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The liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to be nearing its breaking point with Sen.Kyrsten Sinema.

Over the weekend, members of the nonprofit Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA,followed Sinema, D-Ariz., into abathroom at Arizona State University.

Activists recorded and shouted their grievances at her for not supporting more accommodating immigration reforms.

Progressives' frustration with Sinema goes beyond Arizona voters. A Saturday Night Live skit portrayed her as the senator derailing legislation central to the Biden administration,including the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure package.

Sinema has said that is too expensive for her vote, but hasnt said what she would support.

In this week'sepisode of The Gaggle, an Arizona politics podcast,hosts Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Ronald J. Hansenspeakwith Emily Kirkland, executive director of Progress Arizona, a progressive community nonprofit.She's breaking down why the left is angry with Sinema and what they're doing about it.

The best way to listen is to subscribe to The Gaggle on your favorite podcast app, but you also can stream the full episode below.

Read more here:
Why are progressives fed up with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema? The Gaggle finds out - The Arizona Republic

Its now clear that the Biden administration, House and Senate progressives, and the handful of conservative Democratic spoilers are vectoring in on a deal. Build Back Better will be boiled down to something in the $2 to $2.5 trillion range.

Progressives can comfort themselves that once the infighting is behind us, and we can get past the echo-chamber stories of a failed presidency, Biden can get on with the business of governing. His approval ratings can go back up, and we can come back for more money in the FY2023 budget reconciliation next fall.

But hold on, the devil is in the fine print.

More from Robert Kuttner

For starters, the original White House plan also included over a trillion dollars in refundable tax credits, notably an extension of the Child Tax Credit, as well as expanded credits for child care and a more generous EITC. If these tax expenditures are included in a $2 trillion total, then the entire spending part of the package is reduced to not much more than the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has only about $600 billion in genuine new public investment.

And dont forget, these are ten-year totals. Two hundred billion a year is pretty puny, given the kinds of transformations the economy needs. The $60 billion a year in the bipartisan bill is business as usual.

One ray of hope is in the dynamic economic gains produced by these outlays. The White House has argued, correctly in my view, that many if not most of these social and economic investments will enhance productivity and GDP, thus reducing their net budgetary impact. And that could produce a consensus on a larger bottom line. Joe Manchin has said he is sympathetic to this kind of budgeting.

Seemingly, Manchin is sympathetic to higher taxes on rich people, while his fellow spoiler, Kyrsten Sinema, is not. Here again, using public investments to increase economic output allows offsets to the total budgetary impact, and Sinema could be sympathetic to that. Recognizing these gains is as close as economics gets to the proverbial free lunch.

The package would be even worse without the insistence of House progressives that they will compromise only so much. The Child Tax Credit and the other tax subsidies for working families should not be counted as part of the spending. This is no time for further retreat.

See the article here:
Are Progressives About to Get Rolled Again? - The American Prospect

First the booze. Thanks to a Prohibition-era law, the Postal Service is barred from shipping alcohol to consumers. Private carriers like U.P.S. and FedEx have this lucrative business all to themselves. With an eye toward leveling the playing field, Representative Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, introduced the bipartisan United States Postal Service Shipping Equity Act in May. It makes no sense to create a competitive disadvantage for the Postal Service by barring them from these kinds of shipments, especially given the Postal Services dire financial condition, argued Ms. Speier, noting that in 2019 alone the wineries in her state shipped around 275.6 million cases of vino. This most recent version of the bill has 31 co-sponsors from both parties.

Allowing the post office into banking make that back into banking, in which it participated for much of last century is a more involved matter. But thanks to none other than Mr. DeJoy, it is an experiment now in progress. September saw the rollout of a pilot program in which postal outlets in four locations Washington, D.C., Baltimore, the Bronx and Falls Church, Va. are providing bare-bones financial services. For a small fee, customers can deposit payroll or business checks up to $500 onto a single-use gift card that functions like a bank debit card.

A robust postal banking system is a development that progressives, and the American Postal Workers Union, have long favored. Many Americans, especially those in lower income and minority communities, dont trust the financial system or dont have easy access to it. One in four American households is unbanked or underbanked, including half of all Black households, notes the Save the Post Office Coalition. This leads to costly alternatives that function as a lifetime tax on accessing your own money.

The American Postal Workers Union negotiated a banking pilot program in its 2016 contract, but the previous postmaster general declined to act on it. When Mr. DeJoy came in, the union redoubled its efforts and convinced him to give it a shot. Mr. DeJoy deserves at least a sliver of credit for giving this progressive priority a bit of space to prove itself. Postal officials are already exploring ways to expand the program.

Of course, any significant expansion would require legislation. Which means all together now! that Congress needs to make itself useful. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, has been championing postal banking for a few years. As part of its agenda, the Save the Post Office Coalition wanted Congress to include a more expansive test program in the appropriations for the 2022 fiscal year. The groups co-founder, Ms. McConnell, happens to be the daughter of the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, which is kind of funny when you think about it.

Republicans like the senior McConnell are often accused of trying to undermine the Postal Service, in part because of their insistence that it should operate more like a private business not to mention periodic calls by conservatives to fully privatize it. Mr. Trump is a hard-core post office hater, and frequently trashed it during his presidency. But the survival of the service should not be a partisan matter. If anything, Republicans should be itching to keep things running smoothly, since rural areas tend to suffer most when mail services falter. It is in everyones interest to get creative about revitalizing this vital institution to think outside the post office box, if you will.

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Opinion | Louis DeJoy Is Doing Something Progressives Like - The New York Times

I think the temperature is there for somebody to run against him, said Cathy Brienza, founder of Ridgewood JOLT, a local progressive advocacy group in Gottheimers district. I think he should be afraid.

But by all appearances, Gottheimer is not feeling any heat from the left, even as activists hold protests outside his suburban North Jersey district office, about 25 miles from New York City.

No primary opponents have emerged to challenge Gottheimer in 2022, partly because hes a massive fundraiser who, sitting on $11 million in campaign cash, would dominate the airwaves in the nations most expensive media market. At the same time, New Jersey Democrats understand that running a liberal in a district that had been represented by Republicans for decades could imperil a seat Gottheimer has managed to win comfortably.

Also working in Gottheimers favor is New Jerseys unique ballot system, which gives sweeping influence over primaries to party leaders and makes the already tough challenge of ousting an incumbent even more daunting. Though this format has long favored the party establishment, its now having the unintended effect of helping insulate an incumbent whos going against the legislative strategy of his partys president.

The so-called county line, in which primary candidates are listed with other establishment politicians on the ballot, has been the bane of Democrats and Republicans who fail to win their partys backing. But the fight against it has taken on a new intensity over the past year amid the ongoing schism between progressives and more traditional Democrats. A progressive coalition has filed a lawsuit challenging the ballot structure.

While many of those progressive activists have been allied with Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, the governor won his first primary thanks in part to the strength of the line and ran on it again for his reelection primary in June despite facing pressure to eschew it.

On most New Jersey primary ballots, candidates endorsed by their local county party organizations are grouped together on the same row or column, from the top of the ticket to town council races. Off-the-line candidates are sometimes placed in a row or column by themselves, occasionally at the far end of the ballot in whats referred to as ballot Siberia.

The system has helped political bosses some elected, some not wield control over New Jersey politics for decades, from Camden County to Hudson County. And even incumbents who fall out of favor with a single local power broker can find themselves stripped of the line, making their reelections a near impossibility.

Because of the line and the county party system, there is less of a robust culture of primaries in New Jersey, like in New York, where you had a whole wave of Democratic legislators get unseated by primary challenges in 2018 and 2020, said Joe Dinkin, campaign director for the Working Families Party, whose New Jersey affiliate has targeted Gottheimers district office with protests. Its structurally been harder for that culture of primaries to take hold.

Experts say the line is a more effective tool against lesser-known insurgent candidates for offices like state Legislature and county commission than for members of Congress. Gottheimers office, for instance, will be the first one listed on the 2022 primary ballot since neither of New Jerseys U.S. senators are up for reelection and no better-known candidates will draw voters eyeballs.

Still, there are signs Gottheimer has benefited. He didnt even face a primary in 2018, the same year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the original Squad won their seats in Congress. And last year, when Gottheimer did face a challenge from the left, the line seemed to make a difference, albeit a relatively small one, in his favor.

In that 2020 election, three of the four counties in Gottheimers district didn't use "the line" format for their ballots. But Bergen County, which makes up about 80 percent of the districts Democratic primary electorate, did. Gottheimer defeated progressive Arati Kreibich by a roughly two-to-one margin. He won by 34 points in Bergen County. In the three other counties that did not use the line, his margin was between 23 and 30 points.

This suggests that in a closer race, the line would certainly have made a difference in the outcome, said Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University professor who has studied New Jerseys ballot designs effect on elections and advocates eliminating it.

In a statement to POLITICO, Gottheimer said the House must pass reconciliation bill and the bipartisan infrastructure package, which includes two million labor jobs, climate resiliency, clean drinking water, and resources to fix our roads and bridges. Im committed to doing what it takes to get them both across the finish line.

Im not a fan of those who are obstructing the Presidents agenda, blocking the Gateway Tunnel, and risking the reinstatement of SALT and support for universal pre-k and child care, he said.

For their part, some New Jersey Democrats are beginning to grow impatient with Gottheimer.

State Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, who for years has been a champion of the left in New Jersey politics, took issue with Gottheimer attacking Pelosi for breaching her firm, public commitment to vote on the infrastructure bill alone.

I dont know if hell have a primary fight next year. Im not concentrated on it. Right now its about getting through the Biden agenda, Weinberg said. And I dont think it was appropriate for him to have attacked Nancy Pelosi, who I and the majority of Democrats I know have enormous respect for.

Democratic State Chair LeRoy Jones, while not mentioning Gottheimer by name, authored an op-ed this week unmistakably aimed at Gottheimer that urged the states House delegation to go with Bidens strategy.

Anything less than full party unity will invite political disaster and mean a failure to meet this critical moment, Jones wrote.

The intensity of the backlash to Gottheimer has given progressives some hope that, should it continue, a competitive primary is a possibility.

If there was ever a time when a Democrat could put themselves in such ignominy and shame to really merit a primary challenge that breaks through and gets people to pay attention ... I think its behavior like this, Dinkin said.

Read more:
Josh Gottheimer is taunting the far left. Hes still unlikely to face a serious primary. - POLITICO

Oren M. Levin-Waldman is faculty member in the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University-Newark, and Socioeconomic Research Scholar at Global Institute for Sustainable Prosperity Research. Learn more at the professors Website: https://www.econlabor.com/. Direct email to olevinwaldman@gmail.com

NEWARK, NJ October 6, 2021 By design the American political system is supposed to be incremental, thus ensuring that individual rights are protected by default. Progressive Democrats who insist on passing their $3.5 trillion budget with no compromise, not only seek to transform the country economically and socially, but to blow up the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances.

Attempting to ram through legislation with a razor thin majority as though an electoral mandate exists is hardly an example of democracy at work. Rather it is the voice of an anti-democratic elite that presumes to know what is good for all of us whether we like it or not. Democracy is only good when the Dems are in agreement with them. Otherwise, they are nothing less than deplorable.

To review, we have a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed by the Senate, which the House refuses to vote on unless the $3.5 trillion budget proposal is passed first. But a couple of more conservative Democrats in the Senate are balking at the price tag as are some moderates in the House. Of course, this type of political brinkmanship is nothing new. And yet, what is lost despite all the claims that we are a democracy, is that we really arent. We are a republic, and the two are not the same.

Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham talked about two sovereign masters of the universe towards the end of the Eighteenth into the early Nineteenth centuries: pleasure and pain. Individuals seek to maximize pleasure while minimizing pain. In the neoclassical theory of competitive markets, this has found expression in maximizing profits and minimizing costs for firms and maximizing utility and minimizing costs for consumers.

Bentham, however, was laying out a theory of democracy, which was that utility would be achieved when governmental actions would satisfy the greatest happiness for the greatest number. If a majority of the public desires something, then it is presumed to satisfy the greatest happiness for the greatest number. But are we achieving utility when only a razor thin majority and only fifty senators with a tie-breaking vote from the Vice President pass something?

Contrary to popular misconception, Congress does not operate on the basis of majority vote. Well, yes it does but only as the last act of a final drama. Rather bills that are usually brought to the floor for final votes are generally the product of painstaking consensus building requiring tremendous compromise.

Progressives in Congress act as though they have a mandate from the public to radically transform the country, which in their minds means no compromise. Compromise is weakness and a thing of the past. With compromise, little gets done. But then again, that is the whole point of the Madisonian system of checks and balances.

The American political system was not designed to achieve any kind of monumental change unless there is a crisis. And even then, it is very difficult. If each member of Congress represents a specific district, and senators representing even broader constituencies, the odds of having agreement are virtually nil. On the contrary, a bill can only achieve consensus once it has been watered down through compromise, which often entails a fair degree of horse trading.

Again, what is often missed here is that this process is where democracy really exists because it speaks to broad-based representation. Congressman A tells Congresswoman B that he will only vote for a provision that she wants if she agrees to vote for a different provision that he wants. Each provision satisfies a different constituency. Neither of the two separate constituencies has an interest in the others, but because each has received something of interest each feels that it has been represented. When this is multiplied throughout 435 districts in the house and a hundred different constituencies in the Senate, what will have been achieved, at least on budget bills, is something typically larded with pork, but broadly representative of the entire population.

This is also the meaning of distributive politics: everybody gets something and everybody also pays. It is also the reason why new programs can never be removed and deficits ultimately swell. Of course, this isnt completely what Madison thought would happen. After all, he assumed that most spending on domestic matters would occur at the state level, and that the federal government would have little to do.

What Madison did assume was that the need to achieve consensus as a way to overcome checks and balances would result in measures that would be very minimal in impact so that the effect would be the protection of individual rights by default. Which is to say, public policy would only be made in incremental steps, with each measure building on the previous one. This is what the late Yale economist and political scientist Charles Lindblom referred to as the science of muddling through.

If we return to the Bentham utilitarian model of the greatest happiness for the greatest number as the measure of democracy, we have to recognize that there is no place for individual rights. After all, the greatest happiness can be achieved with the majority riding roughshod over the rights of minorities. Jim Crow laws in the South very much represented democracy in utilitarian terms. So much was this so that Twentieth Century philosopher John Rawls had to respond to Bentham with the priority of the right over the good.

Protection of individual rights needs to be protected from utilitarian goods. Put simply, there is no real democracy if individual rights are trampled on. But isnt that precisely what will happen if a bill representing the interests of only a vocal few is rammed through Congress on the baseless claim that they have a mandate? Moreover, the failure of the president to make that clear speaks to a larger problem, which is his failure to lead.

We are already hearing Progressives say that if they dont get exactly what they want, they are willing to blow up the Biden agenda and presidency. The way we used to govern rested on the premise that it would be better to get a little than nothing at all because it was still more than what was there before. For the Progressives, it is better to get nothing than to compromise. One wonders if the real target isnt the U.S. Constitutional system as we have known it. But please dont insult our intelligence by touting your commitment to democracy.

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Author of

Restoring the Middle Class Through Wage Policy: Arguments for a Middle Class

Understanding Public Policy in the United States.

The Minimum Wage: A Reference Handbook

Wage Policy, Income Distribution and Democratic Theory

The Case of the Minimum Wage: Competing Policy Models

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Oren M. Levin-Waldman, Ph.D

(914) 629-6351

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Contrary to Their Rhetoric, Progressives are No Friends of Democracy By Oren M. Levin-Waldman - Yonkers Tribune.