have seemed like a DAmato moment.Alfonse DAmato, then the Town of Hempstead supervisor, saw a glimmer of political daylight in 1980, when he decided to reach for the political gold ring of U.S. senator from New York. Defeating the legendary three-term incumbent Jacob Javits was deemed impossible by every political pundit and commentator, and you wouldve assumed that not even the bookies would take your bet. Yet DAmato successfully navigated every political rapid to secure victory, a win that stands to this day as testimony to astute political analysis, hard work and an indomitable belief in oneself. When Suozzi first announced his intention to run against Hochul, he rightly assumed that state Attorney General Letitia James would remain a Democratic primary candidate for governor. Given her left-wing credentials, combined with the progressive candidate for that office, Jumaane Williams, Suozzi reasoned that moderate Democrats would look for a safe house from which to escape the Democrats lurch to the left. He certainly has the credentials to be that moderate. But with James backing out of the race, the political threat from the left that Suozzi had expected to help rally centrist Democrats evaporated. Williams doesnt have the recognition, sufficient base or fundraising capabilities for a credible statewide race. That leaves Hochul in a powerful place, because she has the means to outflank Suozzi on any number of fronts.

Ronald J. Rosenberg has been an attorney for 42 years, concentrating in commercial litigation and transactions, and real estate, municipal, zoning and land use law. He founded the Garden City law firm Rosenberg Calica & Birney in 1999.

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How progressives might be left in the lurch - liherald.com