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Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has recently cultivated an image as a stern administrator who implores people to stay home and save lives. Memes and mainstream media outlets have portrayed her as a tough leader willing to make the difficult but necessary decision of stamping the fun out of urban life in order to blunt the spread of coronavirus.

But there is much more to Lightfoots pandemic response than memeable administrator. For example, as the outbreak began to spread across the city, a February 26 Chicago Sun-Times headline announced, Lightfoot accuses CDC of spreading panic about the coronavirus, quoting the mayor as saying I dont want to get ahead of ourselves and suggest to the public that theres a reason for them to be fearful we need people to continue to go about their daily lives. At the time, many mayors and elected leaders across the country were not taking the virus as seriously as they should have. Yet Lightfoot went further, refusing to close public schools despite pleas from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and other groups concerned about the safety of students and teachers.

As the Sun-Times recently reported, Lightfoot had to be pressured by Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to cancel the citys massive St. Patricks Day parade on March 14, and only gave in on shuttering schools after the governor ordered them closed in mid March. (Pritzker did, however, go forward with the states in-person election on March 17, which undoubtedly increased the spread of the virus.)

On April 11, Lightfoot also approved the demolition of a coal plant in the citys Little Village community on the Southwest Side that blanketed the largely Latino neighborhood in dust and particulates a stark hazard for an area already facing alarming rates of asthma and hit hard by COVID19. On May 14, her administration gave the go-ahead for yet another demolition on the site, calling it off only after activists protested outside of her Northwest Side home.

Lightfoots response to the pandemic has also included an astounding emergency power grab, cutting against the calls for more transparency and democracy in government that animated her campaign for mayor last year. And she has refused to embrace redistributive policies such as a corporate head tax or a financial transaction tax while attacking left-wing city council members, including its six socialists who are pushing for them.

Lightfoots actions suggest shes far from the progressive mayor sternly facing down coronavirus, the image shes carefully cultivated. In reality, shes been more open to embracing an unabashedly pro-corporate response to the pandemic.

Chicago has been battered by COVID19. Cook County, which includes the city, recently overtook Queens, New York as the epicenter of the outbreak in the United States. The county has seen over 63,000 active cases and more than 2,800 deaths.

Among Chicago tenants, rent collection has been down nearly 75 percent over the course of the pandemic a reflection of the fact that, even before the crisis, half of Chicago renters were rent burdened, meaning they were paying over 30 percent of their income on rent. As job losses have spiked, that income has plummeted, and without serious help from the government beyond a single $1,200 stimulus check, residents have been left out to dry.

As a solution, Lightfoots administration announced a housing assistance grant program to help those impacted. The program, funded by real estate developers, required applicants to show proof that they were facing acute financial hardship due to the pandemic. While 83,000 city residents who lost jobs or pay as a result of the crisis applied within the first five days of the program, only two thousand grants of $1,000 each were ultimately handed out meaning just 2.5 percent of applicants (who themselves represented a drop in the bucket of total need throughout the city) received funding through the lottery-based system.

Lightfoots other signature policy to manage Chicagos rapidly growing housing crisis was the creation of a Housing Solidarity Pledge, an unenforceable compact made by a group of bankers, landlords, and developers to provide flexibility on rent payments for tenants during the crisis. Following the announcement, which featured no tenants rights organizations, housing rights groups in the city argued the pledge was essentially a public relations stunt. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes at the New Yorker, one of the signatories to Lightfoots pledge, TLC Property Management, has fileddozens of evictioncases in Chicago and its suburbs since March 20th, when Illinoiss governor, J.B. Pritzker, declared a statewide moratorium on evictions.

Rather than marshaling the power of the state to expand social-welfare systems, the mayor has instead turned to the private sector for market-based solutions that wont upset companies bottom lines.

It hasnt just been housing. In April, Mayor Lightfoot formed a COVID19 Economic Recovery Task Force, packed with representatives of big business and co-chaired by former White House Chief of Staff Sam Skinner, who served under President George H.W. Bush. Her administrations other recent initiatives include the Microbusiness Recovery Grant Program and Chicago Community COVID-19 Response Fund both privately funded, means-tested programs.

But the response thats received the most coverage in recent weeks has been Mayor Lightfoots emergency powers ordinance, giving her office full control over how to distribute federal funding allocated as part of the CARES Act approved by Congress in late March. Instead of allowing democratic decision making over the tens of millions of public dollars flowing to the city, Lightfoot consolidated her power over the funds distribution.

In response, a group of nineteen city council members, including members of the democratic socialist caucus, sent a letter to Lightfoot laying out their concerns with the ordinance. They demanded the spending of federal funds in working-class communities, particularly African-American neighborhoods that have been hard hit; help for renters and the homeless; and more oversight over the program, referring to the move as a power grab. Lightfoot then proceeded to call the objecting city councilors selfish and shameful grandstanders, accusing them of acting against the interest of public safety.

The mayor saved her harshest words for Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, the two-term democratic socialist who represents the thirty-fifth ward, in which Lightfoot lives. Ramirez-Rosa was an outspoken critic of the mayors gambit, arguing that the decision on how to distribute federal funds should be made through an equity lens, while helping lead the charge against the ordinance. In response, Lightfoot said she was embarrassed to be represented by him.

This dismissive attitude toward her critics on the Left and her opposition to progressive solutions have come to define Lightfoots tenure as mayor a blunt about-face from her proclamation that Im not Rahm, an effort to distinguish herself from her neoliberal predecessor Rahm Emanuel who gained a reputation as Mayor 1%.

Lightfoot has railed against the efforts of left-wing city council members, who have pushed a suite of policy demands to support the citys working class. The Right to Recovery coalition, which includes forty-nine grassroots groups across the city including United Working Families (UWF) and the CTU is calling for drastic changes to Chicagos political and economic status quo in the midst of the global pandemic.

Chief among the coalitions demands are rent and mortgage moratoriums for the duration of the crisis, universal healthcare including COVID19 testing and treatment, an end to ICE raids and deportations, twenty days of emergency paid sick leave, the release of individuals incarcerated due to unaffordable money bonds, weekly direct payments of $750 to families facing job losses, and the delivery of groceries and other support for seniors.

On the city level, the Right to Recovery has been championed by five members of the councils democratic socialist caucus: Alds. Rossana Rodriguez, Jeanette Taylor, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, Daniel La Spata, and Carlos Ramirez-Rosa. In a Sun Times op-ed, the group urged the city to embrace this set of demands, saying If we want everyone to stay home, we need universal social benefits that leave no one out. As democratic socialists, solidarity is one of our bedrock principles.

In early May, hundreds of cars lined the streets of downtown Chicago as part of a socially distant demonstration calling for the Right to Recovery to be implemented immediatelyand they were joined by members of the democratic socialist caucus.

Efforts to institute the Right to Recovery have largely been stalled in city council, and havent been supported by Mayor Lightfoot. But progressives on the city council have continued to organize in their own communities to protect vulnerable residents from both the pandemic and the economic havoc its wrought.

In the 40th Ward on the citys Northwest Side, the office of Ald. Andre Vasquez, another member of the democratic socialist caucus, helped to establish a sewing guard to make masks for frontline workers in jobs deemed to be essential. Using donated fabric and thread, hundreds of volunteers have helped produce masks in a program that has now been expanded to neighborhoods throughout the city.

In the 33rd Ward, Ald. Rossana Rodriguezs office helped to start up the Albany Park Mutual Aid Network, which now operates independently. The network, alongside Irving Park Mutual Aid Network, has helped raise upwards of $30,000 and handed it out to residents in need. These efforts have aided hundreds of families through delivering food, tenant organizing, providing senior assistance, helping residents apply for unemployment, and connecting those facing hunger to food pantries.

Ramirez-Rosas thirty-fifth ward office has been distributing masks and groceries to residents, coordinating food dropoffs from pantries to seniors, and publishing and distributing COVID19 recovery newsletters that have reached over seven thousand households in the ward, leading to calls from residents who were later helped with unemployment applications and housing assistance.

Though Mayor Lightfoot has so far resisted calls for city government to step in and protect vulnerable residents by providing such support, socialists and other progressives on the council are working to fill in these gaps.

But with the virus still rapidly spreading, and without proper safety protections for workers or an adequate testing and contact tracing regime, any reopening in the immediate future will result in more death. The Right to Recovery would shield the public from this grim future.

By guaranteeing healthcare and income along with safeguarding housing and access to food, the policy package would help sustain working people through the pandemic. While the citys business class and political leadership may be opposed to these policies, a number of gains have already been won in Chicago, from a temporary eviction moratorium to suspending utility shut offs.

Other cities have gone further, suspending mortgage payments, halting new admissions to prisons, postponing debt collection, providing free public transit, and expanding bike lanes and pedestrianized streets. Outside the US, governments have taken more expansive action, guaranteeing workers lost income, converting past paid taxes into interest-free loans, increasing paid sick leave, and providing regular cash payments to residents. These types of state interventions, previously politically unthinkable, are now becoming commonplace.

Though Mayor Lightfoot was able to secure enough votes to pass her emergency powers ordinance, she did so over the objection of twenty-one city council members, including the full democratic socialist caucus. That level of opposition was unheard of under the administrations of past mayors Rahm Emanuel and Richard M. Daley, and likely spells trouble for future attempts by Lightfoot to take action without democratic buy-in.

Following the split vote, Dick Simpson, a former alderman who teaches political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago and has been studying city council votes since the 1990s, now says that Lightfoot has only a fragile hold on a majority, adding that Chicago politics are undergoing a major transformation as the machine era ends.

The councils socialists are poised to use that opening. Seeing the devastation that COVID19 has caused in Chicago, in April, Ald. Rodriguez penned a letter in support of federal legislation, sponsored by fellow democratic socialists Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to mint the coin in order to fully fund state and local governments dealing with the crisis.

I saw the bills that Congresswoman Tlaib proposed, for the Treasury to mint trillion-dollar coins and to provide aid to cities and states, and I thought, we need that, we cant do this alone, Rodriguez told Politico. The letter was also signed by the rest of the democratic socialist caucus, along with over 100 other legislators from across the country.

So while Mayor Lightfoot would prefer the publics perception of her approach to the COVID19 crisis to simply be enjoinders to stay at home, Chicagos socialists and other progressives are helping lay a path toward a different pandemic response that enshrines economic rights as human rights.

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Lori Lightfoot's Coronavirus Response in Chicago Has Been Anything But Progressive - Jacobin magazine

The National District Attorneys Association is the main professional body for American prosecutors, and like the Fraternal Order of Police, it is retrograde when it comes to justice. The organization has fear-mongered about youth use of marijuana skyrocketing in states that have legalized the substance, while pushing for heightened federal crackdowns. The NDAA also aggressively fought a White House report that sharply criticized the use of bogus forensic evidence in criminal courts.

In short, the NDAA is not a particularly meritorious organization, and amplifies entrenched ways of law enforcement thinking. One of its vehicles for doing so is its magazine, aptly titled The Prosecutor. Generally speaking, to read it, one must be a member of the organization, and membership is only open to those working in the prosecution field, as well as individuals seeking justice for communities and working on behalf of victims.

But thanks to someone posting it online, the general public gets to see Miami-Dade County State Attorney Katherine Fernandez Rundle, one of the most conservative top prosecutors under the Democratic Party banner, prop herself up as a progressive.

In a new 16-page article, Rundle explains her approach, which she dubs Miami-Style Smart Justice. In the written equivalent of a side-eye, Rundle writes, While more and more district attorneys have begun to experiment with what some call progressive solutions, strategic remedial measures that reduce crime, improve lives, and save money are a matter of tradition in Miami-Dade County.

That is certainly one way to put it.

The average person wont know the history of Rundles tenure, but its well worth exploring as an illustration of the glaring gap between a quasi-reformist prosecutors rhetoric and the realities on the ground. (And while this is about Rundle, it could just as easily be about the district attorneys of places like Brooklyn, Manhattan, and other liberal urban jurisdictions not impacted by the Soros-funded wave of progressive DAs.)

State Attorney Rundle. Photo via Miami-Dade State Attorneys Office.

In her article, Rundle sets herself aside from what she deems the Traditional Approach of US criminal justice: essentially, lock em all up. That may be truer now than it was in the past. Prison admissions have indeed gone down in Miami-Dade County over the years, thanks in part due to changes Rundle has made In FY 2000-2001, Miami-Dade County accounted for 9.1 percent of the states annual prison admissions, but by FY 2015-2016, it accounted for only 6.8 percentbeaten out by both Hillsborough and Broward Counties. Perhaps a change of heart came sometime after 2007, when Rundle still bragged on her government website about ratcheting up the harshness of punishments, using the same criminal code that she herself helped draft.

Rundle has also consulted with some criminal justice reform groups on ways to enact incrementalist reforms in recent years. The Justice Collaborative, the successor organization to a Harvard project that excoriated Rundles record on the death penalty in 2016, helped her create a modernized bail policy, by which people facing some nonviolent misdemeanor chargesincluding prostitution and driving with license suspended for failure to pay or appearare recommended for release from pretrial jailing without payment. The extent of impact is unclear, though Rundle has started taking donations from the bail bonds industry this campaign cycle.

It is also worth acknowledging that whatever good came out of the new bail policy would likely be negated by a new $393 million megajail the mayor and county commission are looking to build. Reflecting her comfort with mass incarceration, Rundle has not expressed her opposition to the plan. In contrast, Rundles 2020 challenger, Melba Pearson, has.

Like other quasi-progressives, Rundle implemented many reforms that broadened the criminal justice systems iron grip on vulnerable, non-dangerous peoples lives. Rundle is a major supporter of the countys drug court, which was the first in the nation. While drug courts are better than prosecutors simply trying to send all people who use drugs into jails and prisons, they are only marginally so. Compliance is highly difficult. The courts criminalize relapse, even though returning to drug use is part of many peoples path to recovery from addiction.

In Delaware County, Pennsylvania, more people died of overdose in 2017 alone than succeeded in the drug court from 2008 to 2018.

Actually treating drug use as a public health issue means removing the matter from the criminal justice system entirely, so health professionals, and not lawyers and judges, can make the right diagnostic calls. Rundle does not get this, or she chooses not to get it, privileging a rigid and simplistic criminological analysis over the ethical practice of medicine.

Rundle conflates drug and alcohol use with crime by mistaking correlation with causation.

In her article, Rundle justifies her approach by pointing to recidivism statistics68 percent of released prisoners are rearrested at least once within the first three years after release, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Rundle then conflates drug and alcohol use with crime by mistaking correlation with causation, remarking that one study found that over 84% of state prisoners were alcohol or drug involved whatever that means. This is a widely believed point of view amongst American law enforcement, but not one that a supposedly progressive prosecutor should parrot.

Rundle cannot honestly rest her hat on her fidelity to victims rights, either. Twelve years into her tenure as State Attorney, Rundles office had no specialized sex crimes unit. Rundle still does not seem to have one today, though she has one for domestic violence. For decades, Rundle had done next to nothing to mitigate the non-testing of over 10,000 rape kits. She waited for other governmental actors to push the issue, unlike some of her peers in other big, liberal cities.

Rundle also virtually never prosecutes police shootings of unarmed civilians. Having worked on many prosecutor campaigns across the country, I can say that this decision often has most to do with political cowardice. The police, the hardest law enforcement sector to change, explode at DAs who charge errant cops, and channel their anger into political retaliation. Regardless of personal motives that might include self-preservation, prosecutors like Rundle nuke the criminal justice systems legitimacy every time they fail to charge an appropriate case. That is doubly true in communities of color, where people are much more likely to be killed by cops.

From a human rights standpoint, earlier parts of Rundles tenure were nothing short of heinous. Rundle charged kids as young as 13 as adults; one of her long-term deputies once seriously considered a murder charge against a 5-year-old. From 2006 to 2015, Miami-Dade County had handed down 13 juvenile life sentences without paroletwo more than Harris County, Texas (Houston), despite Harris County having almost double Miami-Dades population.

Rundles administration also obtained more death sentences from 2010 to 2015 than 99 percent of district attorneys across the country, with some tossed out for deliberate, purposeless prosecutorial misconduct. Her own assistant prosecutor, Abraham Laeser, broke national records by obtaining over 30 death sentences himself (many of which were sought after he got caught unzipping his fly in front of a defense attorney and a female jury consultant).

Today, Rundle holds the state of Florida back on big policy debates. As the longest-serving registered Democrat in the highly influential Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, she has major sway over how other Florida state attorneys perceive bold reforms (like no longer seeking the death penalty) from progressive prosecutors like Orlando State Attorney Aramis Ayala. Instead of sticking up for Ayala, Rundle chose to denounce Ayala along with the rest of the State Attorneys. Elsewhere, Rundle has defended ugly practices like Floridas direct-filing of kids to adult court via prosecutorial whim, which helps make her state the nations cruelest on juvenile justice.

Rundle claims to be ahead of the curve on treating people with mental illness with dignity in the criminal justice system.

This is not to say that Rundle does not still make awful calls in her main role as prosecutor. Darren Raineys death immediately comes to mind. Rainey was a middle-aged Black man suffering from schizophrenia, serving two years in a Miami prison for cocaine possession. When three guards threw him into a scalding hot shower, his skin sloughed off and he was effectively boiled alive. To Rundle, this constituted no crime, and she refused to charge them.

In her NDAA article, Rundle claims to be ahead of the curve on treating people with mental illness with dignity in the criminal justice system. But her handling of Raineys case led to Rundles political party calling for her resignation. And after Rundle traveled to New York City to be on a mental health-focused panel at John Jay Colleges national Smart on Crime conference, Ed Chung at the Center of American Progress personally apologized for Rundles attendance on Twitter.

Her poor discretion is not limited to one standout case. In 2015, Rundle sought a charge with a three-year mandatory prison sentence for marijuana. This was not a giant retailer of the plant, either. The defendant, a Black Hispanic man named Ricardo Varona who grew 15 marijuana plants in his home, argued that he did so to help his cancer-stricken wife with pain.

The ACLU of Florida recently reported on the extreme racial bias found in Rundles administration of justice.

Varonas race matters because the ACLU of Florida recently reported on the extreme racial bias found in Rundles administration of justice. Black neighborhoods in her area face higher arrest rates. The charges at arrest, which police set in Florida, are harsher for Black people, who also face the most drug charges. But the inequality is not limited to the cops. Rundles office gets to decide whether to change the charge set by police.

Ultimately, the ACLU unveiled that Black Hispanic defendants are convicted at a rate that is over five and half times higher than their share of the county population. In addition, Black Hispanic defendants serve jail or prison sentences at a rate over six times greater than their share of the county population, and Black people who do not identify as Hispanic get the harshest sentences in Miami-Dade on average.

Katherine Fernandez Rundle neglects to address the egregious ways she stands on an island all her own compared with prosecutors in other big, liberal cities. The fact that some criminal justice reform organizations cooperate with her in a limited capacity is not a signal that she is progressive, but more a recognition that cooperation is for the greater good of a jurisdiction with approximately three million residents.

Given Rundles electoral popularity, it is a shame that Miami-Dade may not soon see the sweeping change a true progressive prosecutor candidate, like Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, can bring.

On the bright side, Miamis elected prosecutor turns 70 this year, meaning that a change in guard in the somewhat-near future is inevitable. Time is running out for Rundle to demonstrate that her self-rebranding exercise in The Prosecutor contains the merest shred of truth.

Top photo by Michael Draeger via Pixabay.

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Miami-Style Smart Justice Is an Ugly Parody of Progressive - Filter

These clashes and internal debates are beginning to set the course of the post-Sanders left and could be key to whether the young, demoralized progressives remain engaged or withdraw.

Even the left-wings highest profile win this year was less of a triumph than the left has spun it as. Marie Newman, who had a Sanders-esque platform supporting the Green New Deal and Medicare for All defeated Illinois Rep. Dan Lipinski in March. While many left-wing groups backed her, her victory was also attributed to support from more mainstream liberal groups like EMILYs List and Planned Parenthood and several presidential candidates.

Perhaps more concerning for the left, her base of support more closely resembled Joe Bidens than Bernie Sanders hopes for a working-class coalition. Newman focused on suburban women, while Lipinskis base was made of more traditional Democrats...very much more non-college, older, sort of the traditional white ethnic vote of Chicago, according to Donna Victoria, Newmans pollster.

Some progressives compare the recent defeats to Barry Goldwaters drubbing in 1964 a temporary setback but a harbinger for what became the Reagan Revolution. They argued that the rise of the left will continue as young Democrats who overwhelmingly voted for Sanders become an increasing share of the party.

I do believe progressives are in the ascendancy in the Democratic Party and we are still in the midst of that transition, said Faiz Shakir, Sanders campaign manager, who described the recent losses as growing pains. He pointed to Biden and other Democrats who have embraced progressive policies far to the left of where the party was a decade ago as evidence of the left's expanding influence.

But others see a need to significantly revamp the lefts approach after its failure to make significant inroads with older black voters. Some former Sanders aides believe that portraying the party itself as an enemy alienated some black voters who strongly identify as Democrats.

We tried very, very hard in a lot of different ways to make the appeal to older African-American voters, Shakir said, adding that growing support for Medicare for All among black voters in states they lost offers reason for hope.

"A majority of Democratic primary voters agree with us on the issues but see the main conflict in American politics as being between the red team and the blue team, said Claire Sandberg, Sanders' former national organizing director. I think weve seen that leading with an anti-establishment message can be counterproductive because it allows the establishment to paint us as divisive and disloyal, which hurts us with the high propensity older voters we need to do better with to win Democratic primaries."

Others expressed concern that the partys further expansion into the suburbs is a sign that the class-focused politics of the left represent the past, rather than the future, of the party.

On one matter, they all agreed: They are desperate for a win. Many are scouring the remaining congressional primaries and state legislature races for opportunities. Sanders himself endorsed three statehouse candidates last week two primary challengers in Michigan and Pennsylvania and one progressive in a contested race for an open seat in Missouri.

One of those candidates said that the left needs to realize it cant win on its own and suggested Newman's victory could be a blueprint.

Fast. Short. Daily. We take you behind the headlines and help you understand the biggest stories driving politics and policy.

You can't run an exclusive [left] campaign because there isn't the infrastructure and that's just not how society is structured, said Nikil Saval, who is challenging a Pennsylvania state senator this year and whom Sanders endorsed this week. Saval, a former editor of the literary magazine n+1, added: And you don't really want to the point is not just for the left to win, you want to build a hegemonic bloc of people that is diverse and can govern with you when you become an elected official."

Some progressives are cheering on Kara Eastman in Nebraska. She lost a Nebraska congressional race in 2018, but ran again and won the Democratic primary last week; in November, she'll square off against Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.) in a rematch.

Others are looking to Samelys Lopez, who is running in a crowded primary for a Bronx congressional seat and is endorsed by Ocasio-Cortez. The climate-focused Sunrise Movement, Justice Democrats, and some aides from Sanders and Warrens campaigns have zeroed in on Bronx principal Jamaal Bowmans primary challenge against powerful Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.) on June 23.

It is the right moment for some hand-wringing I think progressive activists were really hungry for a Bernie victory, so there wasnt necessarily a plan for what happened after, said Julia Barnes, Sanders national field director in 2016 and a progressive political consultant. We need to recalibrate the timeline for what victory looks like. ... Did we have a setback? Is there a need for a bigger analysis of what a progressive base could look like? Yes, but I havent lost faith yet.

Holly Otterbein contributed to this report.

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Progressives thought they'd overtaken the Democratic Party. Now they're in despair. - POLITICO

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut is one of the progressive Democrats pushing to expand some of the safety net programs created since the coronavirus pandemic. AP hide caption

Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut is one of the progressive Democrats pushing to expand some of the safety net programs created since the coronavirus pandemic.

Democrats said the $3 trillion coronavirus aid bill that was approved last week in the House of Representatives is meant to meet the needs of everyday Americans. Republicans dismissed that same bill as a partisan attempt to enact a longstanding wish list of Democratic policy priorities.

Progressive Democrats don't exactly dispute that.

"Over 80% of the bill we have already passed in one way, shape or form," House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters last week. "So, now we're putting our offer on the table. We're open to negotiation."

The bill that passed the House on Friday is full of proposals Democrats on the left have been pitching for years from a more generous allowance for food stamps to changes in the way people qualify for federal benefits. Many progressives see the economic crisis caused by the coronavirus and the public health response as proof that more expansive social policies are needed now, and in the future, to help people survive in times of crisis.

"The coronavirus pandemic has exposed gaping holes in our social safety net and has brought into stark relief issues that we knew were there," said Rep. Katherine Clark, D-Mass., the House Democratic Caucus vice chair. "Now we can see their devastating impacts so clearly."

Among the policies Clark supported in the House bill is a provision to provide funding for child care providers. She said women have always borne the brunt of the effects when schools and day care centers are closed. The issue is playing out on an enormous scale with the coronavirus. Clark and other Democrats proposed $50 billion in immediate child care funding. They also advocated for another $50 billion to fund long-term structural change.

Republicans, such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., call that logic gross politics.

"Democrats cannot stop salivating, salivating over the possibilities for partisan gain," McConnell said last week on the Senate floor. "Eighty-thousand Americans have died. More than 20 million have lost their jobs. I call that a crisis. They call it leverage."

Progressive Democrats said they are simply advocating for programs that are gaining public support in the crisis.

Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., said until the coronavirus hit, Republicans generally didn't support any expansion of domestic spending intended to help people in a crisis. Now there is a crisis, and Democrats want to use this moment to remake the system.

"These folks have never wanted to go down this road and protect what was a social safety net that we've had in the past and a new social safety net for people in today's world," DeLauro said in an interview. "I've been fighting for these issues for a very, very long time, OK. I'm trying to deal with the pandemic."

Democrats have a running list of policies they said are helping now during the coronavirus crisis and could be used to support people during any future economic dip.

Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, said he wants to tie the expanded benefits that passed in the CARES Act to the unemployment rate going forward. Such a proposal would allow the benefits to ebb and flow to meet the economy.

Wyden said the existing system hasn't worked for a long time. Many states provide benefits below the minimum wage, and the system does not regularly support people who are paid contractors or work in the so-called gig economy.

"The unemployment system, which was invented in the 1930s, is still in kind of a time warp," Wyden said. "Nobody ever heard of a gig worker back in the 1930s."

Many progressives see the coronavirus response as a chance to prove that policies they support can work and should be made permanent.

Some of these benefits, such as extra unemployment assistance, already got big bipartisan support and will be harder to take away later.

Not all Democrats necessarily agree.

Moderates, such as Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., are not eager to use the coronavirus to advocate for long-term spending increases. Murphy, who is a co-chair of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said any policies need to be reevaluated over time.

"I agree that in a crisis, you really highlight the deficiencies in our society," Murphy said in an interview. "But I also believe that the best approach to legislating in a divided Congress is to do what is possible and that means it has to be able to make it through a divided Congress and signed by a Republican president. Only things that become law can actually help the people that we're trying to assist."

Several moderate Democrats, including Rep. Abigail Spanberger, D-Va., voted against the $3 trillion House bill over similar concerns.

"Unfortunately, many members of Congress including some in my own party have decided to use this package as an opportunity to make political statements and propose a bill that goes far beyond pandemic relief and has no chance at becoming law," Spanberger said in a statement.

"We must come together to build a targeted, timely relief package that avoids partisan posturing and instead prioritizes combating our nationwide public health emergency, addressing catastrophic unemployment rates, and protecting the security of the next generation."

Murphy said there are clear bipartisan options out there. She pointed to funding for state and local governments that can bring the two parties together and a proposal to extend and expand a tax credit for businesses that keep employees on the payroll during the crisis.

Those bipartisan proposals may succeed in the near-term, but progressives are also looking to see how their policies can be sustained well into the future. Democrats are hoping to take control of the Senate and the White House in November, which would make it easier to build on temporary programs and permanently remake the system.

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Progressives Are Pushing Their Policies During The Pandemic - NPR

The long-awaited joint policy task forces, agreed to as a condition of Bernie Sanderss endorsement of Joe Biden, were at last appointed last week. But how will this process actually work and what difference will it make?

The good news: There are some terrific Bernie people on the task forces, and some of the Biden appointees are impressive as well. For instance, three senior trade unionists, all progressive, are servingMary Kay Henry, president of SEIU; Randi Weingarten, president of the AFT; and AFSCME President Lee Saunders. And all three are appointees of Biden.

The not-so-good news is that the Biden staffer coordinating the task force process is Carmel Martin, who served as an assistant secretary of education under Arne Duncan, one of Obamas worst appointees. Duncan was a big proponent of teach to the test, charter schools, and closing failing schools.

Charters and public-school bashing are an obsession for hedge fund Democrats, many of whom are big financial backers of Biden. The 2016 Democratic platform called for an expansion of charters.

Martin is now a senior official at the Center for American Progress, a liberalish think tank close to the Clintons that is one big degree more centrist than where the Biden campaign needs to be. CAP is the Biden campaigns default setting.

More from Robert Kuttner

My reporting suggests that the task forces will meet about weekly and produce policy papers. Since Biden is the candidate, and each task force has a majority of Biden appointees, he will have the final say. Yet he will be under a lot of pressure to move in Sanderss direction. Several of his recent policy proposals have already done so.

Some emblematic issues will include student debt and free public higher education, Medicare for All, and expansive climate and public-investment efforts.

Biden has already come out for partial relief for college debt, as well as free public higher education for students with family incomes below $125,000. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren had much more expansive proposals on both.

On the health insurance front, Bidens rather weak proposal to reduce the Medicare eligibility age to 60, and add other subsidies, stops well short of even an incremental path to true universal single-payer coverage. This will also be an area of contention, with several superb advocates of single-payer on the health task force, including Mary Kay Henry; Pramila Jayapal, co-author of the House Medicare for All bill; Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Michigan candidate for governor; and Dr. Don Berwick, former Obama head of Medicare and Medicaid, who emerged as a born-again single-payer advocate when he ran for governor of Massachusetts.

On climate, the co-chair of the joint task force is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her version of a Green New Deal goes far beyond what Biden has proposed. Yet the fact that these people are even meeting together is a good sign.

The task force on economic policy includes two people on Bidens own economic working group, Jared Bernstein and Ben Harris. It prudently excludes another senior Biden economic adviser, Larry Summers, whose role the campaign is trying to downplay.

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Then it adds three Sanders designees: Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants; Darrick Hamilton, an expert on economic and racial inequality; and Stephanie Kelton, a leading author of Modern Monetary Theory, which holds that government should borrow and spend as much as it needs to. That doctrine, which was dismissed as fringe not long ago, has become not only mainstream but conventional.

Today, its hard to see much difference in the views of Kelton and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin or Fed Chair Jerome Powell, except of course on where we should be spending. Indeed, events have moved even to the left of Bernie, who has been strict in insisting that all of his new spending be offset by pay-fors, mainly taxes on the rich. Now large deficits are not only OK but de rigueur. Meanwhile, as the economic task force meets, so does Bidens daily call with his own, partly overlapping senior economic team.

The task force process is one of several influencing Bidens campaign and prospective presidency. Another factor is Elizabeth Warren, who is her own source of influence on public debate generally and on Biden personally. Several of the best policy proposals are Warrens.

The task forces are a welcome addition. They will help push Biden in a more progressive direction and will help keep the Bernie base on board.

Events are unmistakably pushing Biden to be a far more progressive candidate (and one hopes president) than he would have been without the Warren and Sanders campaigns and without the economic collapse produced by the pandemic.

But what will become of these task force proposals? My sources say that their destination is the Democratic platform. The platform is likely to be well to the left of its 2016 counterpart. The question is how much that matters.

Bottom line: The task forces are a welcome addition. They will help push Biden in a more progressive direction and will help keep the Bernie base on board. At the end of the day, however, they will be one of several tributaries into the turbulent river that is the Biden campaign. Even more than in most campaigns, ultimately what will matter most is personnel.

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Bidens New Pressure From Progressives - The American Prospect