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We won! OK, so I’m not from Pittsburgh and have never even been to the city, but when I learned the news, albeit expected, that voters had elected State Rep. Ed Gainey as the first Black mayor to lead the city, it felt deeply personal.

As a child, Gainey lived in a Pittsburgh housing project. After his political ascension to the state Senate, his sister, a mother of three, was murdered in her own city. “There is a level of pain you can’t imagine,” Gainey told WPXI after her death. It’s because of those experiences, however, and his legislative background that I have no doubt Gainey will serve Black people as well as his larger constituency. 

“But let me tell you why this is beautiful,” Gainey told supporters Tuesday night at the Benedum Center for the Performing Arts Downtown, “because you proved that we can have a city for all. You proved that everybody can change. We know how people have talked about Pittsburgh, have talked about how siloed it is, how segregated it is. But today, you changed that.”

With 96.5% of precincts reporting, Gainey won 48,430 votes, with Republican Tony Moreno, a retired Pittsburgh police officer, earning 19,552 votes, Allegheny County reported just before midnight.

Jake Wheatley, a supporter and peer of Gainey’s in the state House, told the Pittsburgh NPR station WESA Gainey’s victory says “a lot” about the coalition he was able to pull together. “He built the kind of coalition that we want the city to be. He modeled that in his campaign,” Wheatley said. “He’s always been accessible, he’s always showing up. And he doesn’t look at the things that divide us or keep us from being able to work together.” Wheatley, who’s originally from Detroit, called Gainey “a child of Pittsburgh—born, raised and educated here.”

“Coming from neighborhoods like Homewood and Lincoln-Larimer and the Hill,” Wheatley told WESA, “that will give those children an opportunity to see themselves in the mayor’s office. And he didn’t grow up with a silver spoon—he came from subsidized housing.”

Gainey grew up in the Liberty Park housing project in East Liberty and has been a resilient voice for police reform and violence prevention. His sister, Janese Jackson, was shot and killed in 2016 outside of a bar in the neighborhood of Homewood when she rejected the advances of the now-convicted murderer. She was 29 years old. Gainey said then: “I try not to focus on what could have, should have. I try to focus on what we need to do to improve the quality of life for all humanity.”

City Controller Michael Lamb told WESA that, while the city is in better financial shape—aided by some $300 million in federal COVID-19 aid—Gainey’s road to accomplishing his goals won’t be stress-free. Gainey has outlined reform priorities that include ending the use of military gear by officers, diverting resources for that gear to “investments in community policing strategies,” creating “alternative response procedures for non-violent and mental health emergency calls,” and “overhauling police training to focus on de-escalation.”

“If you want to move to a more community-based model as Ed has talked about, that to me means more police, not less,” Lamb said. “And you’re going to have a hard time getting there because you have to staff the force up” from retirements and other losses.

Gainey will also have a fight in store for him in his relationship with the nonprofit University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a “tax-exempt health care giant,” that WESA reported Gainey threatened to sue if it did not bolster financial support to the city. 

He did, however, gain the support of Pennsylvania’s largest healthcare union, Services Employees International Union Healthcare. “UPMC [University of Pittsburgh Medical Center] could have given every single employee in Pittsburgh a $5/hr raise and still made $522 million last year,” the union said, retweeting a post from a facet of its Pennsylvania work, Hospital Workers Rising. “We deserve more from UPMC. Time. For. $20.”

The union said in its news release celebrating Gainey’s victory that “Tuesday’s election is an important step in building an economy and healthcare system to benefit all families.” The union added:

“For too long, poor and working class people have felt the weight of unaccountable and militarized policing, with Pittsburgh’s Black minority most harmed. The ‘eds and meds’ economy has never replaced the upward mobility of good, family supporting, union jobs of the steel era, and Black workers who are over represented in Pittsburgh’s service sector have been denied opportunity. Gentrification has forced families from the city and disproportionately harmed Black neighborhoods.”

‘Mayor-elect Gainey’s success tonight is even more poignant and important as we witness powerful ideological and corporate interests who continue to try and divide us.  But instead, Mr. Gainey focused on what unites all working families: our collective demands and need for affordable healthcare, a high-quality education and investments in early learning, expanding good paying union jobs, criminal justice reform, and taking on powerful interests like UPMC and their corrosive anti-union agenda.

‘Ed Gainey’s election tonight marks a major turning point and opportunity for Pittsburgh, and our entire State.  We must seize this moment and continue to center our politics on investing in working families again and tear down the walls of poverty, anti-Black racism, discrimination of all kinds, and the gross inequities within healthcare, education, and housing. It is a cause and a fight our SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania members are committed to leading.’”

RELATED: No matter how you read Virginia, across the U.S. diverse candidates scored a series of ‘firsts’

RELATED: Pittsburgh poised to elect first Black mayor following upset Democratic primary win over incumbent

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The Biden administration and the state of California are working on a medium- to long-term solution to the supply chain problems affecting the nation, but in the short term—extending well into 2022—problems will persist. 

President Joe Biden announced 24/7 operations at the Port of Los Angeles last month in an effort to ease backups there by moving an addition 3,500 containers a week. That was just a small part of what’s needed, and the Transportation Department has now announced plans to work with California to provide as much as $5 billion in loans to help upgrade the state’s ports, including by improving rail and road transportation options out of the ports and increasing warehouse space to prevent bottlenecks.

“Our supply-chain infrastructure is outdated,” said David Kim, the secretary of the California State Transportation Agency. “Now’s the time to modernize it and prepare our system for what will be huge growth and huge demand for years to come.”

With shortages at nearly a two-decade high, though, prices are rising and some products are becoming difficult to find. The key problem is that there’s not just one problem: Transportation, which can be partially addressed through the ports, is a problem. But so is manufacturing. So is the labor market. Different reasons for backlogs pile on top of each other, creating multiple bottlenecks.

The coronavirus pandemic is the immediate cause of many of the problems, but the underlying context is that corporations have spent decades moving to just-in-time manufacturing with as little slack as possible—which translates into a lack of the extra capacity needed to weather a pandemic.

“Look, there are so many things that are still happening in our economy – distortions, disruptions, things in our supply chain that are affecting prices that are clearly a direct consequence of the pandemic,” Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Fox News Sunday. “Which is why the best thing we can do for our economy in the short term, and to deal with these transitory issues, is to put the pandemic behind us.”

The current supply chain problems hit small businesses first, since they usually aren’t first in line for the most in-demand products and can’t just charter planes when container ships are in short supply. But even the biggest businesses have worries: Companies like Toyota and Nike have had to scale back production, and, Bloomberg reports, “Amazon said its entire fourth-quarter profit could be wiped out by a surge in the cost of labor and fulfillment. Apple said it lost $6 billion in sales because of inability to meet demand, and could lose more next quarter.”

While we don’t want to see early pandemic-style hoarding, this is not a bad time to do a judicious amount of stocking up on nonperishable essentials if you can afford it. But a lot of people can’t afford it—the same people who will be most hurt by rising prices. (As a reminder, the federal minimum wage has been $7.25 an hour for more than a decade.) 

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The trend of firsts from the last election continues: People of color are making historic wins nationwide, and by a significant margin. Securing more than 66% of the vote, Aftab Pureval was elected as Cincinnati’s mayor Tuesday. His win makes history as the first Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) to be elected the city’s mayor. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer, he is also the only AAPI mayor in the midwest.

“Tonight, we made history in Cincinnati,” Pureval told supporters, according to the Associated Press. “Cincinnati is a place where no matter what you look like, where you’re from, or how much money you have, if you come here and work hard you can achieve your dreams.”

Pureval, who is of South Asian Indian and Tibetan descent, defeated former congressman David Mann, who had served as the city’s mayor for nearly eight years. Mann took the defeat well and even congratulated Pureval.

“Congratulations to Aftab on his well-deserved victory. I have spoken with him and wish him nothing but the best, and it has been the honor of my lifetime to serve this community as a councilman, mayor, and member of congress throughout my career. Thank you, Cincinnati!” Mann tweeted Tuesday night.

Pureval formerly served as Hamilton County clerk of courts and campaigned with the promise to bring new ideas to city hall. He told the AP that when he decided to run for county clerk, many colleagues and fellow Democrats warned him that he did not have a “good ballot name.”

“When you see A-f-t-a-b on a yard sign, it doesn’t occur to people that’s a candidate not an insurance company,” Pureval said. “When you’re Asian, when you have an ethnic name, it’s just harder. You’ve got to be creative, you’ve got to work harder, you’ve got to knock on more doors.”

During his victory speech at Lucius Q in Pendleton, he stood by his mother and brother and told the crowd of his family’s journey to “to a place called Ohio” from New Delhi, in hopes of a better life.

“What on earth were they thinking?” he said, referring to his parents. “They came to this country to provide a better life for their sons. Because of that incredible decision, our family went from being refugees to mayor of Cincinnati.”

Pureval’s historic win is not a one-off—it comes during a time when another Asian American has just made history for being the first Asian American elected as mayor of Boston.

According to the Associated Press, Councilor Michelle Wu became the first Asian, first woman, and first person of color to be elected as mayor of Boston. Although she follows Mayor Kim Janey, who is Black, Wu is the first to be elected; Janey was actually appointed mayor after the previous office holder, Marty Walsh, accepted a slot in the Biden administration.

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The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Wednesday in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. (NYSRPA) v. Bruen, which focuses on whether New York State violated plaintiffs Robert Nash and Brandon Koch’s Second Amendment rights by denying them unrestricted concealed carry permits. Lawyer Paul Clement is representing both men and the NYSRPA, which is an offshoot of the National Rifle Association.

A former solicitor general for the Bush Administration, Clement is known as the attorney who’s argued the most cases before SCOTUS since 2000—and has consistently represented parties on the wrong side of history. Clement famously left the law firm he was at in 2011 to continue trying to defend the Defense of Marriage Act and its sympathizers. He also fought against the Affordable Care Act in 2012 and defended tactics used by the Bush Administration during the war on terror.

It appears as if this time, however, Clement will score a win for his clients. Many Supreme Court Justices made no secret of the fact that they were skeptical of the New York law that only allows residents to concealed carry if they can provide “proper cause.” Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Samuel Alito pushed back against the requirement, with Kavanaugh at one point asking, “Why isn’t it good enough to say I live in a violent areas and I want to be able to defend myself?”

Nash and Koch are both NYSRPA members and sought concealed carry permits for the purpose of self-defense. They were issued restricted licenses allowing them to hunt and target shoot, but not to carry their weapons under any other circumstances. The two argued that their completion of firearms safety courses should allow them to carry weapons for self-defense, though a licensing officer still refused to grant them concealed carry permits.

Both men live outside of New York City in fairly rural areas, though the metropolitan city came up frequently throughout the nearly two hours of arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts insinuated that those in major cities have even more reason to be allowed to carry a weapon and mused about “how many muggings take place in a forest” as opposed to a big city. Nash, who lives upstate in Rensselaer County, previously stated that a spate of robberies was one of the reasons why he sought the permit in the first place.

While many of the justices looked to historic rulings to guide their eventual decisions, Justice Neil Gorsuch appeared willing to test just how far the Second Amendment should reach when it comes to carrying a gun outside the home. Participating via video due to a stomach bug, Gorsuch asked Clement about similar cases and how much history should weigh on a decision like this.

Gorsuch cited the last landmark SCOTUS case to do with gun control, 2008’s Columbia v. Heller, which allows for the “individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home” under the Second Amendment. Clement argued earlier that the case shows how analysis of the Second Amendment has continued within a contemporary context as opposed to stopping in 1871 when the state of Texas passed a landmark law establishing guidelines for concealed carrying.

You can listen to the full oral arguments here. A decision on this case isn’t expected until next spring.

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Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Sean Parnell wrote a fiction thriller in 2018 that coincidentally included scenes where women were violently abused, strangled, pinned down, and called “whore”—all things his estranged wife said she endured at the hands of Parnell in sworn testimony earlier this week in a custody hearing regarding their three children.

Parnell has the blessing of Donald Trump in his campaign for the Keystone State Senate seat left open by the retirement of GOP Sen. Pat Toomey. But Parnell’s candidacy has been rocked in recent months as his personal history of alleged abuse comes into clearer focus. His estranged wife testified that Parnell also slapped one of their children so hard it left welts on the child’s skin.

Details of Parnell’s book, Man of War, are just one more piece of the puzzle. And given the testimony of his estranged wife, the book seems far more biographical than fictional. According to Politico, Parnell, who is an Army combat vet, “portrays multiple scenes of men assaulting women in the 2018 novel, the first of four in a fiction series.”

The abusive behavior in the book includes scenes of women being hit, pulled by their hair, and dragged across the floor. Some male characters also relish the pain they are inflicting on their female victims. Politico writes of one scene:

“Nate grabbed a handful of Meg’s hair and roughly forced her head around,” Parnell wrote of a female CIA agent being beaten by a rogue military official who “savored the grimace of pain that flitted across her face and the fear that sparked in her eyes.”

“When she tried to jerk free, he struck a blade against her cheek and smiled at the involuntary flinch caused by the cold steel touching warm flesh,” the book says.

The CIA agent was eventually strangled, zip-tied, and punched. She was also dismissed by Parnell as someone her male counterparts objectified and “just wanted to fuck.”

Parnell included another graphic scene in which crying children witness their mother being gang raped by three men, one of them with a “toothy grin spread across his face.”

Parnell’s real-life estranged wife provided tearful testimony Monday in which she described being strangled, choked, verbally assaulted, and even forced out of the car by Parnell and left on the side of the road.

“He tried to choke me out on a couch and I literally had to bite him,” she said in one instance. “He was strangling me.”

She also described the whole family—including their children—being “petrified” of Parnell and “walking on eggshells” whenever he was in the home.

Male candidates with allegedly abusive histories is becoming the norm for the GOP, not the exception, heading into the midterms next year.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Pennsylvania is pursuing legal action over the proposed reopening of the closed Moshannon Valley Correctional Center as a private Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility. The group said that under state law, commissioners are supposed to publish agendas in advance of their meetings. But that didn’t happen for the meeting where they voted in favor of the immigration contracts.

The organization is now suing on behalf of two Clearfield County residents and the advocacy group Juntos. “In our democratic form of government, the public has a right to know what elected officials are doing,” ACLU of Pennsylvania executive director Reggie Shuford said. “The county commissioners are required by law to inform the public of their business, and they failed to do so in this instance.”

“The contract with the private prison company, GEO Group, is one of two contracts approved by the commissioners to repurpose the facility for immigration detention,” the ACLU of Pennsylvania said. That was approved this past fall, after the Bureau of Prisons declined to renew Moshannon Valley’s contract earlier this year. The second agreement was with ICE.

But the civil rights organization said that commissioners “did not publicly post an agenda in advance” of the Sept. 28 meeting where the contracts were approved, “as required by the state Sunshine Act. They only provided public notice that a meeting would be held, without offering specifics of the commissioners’ agenda.” This means that local residents and advocates who may be opposed to ICE’s cruelty had no chance to offer public comment—and there’s quite a lot to say when it comes to both GEO Group and ICE.

“As a local resident, I expect the county commissioners to comply with the law. That’s a reasonable request,” said Tim Smith. He’s one of two residents represented by the ACLU of Pennsylvania. “The Sunshine Act requires the county to inform the public of its business so that people can comment in an open and public meeting. The county commissioners took a great deal of input from GEO and ICE but almost none from the public. None of these details were known or seen by the public before they decided. We now know that this is a very bad deal for the people. An open meeting will allow us to point this out.”

Looking at the commissioners’ actions since, it seems like they know they effed up. ACLU of Pennsylvania immigrants’ rights attorney Vanessa Stine and Juntos executive director Erika Guadalupe Núñez said in a blog post that since filing the legal action late last month, “the county commissioners announced a special meeting to accept public comment. We hope that the county hears people’s concerns and halts further action on the contracts.” 

While Núñez and others spoke out against the contracts at that meeting on Wednesday, Juntos tweeted that commissioners voted “unanimously to reaffirm agreements with ICE & Geo Group”:

“Your livelihoods should not depend on the imprisonment of others,” she continued. “This community deserves better; your elected leaders should be working on an actual solution to bring economic growth that will bring long-term jobs to the area.” The fact is this site’s possible reopening as a for-profit immigration prison shouldn’t be happening at all, under the president’s campaign pledge making “clear that the federal government should not use private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.”

“President Biden has the authority to cancel the ICE contract with GEO Group in Clearfield County. He should do just that,” Stine and Núñez continued in their post. They said that at nearly 1,900 beds, it could become the largest immigration detention site in the Northeast. Mr. President, shut it down.

“What’s more, Clearfield County commissioners and all public officials across Pennsylvania would do well to remember their obligation to open government and to their constituents’ voices, opinions, and concerns,” they continued. “In this age of frayed democracy, such democratic principles have never been more important.”

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On Wednesday, Reuters reported that Smartmatic, a voting technology company, has followed in the footsteps of Dominion Voting Systems and filed a lawsuit against One America News (OAN). The details of the lawsuit have not yet been posted to the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia’s docket, but they contain allegations of libel and slander.

In February, Smartmatic sued “Fox News, its parent Fox Corp (FOXA.O) and several Fox hosts in a New York state court, alleging they falsely accused the company of helping rig the U.S. presidential election in favor of Democrat Joe Biden,” according to Reuters. That defamation lawsuit, like Dominion Voting Systems’ lawsuit, is looking for billions in recompense. Smartmatic has also, like Dominion Voting Systems, sued Trump attorneys, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani.

How much the Florida-based Smartmatic will be looking for in damages from the San Diego-based OAN is not precisely known. However, since the allegations are almost identical to the ones being made by Dominion in its case against the right-wing propaganda machine, that number is believed to be in the billions. That’s billions with a “B.” If OAN’s case rests on the “experts” they pranced in front of their cameras to make false election fraud claims, they might be in big trouble. (Fingers crossed!)

Giuliani and Powell have also been sued by Dominion, specifically in regards to their baseless claims that Dominion Voting Systems executive Eric Coomer was some kind of mastermind in flipping tens if not hundreds of thousands (and maybe millions) of votes from Donald Trump to Joseph Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Coomer’s defamation lawsuit against two of the worst lawyers in America makes a clear case for just how spurious that dynamic duo’s claims of election fraud really are. So far, Giuliani and Powell have been unable to lawyer themselves out of a paper bag, let alone get the case dismissed.

The only bad news in this report is that MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has not been sued by Smartmatic. He is facing the same defamation lawsuit from Dominion that Giuliani and Powell are involved in.

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As progressives process a number of disappointing losses from the Nov. 2 election results, it’s important we don’t glaze over a concerning ruling that came from a federal judge in Texas on Sunday. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor—the guy who Trump once praised at length for striking down the Affordable Care Act and who overturned protections for trans patients in health care settings—ruled that for-profit businesses do not have to abide by LGBTQ+ discrimination claims if it clashes with their religious beliefs, as reported by the Dallas Morning News. This ruling is in opposition to a ruling from the Supreme Court that protected people based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

O’Connor’s ruling also permits certain other religious groups, like churches and nonprofits associated with a religion, to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people. How so? By refusing to hire them because of their identities, and by allowing them to be fired once employed because of their identities. 

O’Connor, nominated to the bench by George W. Bush back in 2007, issued this opinion in response to gray areas in the Supreme Court’s decision in Bostock v Clayton County, Ga., the historic 2020 case that finally granted Title VII protections for LGBTQ+ people. O’Connor’s opinion suggests that Christian-run health care businesses can, in fact, use freedom of religion and the First Amendment to protect themselves from anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination claims. In his 70-page ruling, he applied this same logic to the aforementioned nonprofits and church organizations.

As some background, Stephen Hotze—infamous as an anti-LGBTQ activist and long-standing conservative—brought the case involving his Christian management firm, Briadwood Management Inc., in which he sued the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC) for its enforcement of Bostock. Hotze does not permit his firm to “hire or employ individuals who are known to engage in sexually immoral behavior or gender non-conforming conduct of any sort, including homosexuality, cross-dressing, and transgenderism,” according to his lawsuit. Hotze argued this violates the firm’s “deeply held religious beliefs.” Hotze’s church, the Bear Creek Bible Church, was also named as a plaintiff in the suit.

O’Connor also ruled that employers can mandate that workers use the bathroom that correlates with their sex assigned at birth, not their gender identity, which is obviously transphobic and potentially dangerous for trans workers. He also ruled that employers can set dress codes. Over the summer, my colleague Joan McCarter described O’Connor as a “whack job,” and that assessment still rings quite true today. If anything, given the potential harm caused, it’s generous. 

If you’re wondering how O’Connor thinks one should decide if a business qualifies for a religious exemption, he sets the bar pretty low. What is it? Just if their religious belief appears to be an “honest conviction.”

Thankfully, O’Connor’s ruling is unlikely to go without appeals. It would first go to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and potentially could go to the Supreme Court, but it’s up in the air on whether the justices would agree to take the case or not. As we’ve covered here at Daily Kos, the court has heard some cases involving LGBTQ+ discrimination and businesses, and that’s (unfortunately) gone in both directions. But there’s no guarantee they would make a bid on this one. 

Gregory Nevins, who serves as senior counsel for LGBTQ+ advocacy group Lambda Legal, told Reuters he “firmly” believes the decision is “so bad and contains so many errors” that the Fifth Circuit will reverse at least part of it. But Nevins stressed that exactly what they will reverse, and what will happen after, is unknown at this point.

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Nothing paints a more stark picture of our nation’s dysfunctional health care system than the stories of everyday Americans and the bills they receive following medical treatment.

In a recent case in Atlanta, Georgia, a woman named Taylor Davis went to her local ER for a head injury only to wait several hours to be seen by a doctor. She finally threw in the towel and left, but that didn’t stop Emory Decatur Hospital from sending her a bill for $700 anyway. 

“I sat there for seven hours. There’s no way I should be sitting in an emergency room … for seven hours,” Davis told FOX-5 Atlanta. 

“I didn’t get my vitals taken, nobody called my name. I wasn’t seen at all,” Davis says.

Convinced the hospital made a mistake, Davis reached out. She was told emergency room visits charge a facility fee or ER room visit fee. “You get charged before you are seen. Not for being seen,” read an email sent to Davis from an Emory Healthcare patient financial services employee. 

“I’m very reluctant to go to the hospital now. That’s kind of like the last resort now. Seeing that they’re able to bill you for random things, it doesn’t make me want to go. So that’s not good,” Davis said.

Emory Healthcare sent a response to FOX-5:

“Emory Healthcare takes all patient concerns seriously and appreciates this has been brought to our attention. Our teams are currently looking into this matter and will follow up directly with the individual.”

While Emory is “looking into” the matter, another American, Kristen R. Moore, tweeted about her experience of having a miscarriage and then having to pay over $1,000 out of pocket. 

Moore’s Twitter thread finds one commenter tweeting that she paid nearly $14,000 for her miscarriage. Follow the thread below: 

The examples of these two women don’t even account for the 30 million Americans who don’t have health insurance or are underinsured. 

“Tens of thousands of Americans will die this year for lack of health coverage and the U.S. ranks last out of 16 industrialized countries for deaths that could be prevented with proper medical care,” according to Public Citizen. 

“Medical bills contribute to more than 60 percent of all bankruptcies. Three-fourths of those bankrupt had health insurance at the time they got sick. While the Affordable Care Act reduced the accumulation of medical debt, it has not ended medical bankruptcy.”

Despite a worldwide pandemic and the death of nearly 750,000 people due to COVID-19 in the U.S. alone, the level of health and wellness in this nation has not changed. It’s as sick as it ever was, and the only answer is a single-payer system. 

“Switching to a single-payer system could save nearly $600 billion per year by slashing overhead and negotiating lower drug costs. Savings are enough to cover everyone and eliminate cost-sharing in health care,” a report from Public Citizen reads. 

The battle for a bill that would equally cover all Americans with health insurance is ongoing. The Medicare for All Act would expand and improve coverage; eliminate out-of-pocket costs; add dental, vision, and reproductive care; and add long-term support for elderly and disabled people. 

In March, Reps. Pramila Jayapal and Debbie Dingle introduced the legislation. 

“There is a solution to this health crisis — a popular one that guarantees health care to every person as a human right and finally puts people over profits and care over corporations. That solution is Medicare for All — everyone in, nobody out,” Jayapal wrote. 

“A system that prioritizes profits over patients and ties coverage to employment was no match for a global pandemic and will never meet the needs of our people,” Dingell wrote. 

“In the wealthiest nation on earth, patients should not be launching GoFundMe pages to afford lifesaving health care for themselves or their loved ones. Medicare For All will build an inclusive health care system that won’t just open the door to care for millions of our neighbors but do it more efficiently and effectively than the one we have today. Now is not the time to shy away from these generational fights, it is the time for action.”

The Medicare for All Act of 2021 is also endorsed by 300 local, state, and national organizations that represent nurses, doctors, business owners, unions, and racial justice organizations. This includes Physicians for a National Health Program, Public Citizen, National Nurses United, Center for Popular Democracy, People’s Action, Social Security Works, Labor Campaign for Single Payer, SEIU, and hundreds more, yet the legislation and the health of Americans languish. 

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We’ve known for some time now that the “official” attempt by Donald Trump’s inner circle to find a strategy for nullifying a United States presidential election was deadly serious, was plotted for many weeks, and featured some of the top Republican criminals in the country. Rudy Giuliani gave up stovepiping false claims against Joe Biden’s family invented by corrupt European oligarchs for this one. Bernard Kerik took time off from whatever the hell he’s been doing, since he got out of prison, to join up. Steve Bannon was spurred into action even though it’d take time away from his day job of bilking Trump’s base with fake border wall schemes. Anyone who was anyone in the GOP crime family was working all the knobs.

Mar-a-Lago’s resident golf cheat is now claiming that those team attempts to nullify Trump’s removal from office were a matter of “executive privilege,” private deliberations, and advice given to him as the nation’s pretzeldent. These claims didn’t fly from Day One and are no closer to becoming airborne today. There is no “executive privilege” recognized for ex-presidents, as he is no longer in government. “Executive privilege” specifically cannot be used to cover up crimes, and what the House Select Committee is currently investigating is the crime of obstructing a U.S. election through violent and nonviolent means.

It also won’t count as “executive privilege” when it wasn’t being done as part of your “executive” duties to begin with. The Washington Post has a new piece targeting that point, noting that Giuliani and Kerik’s attempts to dodge House demands for information on the plot suffer from a rather glaring weak point: It was the Donald Trump campaign that footed the bill for the team’s posh Washington hotel “command center” and other expenses.

The attempt to nullify a U.S. election was being paid for by Trump’s campaign, not by Trump’s administration. Giuliani and the others involved can pound sand on any thought of invoking an “executive” defense for Team Sedition.

The details laid out in the Post are gorier, of course, with the team racking up huge bills while Trump threatened to stiff them (as usual), Fox News shouting-head Jeanine Pirro personally intervening with Trump and team to convince them to reimburse Giuliani and Kerik (did you remember that Pirro’s husband is another cog in the Republican crime machine, one who would get a last-day Trump pardon for felony tax evasion?), and the Trump campaign eventually paying out “more than $225,000” for steep hotel bills and travel expenses.

Everyone involved is an absolutely terrible person, either a felon or within hand-shaking distance of felonies, and it was all the sort of incompetent mess that Trump’s bottom-feeders specialized in. The point, though, is that the team’s attempts to nullify the election by inventing a new vice presidential power to simply declare that the election didn’t count was decided to be an offshoot expense of the Donald Trump presidential campaign.

And that means there is no “executive” to invoke for an executive privilege claim. Team Sedition was acting on behalf of Trump’s political campaign, not his administration.

In practice, not a lot of this matters. Trump’s executive privilege claims were nonsensical from the start; the only real test is whether the team’s absolute contempt for U.S. laws and the investigative powers of Congress will result in consequences. The new rule of Republicanism is that legality or illegality doesn’t matter, because even international extortion or assembling a violent mob are allowed so long as you have sufficient allies in government to ensure no investigation takes place.

If Congress wants to get to the bottom of just how the violent mob that Trump’s team assembled on January 6 intersected with the rest of the Trump White House and campaign’s efforts to intimidate Mike Pence and Congress into nullifying the presidential election’s results, it’s going to have to start throwing people in jail—and soon. Come next November, there’s a very good chance enough pro-sedition Republicans will be elected to Congress to shut down the investigation and bar even the Justice Department from probing the day’s events further.

Come next November, there could very well be a Republican majority in place that would order the minting of new coins commemorating the seditionists as new American heroes. The clock is ticking here.

Long story short, the foot-dragging by the Biden Justice Department and by the House itself is getting more dangerous by the day. There is yet no serious belief among the insurrection’s orchestrators that Congress will pursue them if they simply refuse to testify, and—still—there are zero plausible claims that any of Trump’s pro-nullification plotters have protection against congressional demands. Dust off the powers of inherent contempt and send the Sergeant-at-Arms off with enough pairs of handcuffs to do the job. The nation can’t claim to have laws if the nation’s elites never find the stomach to enforce them.