A Capitol Police officer has died of injuries inflicted by the pro-Trump mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday. The death of Officer Brian Sicknick underlines the seriousness of the terrifying stories coming out from people who were in the Capitol, or in contact with people in the Capitol, during the terrorist assault on it.
According to a statement, “Officer Sicknick was responding to the riots on Wednesday, January 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol and was injured while physically engaging with protesters. He returned to his division office and collapsed. He was taken to a local hospital where he succumbed to his injuries” around 9:30 PM Thursday. Sicknick is the fifth person to die as a result of the attack. His death is being investigated as a murder by the U.S. attorney’s office.
The stories coming from people who lived through it show the atmosphere of violence in which Sicknick was killed. The governors of Maryland and Virginia have recounted the calls from congressional leaders pleading for help, but, strikingly, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan’s story involves having to tell House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer that he didn’t yet have permission to deploy the National Guard.
”I was actually on the phone with Leader Hoyer who was pleading with us to send the guard,” Hogan said. “He was yelling across the room to Schumer and they were back and forth saying we do have the authorization and I’m saying, ‘I’m telling you we do not have the authorization.’” The leader of the Maryland National Guard had to ask for authorization repeatedly, and it was only 90 minutes later that the authorization came, not through the usual channels.
Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam described getting a direct personal call from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who he doesn’t know well and would normally arrange a call through their respective staffs. “She said they needed help, and I assured her that we had deployed the Guard and we’d sent the Virginia State Police. She said: ‘Ralph there’s glass being broken around me. I’ve heard there’s been gunfire. We’re just very, very concerned right now.’”
New York Times journalists who were in the Capitol described their harrowing experiences, with one, photographer Erin Schaff, having been assaulted and robbed by Trump’s terrorist mob.
”Suddenly, two or three men in black surrounded me and demanded to know who I worked for,” she wrote. “Grabbing my press pass, they saw that my ID said The New York Times and became really angry. They threw me to the floor, trying to take my cameras. I started screaming for help as loudly as I could. No one came. People just watched. At this point, I thought I could be killed and no one would stop them. They ripped one of my cameras away from me, broke a lens on the other and ran away.”
That assault left her wandering the Capitol without the credentials identifying her as press, and ultimately she was held at gunpoint by police and only let go when other journalists saw and told the police she was a journalist.
Emily Cochrane, a Times reporter, describes Rep. Ruben Gallego “jacketless, standing on a chair and yelling instructions on how to use the masks” as people in the House chamber were told to be prepared to put on emergency hoods.
As account after account makes clear, this was absolutely a terrorist attack—and a deadly one. And the terrorists were gently escorted out of the site of their attack by police, leaving anything approaching justice for later, after they’ve dispersed to their homes.
The Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest is compiled by David Nir, Jeff Singer, Matt Booker, and Carolyn Fiddler, with additional contributions from David Jarman, Steve Singiser, Daniel Donner, James Lambert, David Beard, and Arjun Jaikumar.
Leading Off
●RI-Gov:The New York Times reported Thursday that Joe Biden would nominate Democratic Gov. Gina Raimondo to serve as secretary of commerce. Democratic Lt. Gov. Dan McKee would become the new governor if Raimondo, who was to be termed-out of office this cycle, is confirmed by the U.S. Senate.
McKee had said last month that he planned to run in 2022 to succeed Raimondo, so there’s little question that he’d seek a full term next year. McKee, though, could still be in for a difficult primary even with the power of incumbency on his side. Indeed, back in 2018, McKee won renomination only 51-49 against state Rep. Aaron Regunberg, a progressive who accused the incumbent of accepting “dark money” from PACs. Regunberg himself is preparing to run for lieutenant governor again, but McKee may need to worry about other Democrats who had intended to compete in what was expected to be an open seat race to succeed Raimondo.
McKee and Raimondo also have a notoriously distant relationship, so much so that, as the Providence Journal‘s Katherine Gregg wrote last month, he’s been reduced to delivering letters to his nominal boss—which go unanswered. Things may get a whole lot less awkward in state government if Raimondo goes to Washington, but the governor’s allies at home may not be keen to help McKee win the nomination.
Rhode Island, while a solidly blue state in federal elections, has been willing to sending Republicans to the governor’s office, and a bruising Democratic primary could give Team Red a larger opening. Outgoing Cranston Mayor Allan Fung reportedly has been mulling a third bid for office: Raimondo beat Fung only 41-36 in the 2014 open seat race, though she prevailed by a decisive 53-37 in their 2018 rematch.
Governors
●IL-Gov: Outgoing state Sen. Paul Schimpf confirmed this week that he was considering seeking the Republican nomination to take on Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker. Schimpf was Team Red’s nominee for attorney general in 2014, a contest he lost 59-38 to Democratic incumbent Lisa Madigan. Schimpf won another term in the legislature from his southwestern Illinois seat two years later, and he decided to retire in 2020.
House
●LA-02: Gov. John Bel Edwards announced Wednesday that he had received Democratic Rep. Cedric Richmond’s resignation letter and was scheduling the special election to succeed him for the same dates as the contest to replace the late Republican Rep.-elect Luke Letlow in the 5th District. Richmond, who will join the Biden White House, set his departure from Congress for Jan. 15.
The filing deadline will be Jan. 22, and all the candidates will compete in a March 20 all-party primary in this heavily Democratic seat. If no one takes a majority of the vote then the top two vote-getters, regardless of party, would compete in an April 24 runoff.
Mayors
●Boston, MA Mayor: Politico reported Thursday that Joe Biden had selected Boston Mayor Marty Walsh to serve as his secretary of labor. If Walsh is confirmed by the U.S. Senate, City Council President Kim Janey would take over as acting mayor. Janey, who is Black, would be the first woman or person of color to lead Boston. Both Walsh and Janey, just like every notable elected official in Boston, are Democrats.
Janey’s ascension could also dramatically shake up this year’s mayoral race. Two fellow city councilors, Andrea Campbell and Michelle Wu, had each announced last year that they’d challenge Walsh, whom politicos widely expected to seek a third term. It remains to be seen, though, what they’d do if Janey became mayor and decided to run in her own right.
It’s very possible that Walsh’s absence in the race would entice others to get in. Indeed, Politico’s Stephanie Murray reports that another member of the 13-person City Council, Annissa Essaibi George, is considering a bid. The Boston Globe’s Matt Stout reports that state Rep. Aaron Michlewitz, who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, is also thinking about running.
Boston hasn’t ousted an incumbent mayor since 1949, when John Hynes defeated the legendary and controversial incumbent James Michael Curley. There’s only one instance during the following seven decades of an acting mayor seeking a full term, but it bodes well for Janey. City Council President Thomas Menino assumed the city’s top job in July of 1991 after Mayor Raymond Flynn resigned to become the Clinton administration’s ambassador to the Vatican, and Menino took first place just two months later amidst a crowded field. Menino decisively won the general election that year and left office in 2014 as the city’s longest-serving mayor.
It remains to be seen when the voters will next go to the polls. City Clerk Maureen Feeney says that, should Walsh resign before March 5, the City Council could call a special election this year for the final months of his term.
No matter, what, though, the regularly scheduled contest for a four-year term will take place this year. All the candidates will run on one nonpartisan ballot in September, with the top two vote-getters advancing to a November general election; candidates cannot avert a second round of voting by winning a majority in the first round, which is known locally as the preliminary election.
●Fort Worth, TX Mayor: Prominent attorney Dee Kelly said this week that he would not run to succeed retiring Republican Mayor Betsy Price in May.
●Seattle, WA Mayor: City Councilwoman Teresa Mosqueda announced this week that she would run for reelection rather than compete in this year’s race to succeed retiring Democratic Mayor Jenny Durkan.
Well that was just absolutely, positively, shocking, that President Trump’s supporters would actually put his words into action. Is there any doubt now that Trump incites violence?
How many times has the Denier-in-Chief backed down from incendiary comments by saying he’s kidding or was misquoted? He can start the violence yet seems incapable of stopping it. Trump and his Republican allies have courted far-right nutballs for years and we now have the most blatant example of the fire they’re playing with.
Remember, Trump isn’t the only one behind this. Scores of leading Republicans are also to blame and have been fanning the flames for months — and are at this very moment helping the president overturn the will of the voters.
Here we were hoping all this awfulness would stay back in 2020. Enjoy the cartoon, and join me over on Patreon to help support my work and get yourself some goodies!
Facebook and Instagram have banned Donald Trump, and Twitter has frozen his account. Sen Schumer and Speaker Pelosi have called for the 25th Amendment, or failing that, impeachment.
Elaine Chou and Betsy DeVos have resigned (too cowardly to invoke the 25th?). And Donald Trump is sorry as the House moves to impeach.
I have received so much anger from old friends at NPR and the NYT for warning them, telling them, and, yes, sometimes publicly tweeting about how their coverage is normalizing Trump and his followers, legitimizing their lies and downplaying the crisis.
Yesterday’s crisis was created by Trump and his followers.
And yesterday showed that many journalists are willing to state that some actions by an elected leader are unacceptable.
But they will return to institutional cowardice.
☀️Punchbowl AM — 🚨House Dems are moving rapidly toward impeaching @realDonaldTrump again. It will easily pass the House. Pelosi is furious. Question is will Senate Republicans flip. Noon House Dem call today. pic.twitter.com/3TCY0p4Xuq
“That is the overwhelming sentiment of my caucus,” from her presser yesterday.
Elaine Chao’s resignation, and her husband Mitch McConnell’s break with Trump bring to mind what Ruth Ben-Ghiat, authoritarian expert, and author of “Strongmen” calls “The phenomenon of elite defection in the end, when their personal safety is in peril.”
Internet detectives are identifying scores of pro-Trump rioters at the Capitol. Some have already been fired.
As he strolled past gold-framed portraits of past Congressional leaders, one rioter who stormed the Capitol in a pro-Trump mob on Wednesday wore a red Trump hat, a commemorative sweatshirt from the president’s inauguration and a lanyard around his neck.
When a photo of him went viral, it didn’t take Internet sleuths long to realize that the lanyard held his work badge— clearly identifying him as an employee of Navistar Direct Marketing, a printing company in Frederick, Md.
He’s not alone among the rioters who wreaked havoc in Congress. While police and the FBI work to identify and arrest members of the mob, online detectives are also crowdsourcing information and doxing them — exposing the rioters to criminal prosecution, but also more immediate action from their bosses.
We need to keep saying this: Democracy reform has to be the top priority for 2021. A fascist minority has used our political system to achieve disproportionate influence, powered by zero-sum demonization. This should never happen again.
Invoke the 25th Amendment: Donald Trump forfeited his moral authority to stay in office
Our View: By egging on a deadly insurrection and hailing the rioters, the president’s continuance in office poses unacceptable risks to America
This month, time is short, and Trump retains considerable support among congressional Republicans. Shamefully, even after Wednesday’s insurrection, 139 representatives and eight senators backed Trump’s efforts to overturn the will of the voters in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
That leaves the 25th Amendment, which sets out procedures for replacing an unfit president.
That sound you hear isn’t just Democrats cheering, it’s the air going out of tomorrow’s GOP clown show in Congress. The Fools on the Hill have picked the wrong cause and bet on the wrong horse. #GASenateRaces#SeditionCaucus
Biden climate team says it underestimated Trump’s damage
Some climate moves can’t happen until Biden officials remedy those deficiencies, a senior transition official said, because “those have been very carefully directed budget cuts to the very parts of the [EPA] that are going to be necessary to get rid of [Trump’s] outrageous rollbacks.”
For instance, the official said, EPA’s research laboratories have been hollowed out, and its science advisory boards have been depopulated. At the operational level, each of Trump’s rollbacks has shuffled the staff and funding that had been in place to carry out regulations.
The EPA workforce has shrunk by more than 600 people since the beginning of Trump’s term, another source familiar with the agency review process said.
That’s on top of the agency’s moves to restrict the kinds of public health research that EPA can use for regulations, and its watering down of the social cost of carbon, the government’s metric for analyzing the benefits of emissions cuts.
Joe Scarborough went off on Capitol police live on MSNBC: “You opened the fucking doors for em!” pic.twitter.com/4Ydd4Au8HN
The discussions occurred in recent weeks, and it was not clear whether he has brought it up since he incited supporters to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the site.
In several conversations since Election Day, Mr. Trump has told advisers that he is considering giving himself a pardon and, in other instances, asked whether he should and what the effect would be on him legally and politically, according to the two people. It was not clear whether he had broached the topic since he incited his supporters on Wednesday to march on the Capitol, where some stormed the building in a mob attack.
Mr. Trump has shown signs that his level of interest in pardoning himself goes beyond idle musings. He has long maintained he has the power to pardon himself, and his polling of aides’ views is typically a sign that he is preparing to follow through on his aims. He has also become increasingly convinced that his perceived enemies will use the levers of law enforcement to target him after he leaves office.
Answer to a q asked by many: It is unclear if acting secretaries count if 25th Amendment is invoked. Best if Pence had a majority of all the Cabinet, incl them, w a majority of confirmed secretaries. Remember, too, Congress can quickly designate another body instead of Cabinet!
In Los Angeles and Beyond, Oxygen Is the Latest Covid Bottleneck
It’s gotten so bad that Los Angeles County officials are warning paramedics to conserve it. Some hospitals are having to delay releasing patients as they don’t have enough oxygen equipment to send home with them.
“Everybody is worried about what’s going to happen in the next week or so,” said Cathy Chidester, director of the L.A. County Emergency Medical Services Agency.
The mastermind behind the implementation of the Muslim Ban has thoughts on how he would stand up to Trump now https://t.co/ntQAWAUU0M
Democrats are drafting new impeachment articles. Inaction is increasingly untenable.
Some Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating drafts of new articles of impeachment directed at President Trump for his role in inciting the violent mob assault on the Capitol, a Democratic aide tells me.
It’s unclear whether these will get a vote, or whether they’re intended to pressure members of Trump’s Cabinet to seriously consider removing Trump via the 25th Amendment. Judiciary Committee Democrats have already signed a letter urging Vice President Pence to proceed with that process.
And Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who will be senate majority leader in the new Congress, has now called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked, adding in a statement: “If the Vice President and the Cabinet refuse to stand up, Congress should reconvene to impeach the president.”
The new articles of impeachment circulating among House Judiciary Democrats argue that Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors and violated his oath to defend the Constitution and faithfully execute the office of the presidency by inciting Wednesday’s violence.
💯 For those of us who have covered Trump since 2016, it is hard to overstate how utterly inevitable and unsurprising yesterday’s insurrection felt. There was this amazing — disturbing — video we produced of racism and violence at Trump rallies. 👇(1/3) https://t.co/FCUwFmwdmH
Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy have led Republicans to disaster. They must go.
In 2016, Never Trumpers predicted that by nominating an ignorant and egomaniacal bigot, the Republican Party would lead the country and itself to ruin.
The consequences have proved far worse than even President Trump’s opponents could have predicted. Who, after all, could have imagined that more than 360,000 Americans would die during Trump’s last year in office because of his catastrophic mismanagement of a pandemic? Or that the U.S. Capitol would be invaded by a mob of Trump supporters?
But the political consequences for the Republican Party have not been as dire as they should have been. Until now.
Trump seems to have surrendered his ferocious effort to hang onto power after Congress formally accepted Biden’s victory but the nation’s government remained in disarray following a mob attack on the Capitol that struck at the heart of American democracy. https://t.co/PFfNX4dE8x
A new poll released in the aftermath of Wednesday’s violent coup attempt—incited by President Donald Trump and enabled by Republican lawmakers who questioned the legitimacy of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory—shows that nearly half of GOP voters approve of the pro-Trump mob’s storming of the U.S. Capitol, findings that observers say are inseparable from how right-wing media outlets are lying about the insurrection.
YouGov Direct conducted the survey on Wednesday night between 5:17 pm and 5:42 pm. A majority (62%) of the 1,397 registered voters who had heard about the day’s events told pollsters that they consider the pro-Trump mob’s actions a threat to democracy. But while 93% of Democrats and 55% of Independents perceive what happened as a threat to democracy, only 27% of Republicans see it that way.
In fact, a greater percentage of Republicans (45%) actively support the storming of the Capitol than oppose it (43%). Overall, 71% of registered voters are opposed to the coup attempt, including 96% of Democrats and 67% of Independents.
Among voters who erroneously believe that the presidential election was fraudulent enough to affect the outcome, 56% say the invasion of the halls of Congress was justified.
A majority of registered voters (55%), including 90% of Democrats and 51% of Independents, believe “a great deal of the blame” lies with Trump. Yet, in the eyes of GOP voters, President-elect Joe Biden is the biggest culprit, with 52% assigning some degree of blame to Biden compared to 28% attributing the debacle to Trump.
When it comes to removing Trump from office as a result of what happened at the Capitol—an option that is gaining support among federal lawmakers—50% of registered voters, including 83% of Democrats and 47% of Independents, are in favor. Conversely, 85% of Republicans consider immediate removal inappropriate. […]
“The age of warrior kings and of warrior presidents has passed. The nuclear age calls for a different kind of leadership…. a leadership of intellect, judgment, tolerance and rationality, a leadership committed to human values, to world peace, and to the improvement of the human condition. The attributes upon which we must draw are the human attributes of compassion and common sense, of intellect and creative imagination, and of empathy and understanding between cultures.” ~~J. William Fulbright,
At Daily Kos on this date in 2010—Economic Outrage du Jour: Emails Exposed:
Hugh Son at Bloomberg reports that e-mails forced into the light show that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, parts of whose job is supposedly to be curtailing bankers’ riskiest impulses, told American International Group to conceal information about its payments to banks while the financial crisis was unfolding:
AIG said in a draft of a regulatory filing that the insurer paid banks, which included Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Societe Generale SA, 100 cents on the dollar for credit-default swaps they bought from the firm. The New York Fed crossed out the reference, according to the e-mails, and AIG excluded the language when the filing was made public on Dec. 24, 2008. The e-mails were obtained by Representative Darrell Issa, ranking member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. …
“It appears that the New York Fed deliberately pressured AIG to restrict and delay the disclosure of important information,” said Issa, a California Republican. Taxpayers “deserve full and complete disclosure under our nation’s securities laws, not the withholding of politically inconvenient information.”
You won’t hear any applause in this corner for the obstructionist, ultra-wealthy Darrell Issa. His self-funded recall petition encumbered us Californians with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the governorship, a position Issa himself hoped to capture. His support for English-Only laws, right-wing attacks on ACORN, dissing of the 9/11 widows and other antics since his self-funded campaign put him in Congress epitomize the politics progressives are duty-bound to grind into dust.
But, frankly, if the disclosures in those emails are what Bloomberg and Reuters and others are saying, congressional Democrats ought to be on top of this issue. Must we depend on the richest man in Congress to engage in an oligarch vs. oligarch battle to give us the skinny about what’s going on?
Monday through Friday you can catch the Kagro in the Morning Show 9 AM ET by dropping in here, or you can download the Stitcher app (found in the app stores or at Stitcher.com), and find a live stream there, by searching for “Netroots Radio.”
California is ranked number one among U.S. states where COVID-19 is spreading the fastest on a person-to-person basis, according to data compiled by USA Today. Despite the alarming increase California has seen in COVID-19 cases, some individuals still refuse to follow safety precautions put in place to stop the spread of the virus. Anti-maskers are not only refusing to wear masks and abide by social distancing measures, but are swarming public spaces including grocery stores and causing violence.
Viral videos on social media depict a series of recent occurrences in which maskless protesters chanting “no more masks” and “this is America, you cannot tell us what to do” shouted at both employees and customers in stores. In some footage the protesters even assaulted individuals. “Sir, you need to put your mask on. … I have a mask for you,” a masked man tells a maskless individual in the first video of the multiple videos posted to Twitter. “I don’t need that. I don’t wear masks,” the individual replies. The anti-maskers first took to a local grocery chain, Ralphs, then made its way to a mall in Century City, Los Angeles County, according to the Beverly Hills Courier.
The unmasked individuals, who claimed it is their choice whether or not to wear a mask and said they should not be judged for it, not only criticized those wearing masks but harassed them. “Where is your fucking gloves if you believe there is a virus,” a protester yelled in one of the videos. It seems to those who deem the virus as a hoax, the freedom to do as they choose and decide whether or not to wear a mask, only applies to their own supporters.
Today, a group of anti-maskers protested at Ralph’s and the Century City shopping mall. Lots of angry confrontations with customers and a few physical altercations. Thread pic.twitter.com/cS0YAR2CiH
Anti-maskers in Los Angeles County not only refused to wear masks comparing the U.S. to China, but insisted that testing negative for COVID-19 meant they didn’t need one. “I tested negative [for COVID-19], so what are you worried about? Mask Nazi. There are Nazis here,” a man with a mask pulled down said in another video.
But despite these anti-maskers believing testing negative gives them a free pass to not wear a mask, under California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s coronavirus mandate all residents above the age of two across the state must wear masks when in public. Additionally, as The New York Times noted, testing negative doesn’t necessarily mean that one is not infected by or not carrying the virus.
Stores that remained open weren’t the only ones facing violence at the hands of protesters, those that had closed their doors as a result of the protests saw protesters banging and violently trying to force their way in. Several verbal altercations took place during these Sunday protests. One particularly notable incident included an exchange between a woman who said she was a doctor and anti-masker in the mall. The woman shouted that her “father is in the hospital with COVID,” to which the anti-masker coldly replied: “People die. That’s life. Your father’s not special.”
One of the more intense moments was when a woman who said she’s a doctor shouted at the anti-maskers from behind a makeshift barricade. “My mother is in the hospital with COVID,” she said. “People die. That’s life. Your father’s not special,” an anti-masker replies. pic.twitter.com/HU53xMc05j
While Los Angeles police officers were present to “keep the peace,” no arrests were made according to theLos Angeles Times. The protests follow not only demonstrations that occurred last week during which maskless protesters demanded Los Angeles reopen but after Los Angeles County reported a 50% increase in COVID-19 cases within the last month.
As California faces a deadly surge of the coronavirus, Daily Kos reported that medical emergency vehicles are facing difficulties in responding as more residents require hospitalizations in the area. “The current surge of patients … it’s kind of a hidden disaster,” Cathy Chidester, director of the county Emergency Medical Services agency, said. “It’s not a fire. It’s not an earthquake. It’s not a train wreck that’s right in the public view and they can see what is happening and they can avoid that area. It’s all happening behind the doors of households and hospitals.”
The pandemic is real and deadly and the U.S. is facing an extreme health crisis. Anti-maskers since the start of this pandemic have not taken this seriously and it seems that no increase of COVID-19 deaths will make a difference.
The Washington Post has been reporting on the economic devastation to individual lives because of the pandemic for months, covering stories of individual people and families whose livelihoods have been destroyed by the pandemic. The paper continues that series this week, but adds eye-popping and infuriating context from an analysis of the unemployment system from the states that publicly share information. They have found 703,000 pending appeals around the country, some people who’ve applied as long ago as March who still haven’t received their unemployment insurance (UI) and 529,000 people who are still waiting to find out if they can get their UI. Going back as far as March. That’s more than 1.2 million people caught in bureaucratic limbo.
One of those is Josh Vaughn in Savannah, Georgia, who was furloughed from his bartending job on March 14. He worked at a Hilton hotel bar, and the company immediately filed the necessary paperwork. He was told in April he qualified for $320/week but he had to prove his identity—which took almost six months. In the meantime, he took a job for half the pay he was making and waited. It took the Post calling the state for Vaughan finally to get the $14,000 back UI he qualified for, on December 31. “It’s just so unbelievably difficult to get unemployment. It shouldn’t be this hard, especially at a time like this when millions of us are out of work,” Vaughn told the Post.
The “fraud check” process is one of the key reasons 1.2 million people have been waiting 9 months for help. That and some states are still using systems built on COBOL, cutting edge coding back in the 1960s, to process claims. What those two things have in common is a long-lasting Republican effort, aided for too many years by weak-kneed Democrats, to destroy government. They have instilled the idea that working people have to prove their worthiness for assistance, operating under the presumption of unworthiness and knowing that by throwing up hurdle after hurdle for people to get assistance, they’ll just give up and suffer. To make it even worse, they’ve kept the unemployment system centered in states and provided little in the way of federal help for states to run them. Including refusing to allow $1 billion in funding in the latest coronavirus relief package—the House provided it, Mitch McConnell refused it.
The clunky system, the lack of staffing for many of them, and the amount of hoops workers and state employees have to jump through to verify eligibility have all combined to create months-long holdups for things as minor as typos in forms. Or a worker providing a driver’s license scan instead of a photo. Or someone having to provide a photo of the blank back page of their birth certificate, maybe to prove that there was no secret information there that showed they were actually undocumented or something. That actually happened. Michelle Stoltenberg of Pittsburgh uploaded scans of her driver’s license, her passport, her utility bills, and her birth certificate. The state told her she had to send a photograph of her driver’s license, and then “she was told she needed to upload a photo of the back of her birth certificate—even though it’s blank. She did that, too.” That was in July. “This has gone on for five months,” she told the Post. “My trust in my government is just fundamentally broken now.”
Which, again, has been the Republicans’ plan all along. She did get the more than $10,000 in back pay, finally, after the Post inquired about it. That was after her former employer, her state senator, and a law professor in her acquaintance advocated for her at the state. This is just the people who are waiting to be declared eligible the first time around, not even those who have been denied on the first round and are waiting for their appeals to be heard. That’s taking an average of at least 82 days, according to Labor Department data.
The Trump administration made “fraud prevention” a key priority in the UI process, and that’s what the states have been doing. One of the labor commissioners who agree to provide a comment to the Post, Mark Butler, asserts that there has been rampant fraud in the system. “A huge portion of the issues we have seen with claims stem from individuals who have quit, have been fired, or have not had a job in the past year who believe they are owed benefits from the state regardless of their separation reason,” Butler said in a statement. “We are responsible for making lawful benefit determinations based on the evidence presented in each case.”
The first responsibility should be making sure people survive on the assumption that every worker who has been paying taxes deserves that, especially in a pandemic. And yes, everyone should have gotten that $2,000 in survival pay Mitch McConnell killed. They should have been getting that $2,000 every month of this pandemic.
As it stands, this is just one more huge issue that President-elect Joe Biden and the new Congress are going to have to try to fix right away to try to simply save lives and put the economy on stable footing. In the meantime, if you’re one of the 1.2 million in UI limbo, call the Post or your local news. It seems to be the most sure way of getting a response.
The office of Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts was forced to clarify remarks made by the Republican on Monday stating that undocumented workers at the state’s meatpacking plants wouldn’t be eligible for COVID-19 vaccine distribution at facilities because I guess he thinks they don’t exist there or something. “You’re supposed to be a legal resident of the country to be able to be working in those plants,” The Washington Postreports he said, “so I do not expect that illegal immigrants will be part of the vaccine with that program.”
First of all, no human being is illegal. Secondly, undocumented immigrants do exist and work at these facilities, where in fact most of the laborers are immigrants. Facing public outrage and confusion, the governor’s office had to explain, if you can call it that. “Immigrants would still qualify for the vaccine, one Ricketts aide said, but those without legal status would have to wait at the back of the line,” the report said. But this isn’t just cruel, it makes no public health sense.
Unlike Republicans, COVID-19 does not ask for papers, and this virus has been decimating workers, including those lacking legal status, in these facilities from the start. Prism’s Tina Vasquez reported last year that from the earliest weeks of the pandemic, these plants became COVID-19 hotspots, with hundreds upon hundreds of cases linked to individual facilities all across the nation. By September, over 42,000 meatpacking workers had tested positive for the virus. More than 200 were dead.
“James Goddard, the senior programs director at the nonprofit Nebraska Appleseed, said in an interview with The Post that it was ‘alarming’ Ricketts could make undocumented immigrants wait longer for a vaccine,” the report said. Goddard called the Ricketts plan “terrible public-health policy.” Even the Trump administration’s own surgeon general, Jerome Adams, has addressed the need to ensure everyone regardless of immigration status is able to receive the vaccine.
“Everyone should have equitable access to the vaccine as expeditiously as possible,” Goddard said according to The Post, “but we need to prioritize folks based on public health criteria, not on where someone is from.” In states like California, advocates have urged that as essential workers, farm laborers, many of whom are undocumented, be prioritized for the vaccine alongside healthcare workers.
One study conducted by the California Institute for Rural Studies last year “found that in Monterey County, farmworkers are three times more likely to contract the coronavirus than the general population,” nonprofit environmental journalism organization InsideClimate News said. “Farm hubs have the highest rates of Covid-19 in the state, and Latinx patients comprise the majority of cases in those hot spots.” Nationally, more than five million undocumented immigrants are essential workers, according to one study.
So if Ricketts’ office tried to walk back the outrage by saying that undocumented workers will get the vaccine but just last, does this mean that officials in the state are really going to force families to show their immigration status in order to carry out that process? Still facing public outcry on Wednesday, KMTV 3 News Now reporter Jennifer Griswold tweeted that Ricketts said “they won’t be checking status when giving vaccinations at meat packing plants because that already should’ve been checked for employment.”
Or we can just throw out this ridiculous discussion and give everyone regardless of immigration status the fucking shot, no questions asked, while prioritizing essential workers. Our nation sure is glad to use their labor, until it’s time to take care of them. “This virus isn’t discriminating based on immigration status,” Dulce Castañeda told The Post. She’s a leader with Children of Smithfield, an advocacy group made up of family members of meatpacking plant workers in Nebraska. “It doesn’t ask people if they’re a citizen, if they’re a resident, if they’re on a visa. So why would we ask that for vaccines?”
Up until early afternoon on Wednesday, I thought we were only screwed in GOP-controlled statehouses all across the country.
But then a bunch of right-wing domestic terrorists stormed and occupied the U.S. Capitol, and … well, we’re still screwed in GOP-controlled statehouses all across the country.
Just Peachy: With just a year to go until they draw themselves into newly safe seats, Republican lawmakers are wasting no time in making the most of the majorities they retained in state legislative chambers in November.
Everything from decrying the results of the presidential election to drafting new bills designed to make voting harder to refusing to seat duly elected Democratic members.
… and it’s only the second week of January.
Keep your arms inside the car at all times and secure all loose items, folks. We’re in for a roller coaster ride from hell.
The results of the Georgia runoff U.S. Senate elections were a brief bright spot this week before being snuffed out by Trump’s mob terrorizing the capitol because they can’t cope with the fact that democracy means that their side doesn’t always win.
Georgia is sending two whole Democrats to the U.S. Senate! That’s huge!
And Georgia Republican lawmakers are bound and determined to prevent that from ever happening again.
I talk a lot about how the GOP uses gerrymandering to give themselves artificial majorities in their state legislatures and in the U.S. House.
But you can’t gerrymander a statewide election.
So how do Republicans keep Democrats from winning races for U.S. Senate, governor, and the like?
By
A. changing the rules of the game and
B. making themselves the referees of said game.
In 2005, the Georgia legislature—controlled then, as now, by the GOP—passed a law allowing any registered voter to cast an absentee ballot, no excuse required.
As recently as 2018, more Republican voters—the elderly, often—tended to vote via this method than Democrats.
But in 2020, use of at-will absentee voting jumped from 5% to 26%, and election results—Joe Biden winning the state and Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock heading to the U.S. Senate—indicate that this shift benefited Democrats, and, well, Republicans just can’t have that.
So GOP lawmakers plan to pass bills requiring voters to claim a “valid” reason to vote absentee and prohibiting the mailing of absentee ballot applications to anyone who doesn’t specifically request one.
Republicans also want to ban ballot drop boxes (used this cycle to contend with the Trump-caused unreliability of the U.S. mail last fall) and require photo ID to vote by mail.
And because that’s not bad enough, GOP lawmakers also want to give themselves more power to oversee and administer elections.
Not that the perennially Republican-controlled secretary of state’s office is much of a check on GOP lawmakers’ desires to make ballot box access more difficult, but still.
Keystone Kapers: It feels a little less dramatic at this point in the week, but in the long-ago time of Tuesday, Jan. 5, “hostile takeover” of a legislative chamber just meant that the Pennsylvania Senate’s GOP majority voted to remove Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman from his role as presiding officer of the chamber.
Following the example of their party’s leader and our current president, Pennsylvania Republicans refused to seat the lawfully certified winner of an admittedly close election—a Democratic incumbent, total coincidence, I’m sure.
… No it wasn’t.
Sen. Jim Brewster held off GOP challenger Nicole Ziccarelli by a mere 69 votes (nice).
But a win is a win, and both the secretary of state and a ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court validated that victory.
Ziccarelli has another lawsuit pending in federal court, but session is starting and it’s time to swear in the legislature.
So if Fetterman isn’t able to resume his constitutionally-mandated responsibility as the Pennsylvania Senate president, expect to see this in court.
But the likely futility both of removing the sitting lieutenant governor from his role presiding over the Senate and of preventing Brewster from taking his seat aren’t even the dumbest parts of this.
You might expect this kind of jockeying when majority control of the chamber is on the line (Virginia House Democrats pulled some creative seating shenanigans to hold on to the speakership for one more term even after they’d lost the majority in the chamber after some special elections in 1998), but that’s not even a factor here.
After November’s elections, Republicans still control the Pennsylvania Senate 29-21. (Technically one member is independent, but he caucuses with the GOP.)
Seating Democratic Sen. Jim Brewster doesn’t in any way impact their hold on power in the chamber.
Republicans are refusing to swear him in to the office to which he was duly elected just because they can.
… Well, that’s not entirely true.
This is absolutely part of a party-wide effort all across the country to delegitimize the democratic process and its outcomes whenever it suits them.
Watch for other emboldened Republican-controlled chambers in years to come to refuse to seat Democrats whose wins were under 500 votes—a margin that’s not particularly rare in state legislative elections.
So, yes, the chaos in Pennsylvania seemed dire until Trump’s mob executed a terrorist takeover of the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday.
And it still is. We can’t afford to become desensitized to Republican antics in statehouses.
Because some of those statehouse Republicans actually participated in the right-wing sacking of our seat of federal government.
The list of GOP state legislators who travelled to Washington to participate in the domestic terrorism at the Capitol so far:
Virginia Sen. (and gubernatorial candidate) Amanda Chase
West Virginia Del. Derrick Evans
Missouri Rep. Justin Hill
Tennessee Rep. Terri Lynn Weaver
But how many members were hanging out with Trump-supporting mobs closer to home?
Dozens of states are convening their legislative sessions this month, so expect things to get worse before they get better.
And by worse, I mean GOP-controlled chambers pushing to make voting more difficult, draconian budget cuts (the economic impact of COVID-19 is taking huge bites out of state revenues), and concerted efforts by Republicans to thwart the Biden administration’s agenda at the state level.
… Oh, and then they get to draw themselves majority-cementing legislative district maps before the next round of elections to help protect them from blowback from unhappy voters.
For the first time in 42 weeks, the Labor Department reports, initial claims for unemployment benefits fell below a million in the week ending Jan. 2. Applications for regular state benefits were 787,000 and 161,000 for federal benefits under the (PUA) Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program that provides benefits to freelancers and other self-employed workers not eligible for the state programs. Total: 948,000. That’s 152,000 lower than the previous week, a 15% drop.
This would seem like pretty good news. But at this level, initial weekly claims are still nearly four times what they averaged in the five years before the pandemic. And the reduction is almost completely the result of fewer PUA applications. As Heidi Shierholz at the Economic Policy Institute says, the drop in PUA applications is the consequence of uncertainty about the program’s future before Congress extended it 11 weeks beyond its Dec. 26 deadline. In coming weeks, we can expect those applications to climb again. All in all, some 19.2 million Americans are now receiving unemployment benefits, 17 million more than a year ago before the pandemic struck. Without PUA, 8.3 million of these jobless Americans would receive nothing.
However, as my colleague Joan McCarter has pointed out, even with PUA and other emergency benefit programs established because of the economic impacts of the response to the pandemic, more than 1.2 million out-of-work Americans have received none of the benefits they applied for.
Much fault for that lies with Republicans, who, in the 86 years since the unemployment insurance program was launched—and in every recession since—have fought against these benefits fang and claw, ludicrously claiming that this money rewards sloth. McCarter writes:
The “fraud check” process is one of the key reasons 1.2 million people have been waiting 9 months for help. That and some states are still using systems built on COBOL, cutting edge coding back in the 1960s, to process claims. What those two things have in common is a long-lasting Republican effort, aided for too many years by weak-kneed Democrats, to destroy government. They have instilled the idea that working people have to prove their worthiness for assistance, operating under the presumption of unworthiness and knowing that by throwing up hurdle after hurdle for people to get assistance, they’ll just give up and suffer. To make it even worse, they’ve kept the unemployment system centered in states and provided little in the way of federal help for states to run them. Including refusing to allow $1 billion in funding in the latest coronavirus relief package—the House provided it, Mitch McConnell refused it.
The Pandemic Recession is unlike any in the past, with parts of the economy shut down intentionally to flatten the curve of coronavirus cases. While many white-collar workers have only had to deal with whatever it takes to set up a home office and have suffered no loss of income—indeed, have gained because their spending on commuting and other services has been curtailed—the negative impacts have fallen unequally on lower-earning workers at restaurants, hotels, warehouses, and delivery operations. Meanwhile, many low-paid “essential” workers must continue on the job despite the risk of infection, especially in communities where wearing a mask is viewed as tantamount to siding with an invading enemy.
“It’s been a very unequal pandemic economy,” said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James. “We had a lot of job losses in lower-paying service industries, but those workers aren’t typically big spenders.” He noted the top 20% of income earners account for more than half of consumer spending. And their spending on imported consumer products took the November trade deficit in goods to a record high.
As we have seen throughout the Pandemic Recession, African Americans, Latinos, women, and young people have been hit hardest. An EPI study found:
Across the United States, millions of workers of all ages suffered job losses in the coronavirus-driven recession, but the economic impact on young workers has been even more intense. Not only have many young people in this country faced the harsh reality of returning to school without in-person classes at their colleges and high schools, the job prospects for those seeking employment have been particularly bleak. Historically, young people are disproportionately disadvantaged in many ways during economic downturns, but this recession has been particularly acute given the sectors of the economy that were hit the hardest. Furthermore, many have been all but blocked from receiving jobless benefits even with meaningful expansions to the unemployment insurance system.
The intersection of gender and race among young people shows a similar pattern to the overall population. Although the highest rates of unemployment are among young people in general, Asian American/Pacific Islander men, Black men, and Latino women have been hit with the highest rates of unemployment among young people in the past several months.
Just as the pandemic has exposed the racist and other inequities of the health care system for those who hadn’t previously noticed, the Pandemic Recession has highlighted how longstanding economic inequities differentially affect people during crises. Most of these inequities are not new; they are chronic. The unemployment insurance system—with many understaffed offices using antiquated hardware and software—isn’t up to the task assigned to it. Even in “normal” times, it falls far short of what’s needed.
Whether the program should simply be upgraded and better funded or completely replaced—say, with a universal basic income—is a question for congressional debate. But the damage caused by the inadequacies of the current operation is too serious to allow the status quo to continue its reign.
