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When it became clear last month that former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. would almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, many of the progressive Democrats who supported other presidential candidates were disappointed but not deterred. They quickly shifted their electoral focus to candidates lower on the ballot.

The plan was straightforward: They would donate to a slew of insurgent congressional candidates, and a stable of grass-roots groups would be ready and waiting to organize for the general election and beyond.

But that was in a pre-pandemic America, before the spread of the coronavirus caused thousands of deaths, about 10 million new unemployment claims in two weeks, and the halting of public events in the presidential race. Now many progressive candidates and the organizations that support them are struggling to adapt to a bleak reality dried up fund-raising, unclear election dates, and a moratorium on tried-and-true political tactics like in-person phone banks and door-to-door canvassing.

Its an immediate effect on how we can plan, how we can grow, and even our month-to-month cash flow, said Amanda Litman, the executive director of Run for Something, one of the many Democratic organizations founded after President Trumps 2016 victory. Its really scary, because the candidates need more support than ever. And political fund-raising right now is plummeting, as is the rest of the economy.

Ms. Litman said her group had already been forced to cancel fund-raising that was expected to bring in nearly $500,000. The coronavirus, she said, has made basic operational questions including Run for Somethings survival through the November general election a more open question.

There are also political challenges, said Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats. Insurgent candidates are more likely to rely on door-to-door canvassing and rallies to show enthusiasm, activities that are functionally discontinued until further notice. Progressive candidates also tend to rely exclusively on small-dollar donations, which have experienced a downturn as people tighten their budgets.

Incumbents have certain advantages in a crisis, namely access to the media as a voice of authority, Mr. Shahid said.

The grim picture may have a profound political impact for the general election and beyond. Democrats were poised to have an organizing juggernaut ready for the 2020 election, with the goal of both reaching new voters and helping reverse the state and local losses they experienced during President Barack Obamas years in power. Even more, liberal groups hoped this election cycle would formalize their political infrastructure, so the activism that erupted in response to Mr. Trumps election could be harnessed going forward.

That may still happen, but it will require creative financial and digital solutions, according to interviews with several leaders of progressive political organizations and left-wing candidates running for office in states like New York and Ohio. Optimists have called it a time for political innovation, while others worry the structural barriers could stymie the progressive movement at a critical crossroads.

The outcome is of particular importance because the two most liberal presidential candidates, Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, were surpassed in the primary race by the more moderate Mr. Biden. Ms. Warren ended her presidential bid last month, and Mr. Sanders still says his campaign has a narrow path but is facing increased calls from allies to cede the nomination to Mr. Biden.

The left-wing Working Families Party had to recall waves of canvassers who were collecting signatures for congressional, state and local candidates endorsed by the group. It has also scrapped multiple in-person initiatives: a volunteer training program that was to begin imminently and a two-day organization-wide convention in Milwaukee that was scheduled for May.

On the campaign side, Ohio canceled its primary just one day before voters in the states Third Congressional District were set to vote in a Democratic primary between Morgan Harper, a community activist who had previous jobs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and as a corporate lawyer, and Representative Joyce Beatty, an incumbent with a long history in state politics. The state has rescheduled its primary to April 28, but has also mandated that nearly all voters submit ballots by mail, a move Ms. Harper said might depress turnout and give an advantage to candidates with higher name recognition.

People are very stressed about contracting an infectious disease that has the potential to kill you while also dealing with the disruption to financial life right now, Ms. Harper said. And in the midst of that, while experiencing extreme financial stress, were going to ask them to have the wherewithal to go to a website, request an application, print it out and mail it back in just to get a ballot.

Suraj Patel, one of several challengers running in New Yorks 12th Congressional District against the incumbent Democrat, Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, contracted the coronavirus in March, forcing him into quarantine.

The situation disrupted his campaign schedule, though he has been trying to work from home. Mr. Patel said his small dollar fund-raising had dropped off by 80 percent by the end of March.

No doubt fund-raising is way, way, way down, Mr. Patel said. And its difficult to even ask people to give when most of them are either furloughed or at home or uncertain of whats going to happen.

There have been some silver linings for progressive candidates. Ms. Harper and Mr. Patel have ramped up digital contact with voters and repurposed campaign tools to provide information about coronavirus safety.

Jamaal Bowman, a progressive who is mounting a campaign against the stalwart incumbent Representative Eliot L. Engel in New Yorks 16th Congressional District, pivoted to an online-only operation in a matter of days, said his campaign manager, Luke Hayes.

One of the things about having such a broad base of small donors is that while asking them for that recurring donation of 10 dollars a month, you cultivate a relationship with them, Mr. Hayes said. I think some incumbents, you know, they just expect kind of checks brought in just based on their stature.

Just as in the business world, where new digital tools have exploded in use, fresh political technology is also helping to fill gaps. Outvote, a political start-up in Boston that allows users to send voting and other political information to people in their social networks, has seen a rise in interest from progressive campaigns and causes as the pandemic spreads. Some have begun using Outvote to disseminate information about how to guard against the virus, said Naseem Makiya, the companys founder.

On Thursday, the Progressive Turnout Project, a political action committee that supports liberal candidates, announced a nearly $3 million investment in phone banking that aims to leverage up to 12 million calls from volunteers to lower-propensity Democratic voters before Election Day in November.

The more impersonal the mode, the less effective youre going to get, said Alex Morgan, the groups executive director. So while it is great that a bunch of groups are hopping onto text messages and digital, thats more distant than you and I having a conversation right now.

But progressives are also hoping that their message of big ideas has a new resonance in this moment of crisis. In interviews, group leaders said they were confident the pandemic had strengthened their calls for systemic change by exposing cracks in the countrys economy and health care system.

Ms. Litman said Run for Something, even with looming financial questions, had seen interest from prospective local candidates hold steady throughout March. Rahna Epting, the executive director of the progressive group MoveOn, said its membership had grown by more than one million in March.

What were seeing is that the energy that normally we would funnel into physical protests and physical action, the energy is there and its growing exponentially, she said.

On Sunday, the Working Families Party held its first digital rally, with appearances from the Rev. William J. Barber II and Stacey Abrams, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Georgia in 2018 and now leads the voting rights group Fair Fight Action. Working Families plans to hold its May convention remotely.

You know, it took me some time to get my parents FaceTiming with me in a way that made sense, said Maurice Mitchell, the national director of Working Families. And I think thats happening on a broader level where people have different fluency with different types of technology. Were all kind of learning together.

Original post:
Progressives Built an Organizing Juggernaut for 2020. Then the Virus Hit. - The New York Times

Progressive groups that haven often been aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders are pushing Joe Biden to keep Wall Street executives and business leaders from being part of his administration if he wins the presidency.

While the former vice president has said he has not started speaking with possible members of his potential cabinet, he recently told donors that he has been discussing with his advisors who he would ask to join his administration. Biden is currently in the process of considering candidates to be his vice presidential running mate.

After Sanders dropped out of the race Wednesday, several progressive groups signed a letter to Biden calling on him to pledge that he will not appoint leaders on Wall Street and K-Street, or those in the fossil fuel and health care industries to campaign advisory roles or to cabinet posts.

The letter, which can be found here, also calls on Biden to assign people who endorsed Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, another progressive, to be co-chairs of his prospective transition team. The groups also urge him to appoint advisors such as Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor who is an advocate for the "Green New Deal," to his National Economic Council. Stiglitz was reportedly on a list of advisors being pushed to Hillary Clinton by Warren in 2014 before the former secretary of State ran for president.

The groups signing the letter to Biden include Justice Democrats, Sunrise Movement and NextGen Action.

The progressive groups who spoke with CNBC said that if Biden does not follow these guidelines, he could suffer from low voter turnout in the general election and end up losing to Trump. One group is putting together opposition research against business leaders who are backing Biden's campaign.

"He needs to earn our trust," Waleed Shahid, a spokesman for Justice Democrats, told CNBC. "Personnel is policy, it's where the rubber meets the road in terms of your values and commitments."

Biden, for his part, seems to be trying to appeal to many of Sanders' supporters. He rolled out a plan on Thursday that would lower the Medicare eligibility age to 60 from 65, while also bolstering his student debt forgiveness plan hours after the Department of Labor releasednew data showing 6.6 million people filed initial jobless claims last week as the economy reels from the coronavirus.

Our Revolution, a 501(c)(4) organization founded by Sanders himself that backed his 2020 run for president told CNBC it is opposed to executives from the finance industry of becoming policy advisors to Biden now that he is the apparent nominee. The group did not sign the letter, but is looking into approaching his campaign.Sanders has been openly opposed to leaders in the finance industry playing any role in campaigns and in administrations.

"That's certainly not what we want to see," said Paco Fabian, Our Revolution's campaigns director. "I think it just increases the probability that their policy positions are the ones that get implemented and not the ones the folks on the progressive spectrum would be pushing for."

"At some point we probably will," when asked if they plan to reach out to the Biden campaign. "We haven't figured out the best way to do that and the main issues we are going to engage with the Biden campaign on."

Another group has started putting together opposition research on a host of Biden donors who work on Wall Street. The Revolving Door Project, which is part of the progressive think tank theCenter for Economic and Policy Research, has put together a research packet on Mark Gallogly, the co-founder of investment firm Centerbridge Partners, said the group's executive director, Jeff Hauser.

Gallogly has been helping Biden with fundraising for part of the election cycle and some donors have been privately discussing the idea of him being one of his economic advisors if he makes it into the White House. The opposition research cites reporting from CNBC, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Politico among others. It focuses on Gallogly's ties to Biden and reports on his firm's business ties to Puerto Rico.

Hauser noted that Jeffrey Zients, a former economic advisor to President Barack Obama who became the president of the Cranemere Group, and Tony James, the executive vice chairman at Blackstone, are two Biden supporters they are looking to do research on.

"I expect progressives have their own sort of critiques on how government works but less on revolvers, which they'll pick up from the research we do," Hauser said.

NextGen America, a super PAC founded and funded by billionaire Tom Steyer that has an army of grassroots get-out-the-vote activists, believes that in order for Biden to appeal to young voters he's going to have to make some compromises.

"We're going to work our ass off to get young people to the polls in November. You can throw all the money and time into that problem, but if you don't have a willing partner it's not going to be as effective as it could be," said Ben Wessel, the group's executive director.

A Biden spokesman did not return a request for comment.

More here:
'He needs to earn our trust:' Progressive groups begin push for Biden to keep Wall Street out of the White House - CNBC

In 2018, new progressive challengers such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.-14) and Ayanna Pressley (Mass.-07) made headlines when they defeated Democratic incumbents in hard-fought primaries. Marie Newmans March 17 victory against incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski in Illinoiss congressional primary was a welcomed relief for progressives who have been disappointed by Sanderss and other candidates performances in the preceding primary contests.

One group who supported the victories of Ocasio-Cortez, Pressley, and Newman is Justice Democrats, a progressive political action committee. In 2018, Justice Democrats endorsed 65 non-incumbent candidates in House races. Most of them did not mount liberal primary challenges, but rather ran to fill open (solidly Democratic) seats or against Republican incumbents. Justice Democrats also endorsed three sitting House members, who all won reelection. Overall, twenty-four candidates endorsed by Justice Democrats advanced to the general election, but only seven won in November 2018.

Writing for FixGov about the 2018 congressional primaries, Elaine Kamarck noted that among non-incumbent Democrats, establishment candidates won more of their primaries than progressives did. In short: the progressive record in 2018 was good but not great. But before Newmans win, 2020 did not even look good for progressives.

Of the eight non-incumbent candidates Justice Democrats has endorsed in 2020 House races, there are three whose primary contests have occurred: Jessica Cisneros in Texas-28, Georgette Gomez in Calif.-53, and Marie Newman in Ill.-03. Only Newman placed first against her opponents.

Jessica Cisneros, a 26-year-old immigration attorney challenged Rep. Henry Cuellar, the eight-term Blue Dog incumbent from South Texas. Cuellar is one of the few anti-abortion Democrats in the House and has an A rating from the National Rifle Association. His opponent dubbed him Trumps favorite Democrat and publicized that he voted with the president nearly 70 percent of the time in the last Congress.

Cisneros supported Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and gun control measures. In addition to the endorsement from Justice Democrats, she racked up high-profile support from Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Reps. Pressley and Ocasio-Cortez, as well as EMILYs List, the Sunrise Movement, and many unions. Despite this, Cisneros lost to Cuellar by fewer than 3,000 votesabout 3.6 percentage points.

Another Justice Democrat, San Diego City Council President Georgette Gomez, ran behind former Hillary Clinton campaign advisor Sara Jacobs by about 17,000 votes in the race to fill the seat of Rep. Susan Davis (Calif.-53), who is retiring after this term.

Gomez, too, had the endorsements of Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Sanders. But her opponent ran a liberal campaign promoting universal health coverage, gun control, and immigration reform. One important difference between Gomez and Jacobs was their campaign financing: Jacobs, the granddaughter of the founder of a multibillion-dollar telecommunications equipment company, self-funded much of her nearly $2 million campaign. She also received support from a Super PAC underwritten by her grandparents. Gomez, who relied on her community organizing and local government experience, spent less than $600,000 campaigning according to FEC data as of February 12.

Gomez secured only 19 percent of the vote to Jacobss 30 percent as of this writing, but Californias jungle primary system allows them both to advance to the general election regardless of party. However, the congressional primary results suggest that the Justice Democrats candidate is unlikely to secure a majority of the district in November.

In contrast, Marie Newmans victory over Rep. Dan Lipinski in the Illinois congressional primary on March 17 was a win for progressivesand the first for Justice Democrats this primary season. Rep. Lipinskis opposition to abortion and marriage equality put him to the right of most centrist Democrats. He has represented Illinoiss 3rd congressional district since 2005, when he took over the seat after his fathers 23-year tenure in the House.

While Lipinski and Newmans contest could be a ray of hope for upcoming progressive downballot races, there are some important caveats. First, Newman was able to build on the progressive momentum she rallied in her 2018 primary challenge to Lipinski. But importantly, she actually won with a smaller share of the vote this year than she earned in 2018. Newman won 47.3 percent against Lipinskis 44.6 percent this March, but in 2018 they held 48.8 percent and 51.1 percent respectively. This is attributed to Lipinski and Newmans two new challengers who together secured 8.1 percenta small share of the vote, but enough to cut into the more popular candidates margins. Newman represents a win for Justice Democrats, but it may not be one that is easy to replicate.

There are at least five more congressional primaries Justice Democrats is focused on: Nebraskas 2nd district (currently held by Republican Don Bacon); Missouris 1st district; New Yorks 16th district; Ohios 3rd congressional district; and Massachusettss 1st district. Kara Eastman in Nebraska and Cori Bush in Missouri are repeat challengers, but they have larger margins to close than Newman overcame.

The remaining candidates all face uphill battles against Democratic incumbents in their primaries, which will occur between June and September. Justice Democrats recruited Jamaal Brown for a difficult challenge to Rep. Elliot Engel (N.Y.-16), who has served for over 20 years. Morgan Harper will face off with four-term incumbent Joyce Beatty (Ohio-03). Alex Morse aims to unseat Rep. Richard Neal (Mass.-01), whose initial refusal to subpoena President Trumps tax returns in 2019 may make his seat more vulnerable than it was in 2018.

Progressives underperformance in the 2020 presidential race and early congressional primaries could validate arguments like those from Cuellars neighboring representative Vicente Gonzalez (Texas-15) who called primary challenges like Cisneross a monumental waste of resources that could have been used to keep more blue seatsand gain some.

Most congressional primary contests occur in the summer and some of those scheduled to take place earlier have been postponed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, which means it will be at least a few months before Democrats can determine whether Newmans victory was the exception to an establishment trend or is indicative of a broader return on progressive investment.

Note: The original version of this post stated that Jessica Cisneros was endorsed by Rep. Ilhan Omar, but as of publication that has not taken place.

Go here to see the original:
How have progressives fared in the 2020 congressional primaries? - Brookings Institution

GOOD MORNING, MASSACHUSETTS. TGIF!

THE BATTLE FOR THE PROGRESSIVES Sen. Ed Markey is touting an endorsement from Progressive Mass this morning, a statewide group that says 96 percent of its members prefer him to Rep. Joe Kennedy III.

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Beyond being a boost for Markey, the progressive endorsement illustrates a point of tension between Markey and Kennedy in the Senate primary. Their supporters and staffers often go back-and-forth over which of the two Democrats is more progressive.

Markeys supporters insist the incumbent is more progressive, pointing to his work on the Green New Deal in particular, and cast Kennedy as a moderate. Kennedys campaign often pushes back.

Just objectively not true, Kennedy spokesperson Emily Kaufman wrote on Twitter in March, pointing to an analysis of Kennedy's voting record by the database ProgressivePunch. And the campaign has taken it a step further, pointing out Markeys past positions on the Iraq War and the 1994 crime bill. He aint no Bernie, Kaufman wrote of Markey.

For Progressive Massachusetts, the endorsement boiled down to Markey being earlier to progressive issues like Medicare for All, said member Jonathan Cohn. You want to have people you can count on to be with you, rather than people that you spend a lot of time pressuring, Cohn said.

Despite the battle for the progressive title, its not a guarantee that primary voters will even want a progressive candidate when they cast ballots in September. When it comes to Medicare for All, for example, Democratic voters in Massachusetts arent exactly sold. Only 28 percent of likely Democratic presidential primary voters said they preferred that health care option, according to a WBUR poll from the fall.

And Massachusetts voters rejected progressive candidates on Super Tuesday. Former Vice President Joe Biden won the Democratic primary here in an upset, even as polls showed the two progressives Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders tied for the prize days before the election.

Biden won 34 percent of the vote, while Sanders got 27 percent and Warren got 21 percent. A caveat: combining Sanders and Warrens vote totals would have put the two progressives ahead of Biden in terms of vote share. Either way, Cohn is taking Super Tuesday with a grain of salt.

People approach elections at different levels somewhat differently, Cohn said. There was probably a certain sentiment by Super Tuesday among some voters who wanted the primary to be over so they could focus on taking out Trump, which is less of a dynamic when it comes to the September primary.

Have a tip, story, suggestion, birthday, anniversary, new job, or any other nugget for the Playbook? Get in touch: [emailprotected]

TODAY Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell is a guest on WGBHs Boston Public Radio. Rep. Ayanna Pressley is a guest on WGBHs Basic Black.

Coronavirus in Massachusetts: 70 more COVID-19 deaths as toll passes 500; state now releasing racial and ethnic data, by Tanner Stening, MassLive.com: The death toll associated with coronavirus stands at 503 after health officials announced 70 new fatalities on Thursday. The number of statewide COVID-19 cases increased to 18,941, up 2,151 from Wednesday.

New unemployment claims dip as state's jobless rate rises, by Christian M. Wade, The Salem News: The number of first-time unemployment claims dipped slightly in the past week, even as the state's unemployment rate jumped to its highest level in years. There were 139,582 new jobless claims filed in Massachusetts for the week that ended April 4, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Labor on Thursday. Overall, at least 468,639 new benefits claims have been filed by Massachusetts workers in the past three weeks.

Reports of child abuse and neglect are plummeting across New England. Thats not a good thing, by Matt Stout, Boston Globe: In a normal week in March, Massachusetts officials can be bombarded with thousands of allegations of children being left unsupervised, beaten, or worse. But, almost overnight, those reports have been sliced by more than half. Child welfare workers who spend their nights hustling to emergency calls are seeing far fewer. None of that is good news.

Baker allows foreign-trained doctors to practice here, by Sarah Betancourt, CommonWealth Magazine: The Baker administration on Thursday announced several executive orders to support the health care workforce and expand its capacity, including easing licensing restrictions for foreign-educated doctors. One order allows graduates of international medical schools who have successfully completed at least two years of postgraduate resident medical training to be eligible for licensure in the Commonwealth.

Students might not return to classes until fall, by Christian M. Wade, The Salem News: As parents get used to their children learning at home and school districts struggle to expand remote learning, school administrators are becoming increasingly skeptical that students will return for the rest of the school year. Schools across the state remain closed until May 4 under an executive order issued by Gov. Charlie Baker aimed at preventing the spread of COVID-19.

Coronavirus Surge Overwhelms State Unemployment System As Officials Scramble To Keep Up, by Tori Bedford, WGBH News: As the state anxiously waits to see whether a surge of coronavirus patients will swamp the hospital system, waves of newly unemployed workers have already swamped the state's unemployment system, leaving thousands with neither paychecks nor answers. Massachusetts Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Rosalin Acosta promised listeners on a telephone town hall Monday that help would be coming for tens of thousands of unemployment applicants she just couldnt quite say when.

Massachusetts Attorney Generals office investigating complaints of personal protective equipment price gouging, by Melissa Hanson, MassLive.com: As doctors and nurses at UMass Memorial work to treat COVID-19 patients, the health care systems CEO said the system has fallen victim to price gouging of protective gear. UMass Memorial Health Care, like hospital systems across the country, is struggling to make sure there is enough personal protective gear, or PPE, for doctors, nurses and staff responding to the COVID-19 crisis, CEO Dr. Eric Dickson has said.

Senate bill would cancel MCAS test this year, by Anastasia E. Lennon, The Patriot Ledger: The Senate has approved a proposal that would waive MCAS testing for the rest of the school year because of disruptions and school closures caused by the coronavirus pandemic. The Senates version of the bill includes changes to the House version, which calls for Education Commissioner Jeff Riley to either modify or waive the standardized test requirement this year.

Chelsea city manager sounds urgent alarm, calls for residents to stay home 24 hours a day, by John R. Ellement, Boston Globe: Chelsea is the epicenter of the coronavirus outbreak and residents should now shift to a voluntary 24-hour-a-day curfew to slow the spread of the disease in the city, where 387 people have the illness and at least 10 have died, including five at the Chelsea Soldiers Home, the city manager said Thursday. These are desperate times,' said City Manager Thomas Ambrosino in a telephone interview.

MBTA Worker Dies From COVID-19, Union Says, by Zeninjor Enwemeka, WBUR: An MBTA employee has died from COVID-19, according to the Boston Carmen's Union. The T's largest union says Andrew Wong passed away last Tuesday after testing positive for COVID-19. Wong worked for the transit agency for 22 years and was an inspector at the Southampton Garage, according to the union.

Psychological, economic toll piling up, by Steve Koczela, CommonWealth Magazine: A perfect storm of economic, social, and political crises brought on by coronavirus are battering Massachusetts residents. The economic devastation is spreading, with 20 percent reporting losing a job since the crisis began, and a third of those still employed losing a portion of their paycheck. The worst of the damage is among those with the least to lose, with lower income, hourly, and part time workers reporting the greatest setbacks.

Troubling signs at state elder care facilities, by Bruce Mohl, CommonWealth Magazine: The number of coronavirus cases at the states nursing homes continued to mount dramatically on Thursday, amid troubling warnings from industry officials and explosive charges from the former head of the Holyoke Soldiers Home that he notified Baker administration officials about the spread of the deadly virus at his facility and received no assistance to fight it.

Early Boston Data Shows Disturbing Racial Disparities In COVID-19 Infections, by Isaiah Thompson, WGBH News: New data released by Boston officials Thursday suggests that African American and Latino residents have contracted the COVID-19 virus at substantially higher rates than Whites. City officials cautioned that the data does not give a full picture of COVID-19 infections by race in Boston.

God certainly understands': Marty Walsh urges Bostonians to stay home for Passover, Easter Sunday, by Christopher Gavin, Boston.com: Mayor Marty Walsh will not be seeing his mother this Easter Sunday the first time they have spent the holiday apart. But Walsh said hes doing so out of necessity as the region braces for an expected surge in COVID-19 cases, and hes urging other Bostonians keep their distance from relatives and loved ones, too, during the Passover and Easter observances.

Mass. To Launch Spanish Language Unemployment Site, by Simn Rios, WBUR: The Mass. Department of Unemployment Assistance will launch a web platform that will allow the hundreds of thousands of Spanish speakers in Massachusetts apply for benefits in their native language. With a skyrocketing number of people applying for unemployment, the department has come under fire for having a monolingual online application system, including claims that the English-only system could open the state to liability under federal civil rights law.

The coronavirus undercut these candidates efforts to get on the ballot in Massachusetts. Now, theyre suing. by Nik DeCosta-Klipa, Boston.com: The three plaintiffs are different candidates with different hurdles. However, their signature-gathering efforts have followed identical paths; the coronavirus has turned a requirement that in most years would be a formality into a major roadblock to the ballot.

Coronavirus prompts federal judge to order release of at least 33 immigrant detainees in Massachusetts, by Steph Solis, MassLive.com: U.S. District Court Judge William Young on Thursday ordered the release of 16 immigrants from detention centers in Massachusetts to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. The latest decision brings the total of released detainees to 33, according to Lawyers for Civil Rights, one of the plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit calling for their release during the coronavirus pandemic.

Neal: 60 Million Stimulus Checks Expected To Go Out Monday, by Arjun Singh, WGBH News: Americans who earn less than $99,000 a year can expect to receive stimulus checks from the federal government beginning Monday, Rep. Richard Neal said Thursday on Boston Public Radio. As Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Neal had significant influence over the language that was put into the stimulus bill. Neal said 60 million checks are expected to go out Monday.

Mass. marijuana regulators table vote on retail licenses for The Botanist after Acreage Holdings restructures contracts with affiliates, by Melissa Hanson, MassLive.com: State cannabis regulators have again tabled a vote on provisional retail licenses for The Botanist following restructuring by its owner, conglomerate Acreage Holdings, Inc. The Botanists applications for retail stores in Worcester and Shrewsbury were initially up for a vote by the Cannabis Control Commission in February, but the vote was tabled so staff could investigate Acreages ownership and control of other companies and whether a license cap would be violated.

Herald: DATA FLOW: Mass. team will study U.S. sewage to map real Covid spread Globe: Reports of child abuse drop, but DCF wary; Nursing homes struggled with infections

Coronavirus at Holyoke Soldiers Home: State got daily updates after first COVID-19 case identified, suspended superintendent says, by Cynthia G. Simison, Springfield Republican: From the time the first resident of the Soldiers Home in Holyoke tested positive on March 21 for the COVID-19 coronavirus, the homes leadership provided daily reports to multiple state agencies, says Bennett W. Walsh, the suspended superintendent. Walsh, in a statement issued today on his behalf by former Hampden district attorney William M. Bennett, also says he requested National Guard assistance at the home on March 27 and was denied.

New Bedford establishes coronavirus recovery centers in former nursing homes, by Kiernan Dunlop, The Standard-Times: The city is preparing for the possibility of a surge of patients with COVID-19 from throughout the region who need medical care but cant be accommodated by local hospitals. New Bedford Mayor Jon Mitchell, joined by Fall River Mayor Paul Coogan, announced Thursday that two former nursing homes in the Whaling City will act as Southeastern Massachusetts Regional Care Centers for those recovering from the coronavirus.

Framingham schools impose hiring freeze amid financial uncertainty caused by coronavirus crisis, by Zane Razzaq, MetroWest Daily News: The school district imposed a full and immediate hiring freeze for this school year, as financial uncertainty clouds the upcoming fiscal year. Lincoln Lynch IV, executive director of Finance and Operations, outlined the plan in a April 3 memo to the districts administrative council.

Wilmington officials ask state for assistance as nursing facilities report more COVID-19 cases, by Emma Murphy: Lowell Sun: After seven people died from COVID-19 at skilled nursing facility AdviniaCare, where a total of 84 residents are infected, town officials are requesting assistance from the COVID Command Center, Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Public Health.

Worcester field hospital, pandemic provide lessons and legacy, UMass hospital chief says, by Steven H. Foskett Jr., Telegram & Gazette: The field hospital at the DCU center set up to accept overflow cases of COVID-19 became operational at 7 a.m. Thursday. At 7:01 a.m., it got its first call, and later in the day, staff were in discussions with Boston-area medical centers about transferring patients, said Dr. Eric W. Dickson, president and chief executive officer of UMass Memorial Health Care, which is overseeing the facilitys operation

WELCOME TO THE WORLD: Newton City Councilor and congressional candidate Jake Auchincloss and his wife Michelle welcomed their first child Teddy on Wednesday night.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, Max Clermont, and Elaina Nigro.

HAPPY BIRTHWEEKEND to former Boston City Councilor Tito Jackson, Henry Gass, Matt Tannenbaum, Kevin Gilnack, Ted Dooley, Todd Domke, and most importantly my wonderful mom Darlene Murray, who all celebrate Saturday. And to Sunday birthday-ers Romneycare and Dan Manning.

NEW EPISODE: FLOUR POWER - On this weeks Horse Race podcast, hosts Steve Koczela, Jennifer Smith and Stephanie Murray speak with Northampton Mayor David Narkewicz about the coronavirus pandemic. Subscribe and listen on iTunes and Sound Cloud or watch the Zoom video.

Want to make an impact? POLITICO Massachusetts has a variety of solutions available for partners looking to reach and activate the most influential people in the Bay State. Have a petition you want signed? A cause youre promoting? Seeking to increase brand awareness among this key audience? Share your message with our influential readers to foster engagement and drive action. Contact Jesse Shapiro to find out how: [emailprotected].

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The battle for the PROGRESSIVE label CHELSEA emerges as 'EPICENTER,' calls for 24 hour curfew How to finish the SCHOOL YEAR - Politico

Last week, while most journalists and intellectuals were focused on responding to the global pandemic and looming economic depression, a significant number of writers on both the right and left were busy absorbing and formulating criticisms of what may well prove to be the most important essay written by a conservative thinker in many years.

The importance of Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule's "Common Good Constitutionalism," published by The Atlantic, is not a function of originality. Plenty of legal theorists have made similar arguments in the past. When I was an editor at the conservative religious magazine First Things back in 2003, we published an essay by an obscure academic that tentatively advanced similar claims but we ran it paired with a stinging rebuttal by none other than Robert Bork, a legend in conservative legal circles. Seventeen years later, the views Bork eviscerated are being advanced in a far more cogent and confident way in the pages of a prominent centrist magazine by an author ensconced in one of the country's foremost elite institutions hoping to influence the dozens of judges recently appointed to the federal courts by a right-wing populist president.

Times have certainly changed. But Vermeule hopes to change them quite a lot more.

His primary target is "originalism" the view, long favored on the right, that jurists ought to defer in their legal interpretations and decisions to the meaning of the Constitution that prevailed at the time of its drafting and ratification, even if doing so cuts against the policy preferences favored by present-day ideological conservatives. In its place, Vermeule proposes a "substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation" that would not hesitate to empower the legislators and judges to promulgate and enforce a comprehensive notion of the "common good" rooted in "objective natural morality," even if there is little warrant for doing so in the text of the Constitution itself. Instead of flinching from the charge that conservatives aim to use the law to "legislate morality," Vermeule wants conservatives to do precisely that, with conviction and without apology.

But the importance of Vermeule's essay also derives from the author's deft attacks on and selective appropriation of progressive legal assumptions. This is something that many of Vermeule's early critics have missed. Convinced that his ideas are potentially dangerous (they are), these critics rush to denounce and call him names (fascist!) while failing to realize that the most ominous passages of his essay reproduce and deploy for right-wing ends widely shared progressive arguments and assertions about the legitimacy of using law to advance and enforce comprehensive moral views.

In trying to make headway against Vermeule's legal project, one option is to concede these shared progressive/conservative premises and do battle over which of the two comprehensive moral views deserves to triumph. But there is another alternative, which is to take a stand on different ground the ground of liberal pluralism by rejecting those shared illiberal premises.

So many passages in Vermeule's essay seem designed to provoke progressives that it's easy to miss how much they reproduce progressive claims. Take the line of argument found roughly halfway through the essay, where Vermeule asserts that "common good constitutionalism" does not aim at maximizing "individual autonomy" or minimizing "the abuse of power," and neither does it "suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy" because it accepts that law is "parental, a wise teacher, and an inculcator of good habits." This leads to one of the most striking passages in the essay one that sounds remarkably like an impatient dismissal of the need for democratic legitimacy and a full-throated endorsement of political authoritarianism.

Just authority in rulers can be exercised for the good of subjects, if necessary even against the subjects' own perceptions of what is best for them perceptions that may change over time anyway, as the law teaches, habituates, and re-forms them. Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being. [The Atlantic]

The authoritarianism seems as novel as it is alarming at least until one realizes that a long line of progressive jurisprudence stretching from President Woodrow Wilson down to legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin and beyond makes nearly identical assumptions about the relationship of constitutional law to democratic majoritarianism. Think especially of progressive Supreme Court decisions on abortion and same-sex marriage that overturned democratically enacted law in states across the country. Or anti-discrimination law and efforts to use it to enforce conformity to progressive views on race, sexuality, gender, and related issues, even when doing so forces churches, schools, and businesses run by traditionalist religious believers to adjust what they say and claim to believe in public.

The case in favor of upholding and enforcing such laws is that a higher standard of morality (and maybe its emanations and penumbras within the text of the Constitution) demands it and those who resist or oppose this standard have no right to do so. They are bigots who will eventually come to realize that progressives were right and they were wrong. Which is exactly what Vermeule thinks conservative jurists and lawyers should say to those many Americans who would strenuously object, for instance, to a Supreme Court ruling that overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) and Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and perhaps also acted to ground fetal personhood from the time of conception in the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Because I'm very much at home in "blue" America, I would be far more comfortable living in a country in which the progressive construal of what morality demands was uniformly upheld and enforced by law than I would be in the uniformly pro-life and sexually traditionalist country that Vermeule and other staunch conservatives prefer.

But far better than either absolute extreme would be an America in which the law recognized, reflected, and took its cues from the truth of pluralism. This doesn't imply the denial of a common good. What it denies is that the common good is obvious or simple. Every side of every dispute in our politics is dominated by people trying to advance their construal of the common good against opponents who have their own different views of it.

This jostling and clashing of competing views of the common good is what politics is like everywhere people are free to try their hands at governing themselves, as anyone who has read Book III of Aristotle's Politics is well aware. The main fissure that Aristotle noted in the city states of his time was the clash between the many who were poor and the few who were wealthy. Each class understood the common good in very different ways, and the best that most cities could hope for was a balancing and moderation of each view against the other to form a relatively peaceful and thriving polity.

Our political communities are far larger and far more diverse. Our disagreements are rooted in demographics, as were the ones of Aristotle's time, but the fissures are much more numerous now: class, but also ethnicity, religion, race, age, and others. A few of us, like Vermeule, are conservative Catholics who view the common good in one way. Other Catholics view it somewhat differently. As do white conservative Protestants, white liberal Protestants, black Protestants, Jews, Mormons, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and secular Americans ranging from "spiritual but not religious" to atheist. Add in hierarchies of wealth and education and regionalisms and ideology and many other differences and you end up with a multitude of disparate views about how to define and achieve the good of all 330 million Americans.

Faced with this tableau of pluralistic diversity, a would-be authoritarian like Vermeule will tend to deny its significance just as a progressive might be unmoved by being told that many millions of Americans don't share his outlook on gay marriage or transgenderism. Sure, people disagree about the good, both camps would say, but if they thought about it as they should, and if the law nudged them along in the right direction, they would eventually come around. Morality is unified and simple, and under the right set of norms and institutions, everyone can be made to acknowledge and affirm it as one.

The great liberal political theorist Isaiah Berlin called this view "monism," and he considered it a recipe for tyranny not simply because all political communities larger than a small village have too much diversity to be brought around to affirming a single view of the common good without employing coercion, but also because morality itself isn't unified and simple.

Berlin was a moral pluralist, which has implications that go far beyond the banal point that public opinion in nation states is diverse. Berlin's pluralism maintains that our experience of the world tells us there are many objectively good ideals or ends freedom (in its multiple senses), equality, communal solidarity, piety, justice, to name just a few and that they inevitably clash with each other. The liberty of a gay couple to marry, for example, will clash with the piety and communal solidarity of the bakery owner who doesn't want to be forced to bake a cake for the wedding ceremony. And of course both sides appeal to conflicting notions of justice as well.

The simple triumph of either side in this conflict represents a real loss. A liberal will be sensitive to the cost and the civically poisonous consequences of one side being forced to pay it and will therefore seek to achieve compromise and accommodation whenever possible, using every available means, including appeals to federalism and the crafting of highly nuanced and narrow court decisions that carve out space for different ways of life to flourish as much as possible.

Berlin's pluralistic liberalism teaches us how to live together in pursuit of the common good while honestly facing up and striving to do justice to the irreducible complexity of moral reality.

Adrian Vermeule's monistic authoritarianism, like that of the progressives he mimics, is something else entirely perhaps its polar opposite. It's an especially vivid example of the troubling tendency of leading writers on all sides of our ideological divides to indulge in the politically pernicious fantasy that they can make Americans who disagree with them disappear.

For those who realize the dangerous futility of such indulgences, a better option awaits us in the liberal tradition. If only we will seek it out.

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When conservatives interpret the Constitution like progressives - The Week