The Freedom Caucus failed to cause an economic catastrophe by forcing the nation into default. They couldn’t get organized enough to challenge Kevin McCarthy’s speakership, partly because no one else wants the job. So they’ve resorted to the one thing they can achieve: They shut down the House of Representatives. The procedural stunt they pulled on Tuesday kicked off a rebellion that has prevented the House from doing anything of substance for the remainder of the week. A defeated McCarthy gave in Wednesday evening, sent everyone home for the weekend, and worsened his leadership crisis by blaming the whole mess on his number two, Majority Leader Steve Scalise. He’s made a very big mess for himself.

On Tuesday, 11 of the rebels pulled their surprise, voting with Democrats to defeat the procedural vote that set the rules for a couple of bills that were supposed to come to the floor. This is always a party-line vote. The minority always unanimously votes against it, the majority always unanimously votes for it, by rote. This was the first time in 21 years that a rule vote was defeated. Since then, the group has dug in and refused to agree to allow any bill to move to the floor until they get concessions from McCarthy.

McCarthy’s self-proclaimed great “victory” on the debt ceiling is now history. His effort Wednesday to try to gloss this over as a spat that would make his next wins even bigger and better has been exposed as so much hot air. He made everything worse by turning on his own leadership team. “The majority leader runs the floor,” McCarthy told reporters, insinuating that Scalise had screwed up.

It’s Scalise’s fault, he insists, pointing to one of the beefs the maniacs brought up as a cause for their rebellion. Rep. Andrew Clyde, Georgia, has a controversial gun bill that Scalise has agreed to bring to the floor. According to Scalise, he’s been whipping it but hasn’t found enough votes. According to Clyde, Scalise threatened to never allow a vote on the bill if Clyde didn’t support the team on the debt ceiling.

The real problem, according to Scalise, is the promises McCarthy made to the extremists to get to be speaker. The maniacs say McCarthy broke those promises with the debt ceiling bill. The reality—and Scalise points this out, too—is that no one but McCarthy and that crew know what those promises were. Not having it in writing, not having it in public, and not even cluing anyone else in leadership in on the deal means that the Freedom Caucus can make up any damned thing and say McCarthy promised it.

“So I still don’t know what those agreements were. Whatever they are, [conservatives] feel that the agreements were broken. That’s got to get resolved. Hopefully it does,” Scalise said. So either McCarthy dealt in total secrecy, not even telling his leadership team the constraints they were operating under with the extremists, or the relationship between these two is so bad Scalise would lie about it.

McCarthy also created this mess by telling everybody what they wanted to hear back in April, to get the House’s original debt ceiling bill passed. The bill was essentially the Freedom Caucus’ wish list for American dystopia, and plenty of regular Republicans didn’t like it. McCarthy essentially told them that this bill was just symbolic, that it was important for the team to get something passed to force President Joe Biden into negotiations with them. It would never become law, he said. Meanwhile he was telling the Freedom Caucus that he would hold tough on their bill, and not agree to a “watered-down version.”

The problem here is no one can be trusted to be operating in good faith. McCarthy has clearly lied to get what he wanted—first the speakership and then a debt limit deal. The Freedom Caucus people will lie about anything and everything just because. The rest of the Republicans can’t trust the maniacs, but McCarthy has also proven that they can’t trust him either. Neither can his own leadership team. That leaves the House in chaos. As it stands, nothing can move forward until the handful of extremists allow it.

McCarthy has two choices: He can cave and give the Freedom Caucus total control of the House, or he can try to form a coalition government with the Democrats. If he chooses the former, he’s opening himself up to more extortion. His second choice, to appeal to the more moderate voices in his conference and work with the Democrats, depends on whether the Democrats are willing to help him out. They shouldn’t do so without some guarantees locked in, because by now everyone knows McCarthy can’t be trusted.

Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy is facing a big test this week: marshaling his tiny majority to vote for his radical debt ceiling and budget cuts plan. He set an ambitious deadline for getting it done by the end of this week, which seems unlikely since the House doesn’t get to legislative work until Wednesday. While it’s a leadership test for him, it’s nearly as big of one for the supposed moderate Republicans, who will have this one chance to show they can—or want to—wield as much influence as the Freedom Caucus.

With his slim majority, McCarthy has just five votes to lose to try and force President Biden into his hostage-negotiating scheme. He’s threatening the full faith and credit of the nation, not to mention the global economy, by refusing to raise the debt ceiling limit without a massive set of budget cuts. Those budget cuts would hurt everyone: children, working families, veterans. That, in turn, could hurt the reelection prospects of a couple of dozen House Republicans who represent swing districts.

The debt ceiling is the congressionally imposed limit on how much the government can borrow to continue to pay the bills for money Congress has already appropriated. Those debts include paying for people in the military, Social Security and other federal pensions, and payments on foreign debt. The federal government needs to borrow money to pay its bills when its ongoing operations can’t be funded by tax and other federal revenues alone. The U.S. paying its bills—and making the payments on the debt it owes overseas—is essential.

McCarthy’s plan is the same as the one the Freedom Caucus put forward in March: Biden has to erase all the accomplishments of the past two years. As White House spokesman Andrew Bates told RealClearPolitics, “Their leadership has caved to the most extreme MAGA hardliners in their conference.”

Despite that, some of the maniacs are still holding out on McCarthy. Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona says he’s “leaning no” on the bill because it would raise the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion. Florida’s Rep. Matt Gaetz doesn’t think it punishes low-income working Americans enough. It should have “more rigor” on work requirements for recipients of Medicaid and other programs, he says, making them prove that they work 30 hours a week instead of 20 as is currently in the bill.

The MAGA team holding out on their votes should be giving the so-called moderates the opening they need to show they care more about responsibly governing the country rather than appeasing the extremists. They could, but they’re not.

Like Nebraska’s Don Bacon, the “center-right” guy the traditional media runs to for quotes. He’s completely on board. The “goal is to get this on the floor next week,” he told NBC last week. “[McCarthy’s] providing a simple plan. I think it’s good policy. I think the American people are gonna like it,” said Bacon.

That doesn’t seem likely, given the majority of American people don’t think games should be played with the debt ceiling. Republicans, however, are used to ignoring popular sentiment.

South Dakota Rep. Dusty Johnson chairs the Main Street Caucus, supposedly a moderate, business-friendly bunch. He’s on board with McCarthy’s plan to pass the bill “before the end of April,” and is bullish on the bill. “Kevin McCarthy’s gonna get 218 votes on this deal,” he told NBC. “These are really concepts that, I think, unify the conference rather than divide us.”

They’re generally not used to ignoring Wall Street, though, and Wall Street is getting increasingly jittery. They’re not raising hell about it yet, but they’re nervous. Last week, BlackRock Vice Chair Philipp Hildebrand warned that default would undermine “a basic anchor” of the world’s financial system and “must not happen.”

“All we can do is to pray that everyone in the United States understands how important the sanctity of the sovereign signature of the leading currency, of the leading bond market, of the leading economy in the world is,” Hildebrand said.

Of course they can do more than send thoughts and prayers. They can use their massive leverage—and campaign money—on Republicans, starting with the so-called moderates. Those guys might not listen to their constituents, but they will listen to their funders.

Barely Speaker Kevin McCarthy spoke at the New York Stock Exchange Monday, attempting to convince Wall Street that if the nation defaults on its debts in a few months and causes a global financial crisis, it’s all going to be President Joe Biden’s fault. That’s a tough sell since it’s been McCarthy’s GOP that has been arguing for months that a default could be managed by the Treasury Department while they flailed around unable to come up with a plan of their own.

“He’s probably trying to reassure investors and Wall Street … that Congress is capable of doing something, and we’re going to do something,” Rep. Steve Womack told The Washington Post, calling it a “test” for McCarthy. He added that the “real problem” is whether McCarthy can find 218 votes among the GOP to pass any kind of bill, much less a plan to present to the White House.

One thing McCarthy apparently wants is to make people go hungry. A centerpiece to the budget-cutting message he took to Wall Street is steep cuts to food assistance programs. That’s getting a tepid response from Republicans in the Senate (where it’s not going to pass). One GOP Senate aide scoffed “I mean, Godspeed. Get what you can. We’re going to live in reality over here.”

Arkansas GOP Sen. John Boozman reiterated that reality, saying it “would be difficult to pass in the Senate with 60 votes.” He’s doubtful it would even get 218 in the House GOP. “You look at the margin in the House,” he said, “It might be difficult to pass it in the House.”

McCarthy has four votes to spare, and plenty of his members have constituents among the 41 million low-income Americans who get Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program help. That includes a bunch of swing-state Republicans, including a new group of freshmen members from New York.

That’s just one aspect of the massive cuts McCarthy would have to pass to achieve the kind of spending reductions he’s talking about–cuts that he’s going to find impossible to find 218 votes for.

That’s just one reason he has no plan, as Biden was quick to point out. “Show me his budget,” Biden told reporters early Sunday morning, on his return from his trip to Ireland. Biden released his budget on March 9. McCarthy has released nothing. Not even an agreed upon outline for the cuts he’s demanding.

"I don't know what we're negotiating if I don't know what they want, what they're going to do,” Biden stressed.

That’s one reason the White House is as adamant as it is in arguing that the only option is a clean debt ceiling that is separate from budget negotiations. They can count to 218, even if McCarthy can’t. They can also point to plenty of evidence that just one side of this argument thinks that breaching the debt limit isn’t such a big deal.

Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, responded to the latest from McCarthy in a statement reflecting that. The House should “immediately take a default on our obligations–which would worsen the fiscal outlook–off the table.”

“House Republicans must address the debt limit; that’s their non-negotiable obligation under the Constitution,” Bates said.

House Republicans have spent more time putting together an inoperable plan for what the Treasury Department could do after a default rather than putting together any kind of budget to take to Biden to begin a real negotiating process. Taking the nation into default has actually become a thing that some Republicans think should happen. For real.

“My view is that the crisis at hand is the debt; it’s not that we might not pass the debt ceiling,” said Stephen Moore, a leading economist at the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. “It’s that we can’t just stay on this path. There will be a financial train wreck.”

Meanwhile, on Wall Street, real economists’ hair is on fire. “It will be financial chaos,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, if the nation even comes close to default. “Our fiscal problems will be meaningfully worse. … Our geopolitical standing in the world will be undermined.”

The GOP is reaping what they sowed in the wake of the decision by the extremist district court judge in Texas, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, to block the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. A baldly activist forced birther judge overturning 117 years of the FDA’s authority to regulate drugs in a lawless, unprecedented, and deeply flawed decision is causing no little heartburn for Republicans, who are finally seeming to get that they are very much on the losing side politically in this fight and have no idea how to get out of it.

There’s been a wall of silence from Senate Republicans on the decision, with the exception of just two members: the sole GOP senator who voted against confirming Kacsmaryk, Maine’s Susan Collins, and the unabashedly extreme Cindy Hyde-Smith from Mississippi who applauded the decision

“In 2019, I voted against Judge Kacsmaryk’s confirmation, and I disagree strongly with his decision in this case,” Collins said Monday. “Mifepristone is an FDA-approved drug that has been on the market for more than two decades and extensively studied.” Hyde-Smith tweeted her glee, and her ignorance: “Today’s ruling on abortion drugs is a victory for pregnant mothers & their unborn children. I’m grateful the Court reined in the @US_FDA for recklessly violating the law & jeopardizing patient safety.” In case you’re wondering, no, the FDA did not break any laws 23 years ago when it approved the drug.

The rest of the Senate GOP are absolutely mum.

HuffPost contacted the offices of all 38 of the senators who voted for Kacsmaryk and none of them responded, despite the fact that they got what they wanted in Kacsmaryk. It’s not like his credentials as a wild-eyed forced birth anti-LGTBQ+ bigot were a big secret when his nomination came before them. But they really, really don’t want to talk about the reality of it all, the fact that Kacsmaryk was confirmed by them for any reason other than crass, extreme politics perfectly willing to embarrass them all with a really, really bad and lawless ruling.

The usual suspects among House Republicans don’t give a damn about any of that. They are so gung-ho, dozens of them filed an amicus briefasking the appeals court to affirm Kacsmaryk’s ruling (along with 11 GOP senators who prefer to keep their opinion on the ruling hidden in court documents).

“The FDA’s (Food and Drug Administration) unlawful approval and deregulation of chemical abortion drugs subverts Congress’ public policy considerations and safeguards for patient safety,” the lawmakers wrote to the court. Again, the FDA acted entirely within the law when it approved mifepristone back in 2000. It’s actually pretty scary that so many lawmakers have absolutely no idea what law is.

They urged the court to uphold the ruling and move to immediately ban the drug to “protect women and girls from the harms of chemical abortion drugs,” which is also not a thing. The drug is safer than many prescription and over the counter drugs, including Tylenol and insulin. Also, if they really gave a damn about the safety of women and girls, they’d be doing something about the guns that are slaughtering them every day.

For the most part, though, Republicans from the House all the way to presidential contenders are just not talking about it, which the forced birth movement has noticed and is trying valiantly to explain away. “Everyone was at church on Friday night when the decision came out,” Katie Daniel, the state policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, toldSemafor. “That could be part of it.” Sure Katie, church. Where they’ve apparently all been ensconced since.

The GOP’s reticence to weigh in might also have something to do with their friends in the pharmaceutical industry, which reacted to this with appropriate horror. They immediately responded to the ruling with an open letter siding with the FDA, spearheaded by Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla; Alisha Alaimo, president of Biogen; Christopher Tan, an executive for Merck & Co.; Imran Nasrullah, a vice president for Bayer Pharmaceuticals; and a senior clinical leader at Novartis, Nancy Lewis. Hundreds of pharmaceutical and biotech companies have signed on.

They call out Kacsmaryk as an activist judge who has "no scientific training," and who "ignores decades of scientific evidence," that has proven mifepristone to be "safer than Tylenol, nearly all antibiotics and insulin." They call for the ruling to be reversed, saying it “set a precedent for diminishing FDA’s authority over drug approvals, and in so doing, creates uncertainty for the entire biopharma industry.”

“As an industry we count on the FDA’s autonomy and authority to bring new medicines to patients under a reliable regulatory process for drug evaluation and approval. Adding regulatory uncertainty to the already inherently risky work of discovering and developing new medicines will likely have the effect of reducing incentives for investment, endangering the innovation that characterizes our industry,” the letter says.

Well that’s kind of a problem for Republicans, isn’t it. The pharmaceutical industry spent $15.6 million in GOP campaign contributions in 2022, and is already much more supportive of Democrats, who got $23.6 million. The forced birth movement, however, coughed up just $1.2 million for the GOP last year.

Maybe this time one of their pet judges went just a little too far.

C’mon, Sen. Angus King, read the damned room. The independent senator from Maine, the state with the oldest population in the country, has decided that his 2024 re-elect requires that he talk with Republicans about tinkering with Social Security. And if it’s Republicans talking about it, you know it’s nothing good for the program or the people counting on it.

King, who caucuses with the Democrats, is leading the group along with Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA). One option they are talking about is to gradually increase the retirement age to 70. Yes, 70. That’s a fine thing for 79-year-old King and 65-year-old Cassidy to decide. After all, they’ll have no problem doing their jobs in their eighth decades and ninth decades, if they stick around. They’re senators!

It’s nice work if you can get it, being a senator. You can do it until you croak, provided the people keep electing you. You only have to show up on the job in Washington, D.C., for eight, maybe nine months out of the year, because of all the time you get for various holidays and, of course, most of August. You have people to figure out your travel. You have people to write your speeches. You have people to write your bills, if that’s something you feel like doing for your job. You have people to drive you around, and you have a person who manages all those people.

King also has no financial worries. In 2018, the last year from which statistics are readily available, he was a multi-millionaire, with a net worth of nearly $9.5 million. He was the 16th richest senator. Cassidy is practically impoverished in comparison, with just $1.1 million.

The other bright ideas these guys are kicking around are a sort of privatization scheme—a sovereign wealth fund that would be started with $1.5 trillion in borrowed funds. They would be a trigger in it so that if it failed to yield an 8% return, then both the income cap and the payroll tax would be increased at a rate to keep the program solvent for 75 years.

“You could really take a fund and, with certain assumptions, take all your revenue from there,” Cassidy told Semafor, in an interview. “Certain assumptions” is doing a lot of work there. Also note that this comes with a tax increase if it doesn’t work, in what would likely be an economic downturn—that is most likely the reason the fund wasn’t making expected returns. Also, that’s horribly regressive, with the lowest earners being hit much harder than the wealthy.

Besides making us work until we’re 70, their other brilliant idea is easily just as bad and regressive. It would completely upend the existing benefit formula used to determine monthly payments to be based on years worked instead of the current formula that uses the average earnings over 35 years worked. The existing formula is flexible, to allow for people leaving and entering the workforce to return to school, because of an illness or injury, or to take care of young children or sick or elderly family members—or whatever life reasons that interrupt work.

The current formula adjusts your earnings to take into account historical changes in wages, and then takes the highest-earning 35 years to calculate the average indexed monthly earnings (up to the maximum taxable earning cap, now at $160,200). The system is geared toward making sure the lowest-earning workers get the maximum possible benefit.

Just counting years worked “rewards people with more years of work and penalizes people with fewer years of work,” Kathleen Romig, with the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, told Semafor. People with uninterrupted work histories could benefit, she said, but “on net, it’s definitely a cut.”

There’s a much simpler way to shore up Social Security’s long-term health: Lift the earnings cap subject to payroll taxes. Even a Republican—and Joe Manchin!—have said that’s an option. The problem is they want to condition doing that on a bunch of things like raising the retirement age and making other cuts.

The other independent from New England has better ideas and the ear of President Biden. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) met with Biden in late January to talk about his proposal to bolster Social Security’s finances by making the nation’s rich pay more in payroll taxes. He want’s to apply the payroll tax to income over $250,000 a year which would give the program another 75 years of solvency. He also pitched Biden on his plan to increase existing benefits for everyone on Social Security with an additional $200/month.

Sanders is arguing the Democrats have to counter all this bullshit from Republicans and King and Manchin about needing to Social Security. “It is not enough to point out the reactionary, anti-worker vision of the Republican Party. We have to present a positive, pro-worker alternative,” Sanders said. “The truth is that Social Security does have a solvency problem, and we have got to address that.”

The most effective way to take it off the deficit peacocks’ chopping block is to take away the narrative that it’s doomed. The most effective way to do that is to start making the wealthy pay a fair share.

This weekend marked what would have been the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision granting the right to an abortion. The reversal of that decision in last year’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization has had a massive ripple effect in the months since it was first leaked, then handed down, reverberations that serve to amplify the court’s existing legitimacy crisis.

The results of the 2022 midterm, for example, and the very obvious failure of a red wave to emerge. There’s also the plummeting trust in the institution and approval of it, a growing sense that it is both too ideological and tipped too far to the right.

There is this: Idaho, following in the footsteps of Alabama and Oklahoma to take Justice Clarence Thomas up on his threat to marriage equality made explicit in his concurrence on Dobbs. A GOP legislator in Idaho has reupped an effort to end the issuance of marriage licenses by the state, and replace them with certificates that can only be issued to a same-sex couple. That’s likely not the only tactic we’ll see from red states to create lawsuit bait that they can take to the Supreme Court to end marriage equality. It will likely become a hobby on the part of red state legislators.

Meantime, the Dobbs decision itself has created more internal controversy on the court. More precisely the leak of that decision penned by Justice Samuel Alito a month before it was formally handed down, has brought even more scrutiny and distrust to how it handles its business. Chief Justice John Roberts made a very big deal out of having an investigation of that leak, an investigation that found that nobody did it. Or at least they couldn’t determine who did it. Because reasons. Like maybe they didn’t actually look that hard at everybody working at the court.

Careful readers of the investigation reporter, like Jamison Foser, found some careful wording in the report that made it pretty clear the justices themselves weren’t subject to investigation, but that the marshal of the court didn’t want to actually say that in print. The report noted that “82 employees [who] had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion” were questioned, and later on in the report notes that “in addition to the Justices, 82 employees had access to electronic or hard copies of the draft opinion.”

The marshal of the court, Gail A. Curley, eventually released a statement saying: “I spoke with each of the Justices, several on multiple occasions,” and that based on leads followed “I did not believe that it was necessary to ask the Justices to sign sworn affidavits.” Uh huh.

Here’s what the employees of the court had to sit through, as explained in the report: interviews with the investigators in which they were informed they “had a duty to answer questions about their conduct as employees; that disciplinary action including dismissal could be undertaken if they refused to answer or failed to answer fully and truthfully; that the answers provided and any resulting information or evidence could be used in the course of civil or administrative proceedings; and that such information or evidence could not be used against them in any criminal proceedings unless they knowingly and willfully provided false statements.”

Additionally, they had to hand over phone, email, and print records of their work involving the case as well as their court-issued laptops. Some handed over personal phone and text records as well, including billing statements. And they all signed sworn affidavits.

Equal justice for all my ass.

That’s a sentiment that is spreading as the court invites more scrutiny. This report from NBC News explores the harsh treatment peaceful protesters at the court are subject to, versus what those protesting at the Capitol across the street. A night in jail and a criminal conviction for speaking out in court on the one hand, a few hours in police custody and a $50 fine for interrupting a Senate session on the other.

Mark Goldstone, a lawyer who represents D.C. protesters says those who get nabbed at the Supreme Court are treated “more harshly.” Get arrested on the Capitol grounds and the cops “process you and release you,” Goldstone said, but at the Supreme Court, “you are going to spend the night in jail” and likely be prosecuted.

That’s a court out of control, a court that believes it is untouchable. That can’t continue—democracy can’t afford kings and queens in robes.

A last-ditch Republican appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court to block voting this Saturday failed Wednesday, so voters in more than a dozen counties can cast their vote in the runoff between Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock and MAGA Herschel Walker this weekend and beat the rush. They’ve already started in DeKalb County.

The urgency of returning Warnock to the Senate becomes more clear by the day as House Republicans are promising to surpass already low expectations for acting like responsible adults in charge of one of the most important governing bodies in the world. That makes having an effective Senate—one that has a clear Democratic majority—even more essential.

David Nir has already talked about some of the reasons why Warnock needs to be in the Senate, including the fact that he’s a phenomenal senator and that Black representation in that body is essential—that is Black representation chosen by Black voters. According to exit polls, 90% of Black Georgians cast their vote for Warnock in the general election. But beyond that, there’s the 51 vote majority for Democrats. With a 51-vote majority comes something really important: the ability to issue subpoenas without Republican obstruction.

The power-sharing agreement Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Republican leader Mitch McConnell struck didn’t specifically address subpoena power, but most committees have to have a majority vote or approval of the top Republican on the committee to issue them. But committee rules can be changed with a majority.

With the work of the Jan. 6 select committee winding down and Trump announcing that he’s running again, it’s going to be important that the Senate has full investigative powers. Since the House is going to be running bogus investigations of Joe Biden, his family, and his administration nonstop, the Senate is going to need to counterbalance that with substantive investigations.

That’s what Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii recently told The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent. “If we’re investigating legitimate issues while they’re fixated on Hunter Biden’s laptop, we’ll be doing our job,” Schatz said. “And we’ll be winning the battle of public opinion.”

That would likely include examinations of Trump’s ongoing efforts to use the presidency for personal profit, including with foreign companies and governments. “Now that we know that it already happened, it’s ongoing and he fully intends to monetize another presidency, that has to be a central theme,” Schatz said. It would serve the public, he said, for the Senate to establish a record of “all the foreign money” Trump took as president.

The Senate might have to take on follow-up tasks from the House Jan. 6 committee as that information stream is still active. It could take on the work of the House Ways and Means Committee, which just got access to Trump’s tax returns via the Supreme Court’s refusal to block it. It should also launch a full-on investigation of the Supreme Court leaks in which Justice Samuel Alito is strongly implicated.

All of that will be controversial with some Democratic senators, who’d rather pretend that Republicans haven’t declared war against them. “A balance has to be struck,” Schatz told Sargent. “We have to be tough. We have to be loud. We have to be pugilistic. But we don’t have to be ridiculous and unfounded and corrupt. That’s what they are.” Nonetheless, he said, “we have an obligation to fully use our subpoena power and our investigative authority.”

But that fight is moot without the 51st vote and the clear majority they would get with a Warnock win.

The would-be leaders of the Republican House and Senate conferences are in for some wild times as recriminations and power struggles take precedence in both chambers. In the House, the tiny majority Republicans has every faction plotting how they’ll control Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California. In the Senate, leader Mitch McConnell is under pretty much daily attack from Sen. Rick Scott of Florida, the guy who blew all of the National Republican Senate Committee’s money and is still blaming McConnell for not winning the majority.

There are still five uncalled House races, but it’s looking like McCarthy will have a 222-213 majority. He needs 218 to become speaker and to pass anything, and right now, that’s in jeopardy. Two Republicans—Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida and Andy Biggs of Arizona—have said flat out they won’t vote for him as speaker. Two more, Reps. Matt Rosendale of Montana and Bob Good of Virginia, have signaled that they are opposed to McCarthy, but haven’t definitively said they’ll vote against him. Biggs challenged McCarthy in last week’s vote and got 31 votes.

McCarthy is clearly chasing those votes. He’s already all but promised Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Georgia MAGA maniac, that she’ll get a coveted Oversight Committee post. He’s also vowed that he’ll kick Democrats off of committees in retaliation for the Democrats stripping Greene and Paul Gosar of committee assignments. He’ll oust Democrats Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from the Select Committee on Intelligence (which he can do because it’s not a standing committee) and Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs, which is subject to a vote of the full House. All of this is to court the maniacs.

Which leaves a fairly large group of moderate Republicans (and calling a bunch of people who didn’t agree to birth control as a right “moderate” means we need better political descriptors) feeling like they can exert some pressure of their own.

“Kevin’s not stupid,” said Rep. Dave Joyce of Ohio, leader of the Republican Governance Group. “He’s trying to add to his numbers, not destroy his base. And so I count on his political acumen to know what’s acceptable to the rank and file inside the conference.” Joyce is clearly in flattery mode with McCarthy, because he’s rarely characterized by his smarts, political or otherwise.

Two other groups, the Main Street Caucus and the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, are strategizing about how to influence him as well. The latter group has about 50 members, and while they’ve never solved any problems, they could definitely trip McCarthy up, if those 50 members can remain unified. “We just want to make the group more accountable … I mean, the whole point of our group is to stick together on the floor when we endorse bills,” Republican Brian Fitzpatrick said. He also told Politico that even Freedom Caucus members have approached him about potential alliances. Which kind of shoots the whole “problem solving” moniker to hell since the maniacs are the problem.

The Main Street Caucus of Republicans, Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska says, has nearly 90 members and is sick of the maniacs. “It’s time we flex our muscles,” he said. Last week Bacon floated the possibility that his group would work with Democrats to find a candidate for speaker, later saying the the report “mischaracterized his remarks” and that he was pro-McCarthy. So how effective his group will be in blocking the maniacs is questionable.

While McCarthy is trying to wrangle all that, McConnell has his own group of nihilists to fend off. He retained his leadership position in a secret ballot last week, with 10 members voting against him and one voting present, with Scott challenging. It’s been open warfare between McConnell and Scott and their allies for months now, each blaming the other for the fact that Republicans had such a poor showing in Senate races.

To be fair to McConnell (which tells you just how odious Scott is), there’s the fact that Scott has used his position at the NRSC for grift and is still doing it. His NRSC team just sent out another email ostensibly raising money for Herschel Walker in the Georgia runoff, but with 98% of the money going to the NRSC, 2% to “Team Rick Scott” and 2% to Walker. If the past is any guidance, a good portion of that NRSC money is going to go to Scott as well.

That fight is still on thanks to Tucker Carlson and Blake Masters, the failed Arizona GOP Senate candidate (who was viewed less favorably by voters than Roy Moore was in his failed race for the Senate in Alabama—after all the news reports that he creeped on teenaged girls when he was in his 30s). Masters blasted McConnell for his loss.

“You know what else is incompetent, Tucker? The establishment. The people who control the purse strings,” Masters said. “Had he chosen to spend money in Arizona, this race would be over. We’d be celebrating a Senate majority right now.”

As that charge results in even more national stories about the Republican civil war, more right-wing pundits take sides, raising the temperature even more.

With the Senate majority secured, Democrats are working hard to increase it by one and return Sen. Raphael Warnock in the Georgia runoff. They’re also enjoying the show. “My advice is to keep on doing what they are doing,” said Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, who led Senate Democrats’ campaign committee to victory this cycle.

It’s going exactly how Republicans promised it would if they took the House: vengeance. Nothing but vengeance. Policy agenda? As if.

The first press conference of their majority Thursday, was from the Oversight and Judiciary Committee chairs laying out the number one target for their vendetta. It was all Hunter Biden’s laptop, all the time. A thing that is entirely not real.

On the second day of their majority, Rep. Jim Jordan’s Judiciary committee sent a letter to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain demanding the testimony of White House staff about the administration’s “misuse of federal criminal and counterterrorism resources to target concerned parents at school board meetings.” Another thing that never happened. All four of the people they are demanding testimony from are women, and some are women of color.

That was just the start. Jordan also sent letters to Justice, the FBI, Departments of Education, and Homeland Security telling them to “anticipate requiring testimony, either in hearings or transcribed interviews” from dozens more officials, many again of whom are people of color and women.

What about inflation? What about gas prices? What about fentanyl? What about violent crime? What about immigration? What about making sure everyone can afford to go to Disneyland?

As if.

They are not interested in making government work. They won’t try to make government work. Which is why it is imperative that Democrats do all the stuff while they have the majority. That includes figuring out how to put the debt ceiling out of their reach, just for a start. That one’s a necessity.

So is doing the least they can on protecting the next presidential election by pushing the electoral count reforms through. We have some breathing room on that with the great results in some swing state elections, but fixing this is important, particularly now that larger election reforms can’t get done.

It would also be super smart to revive the child tax credit monthly payments from the 2021 COVID-19 relief bill Democrats passed, and generally do do everything they possibly can to help regular people and to make a very big deal out of it—the Democrats’ Christmas Gift to America—to start making the case for 2024.

Which will have to happen the week after next, because they’re already gone until after Thanksgiving. Oh, well. In the meantime, enjoy the Washington Post showing us what a fool Kevin McCarthy is, and relish how his red wave became a pink dribble.

How McCarthy wrongly predicted a House 'red wave'youtu.be

Senate Republicans have been playing a transparent game for months now, using their willing tool of Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) to drag out negotiations on any number of issues to keep him away from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden. To prevent Democrats from moving any significant policies that can help the American people and give Democrats a win.

They’ve done it on voting rights and election reforms. They’ve done it on climate and energy. It’s just one tactic—and a very successful one—Republicans are using to keep the Democratic majority tied up and unable to accomplish anything.

Case in point: additional funding for the federal COVID-19 effort. Manchin’s good friend and frequent negotiating partner Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) all but killed it this week when he alleged that the Biden administration lied about the government’s ability to secure additional vaccines, treatments, and supplies. That’s because the White House recently announced it was taking money from other priorities to pay for the most pressing needs.

“Washington operates on a relationship of trust between the respective parties,” Romney said Thursday,. “I hope that there’s an appreciation that for the administration to say they could not purchase these things, and then after several months, divert some funds and then purchase them is unacceptable, and makes our ability to work together … very much shaken to the core.” The pearls are tightly clutched.

The White House, not surprisingly, has a different interpretation on how discussions have been going. “We’ve tried to meet Republicans on their requests, and they keep moving the goal posts,” one official told the Washington Post. Another, spokesperson Kevin Munoz, went on the record. “Going back to January, we’ve been working with members of Congress, Democrats and Republicans, on the funding needs for the covid response,” he said in a statement. “We’ve also been crystal clear about the consequences of a lack of funding … including the very real possibility that we would have to reevaluate the planned uses of existing funds.”

There’s one more potential win for the White House—not to mention all the people at risk of catching COVID-19 in the coming weeks and months—Republicans are cynically blocking. It’s nearly as egregious as what they’ve been doing on guns.

All of that puts this in a “we’ll believe when we sit it” mood. “Senate Democrats are preparing for possible summer action on their still-elusive climate, tax reform and prescription drugs bill, grinding behind the scenes on a new version during high-profile gun safety talks.” Because it’s Manchin, once again, that all this is hinging on and Republicans are on the verge of declaring that partisan Democrats have destroyed any hope of gun safety regulation with their unreasonable demands that guns be kept out of the hands of people who have been convicted of violence.

That sets up Manchin to declare that the Democrats have been horrible partisans and he just can’t continue to work with them. He’s used far flimsier excuses before, like the fact that the White House included his name in a statement about Build Back Better. That’s what blew up the whole package last December, supposedly. It likely wouldn’t take anything more for Manchin to do it again.

Republicans are counting on that.

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court is now assured with the support of Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, who is always there with her vote when it’s not needed. Since Sen. Joe Manchin announced he would vote for Jackson, Collins’ support is not necessary, but it does give Jackson at least 51 votes.

Collins’ endorsement was every self-serving thing you would expect from her. “In recent years, senators on both sides of the aisle have gotten away from what I perceive to be the appropriate process for evaluating judicial nominees,” she said. “In my view, the role under the Constitution assigned to the Senate is to look at the credentials, experience and qualifications of the nominee. It is not to assess whether a nominee reflects the individual ideology of a senator or would vote exactly as an individual senator would want.” Uh-huh.

This from the woman who voted for Brett Kavanaugh after serious and multiple allegations of his history of sexual assault, which went unexamined by the FBI and then-Republican Senate majority. That makes two Republican men on the Supreme Court credibly accused of sexual harassment and/or assault.

One of those two, Clarence Thomas, might also be complicit in a conspiracy to overthrow the government. We know that his “best friend” and spouse Ginni Thomas agitated for a coup with the Trump White House after the election, before the Jan. 6 insurrection, and for weeks after the attack on the Capitol. We also know that Clarence Thomas was the sole Supreme Court justice to try to prevent records of that contact between his wife and the White House from being released to the House Jan. 6 committee.

Collins has apparently not been asked where she stands on these clear conflicts of interest for Thomas. Her Republican colleagues, however, have been clear. The absolute minimum that could be asked of him—that he recuse from any Jan. 6 cases—is a bridge too far. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell even says the call for Thomas to recuse is “inappropriate” and “has no basis in Justice Thomas’ decades of impeccable service on the court. The Justice and the entire court should feel free to completely ignore all this.”

That’s his answer to treasonous Republicans: Ignore them. Allow the corruption to keep festering under the surface while trolling Democrats. It’s a game in which Collins is entirely happy to participate.

So while McConnell and his Republicans have packed the court with unqualified Trump picks and are looking the other way at Thomas’ clear ethics abuses, they’ve decided to create a whole new and extremely dangerous line of attack on potential new nominees from President Joe Biden.

When it was clear there was no way they could impugn Jackson—easily the most qualified nominee to come before the Senate in decades—Republicans went off-script. They demanded documents that should not under any circumstances ever be put in politicians’ hands, and now they’re threatening to keep doing it.

They tried to derail Jackson’s hearing on the last day by insisting the White House provide presentencing documents from Jackson’s time on the federal bench. These are documents the White House doesn’t and shouldn’t possess. These are sealed documents prepared by court probation officers that only the parties in the cases involved are allowed to see. What Republicans were asking for from Jackson was doubly sensitive because they involve child sexual abuse materials and extensive personal information about the victims, their families, and the defendants. Stuff that should never, ever be in the hands of someone as dangerously dim as the likes of Marsha Blackburn.

It so alarmed the legal community that former district court judges immediately wrote a letter to Judiciary Chair Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and ranking member Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) condemning the demands and warning that this was dangerous territory. The only entities beyond the people involved in the cases that have access to these reports (PSRs), the judges insist, are the FBI and the Bureau of Prisons “for the sole purpose of aiding in ongoing investigations specifically related to terrorist activity, for the safe placement of the defendant while incarcerated, and for possible deportation proceedings,” the former judges wrote. “These are the only authorized uses of the PSR.”

“It would be completely inappropriate to release a PSR for any other purpose,” they write. “Certain information, such as medical information, cannot be released … Other information could endanger a defendant and his family.” That’s not going to stop Republicans. “[Y]ou better believe” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) will bring them up in the future, he told Politico. “We have the right to see those reports,” said Sen. John Neely Kennedy (R-LA). Senators don’t indeed have that right. The judicial branch has already decided that.

But to keep pushing their “soft on crime” narrative against the Biden administration, which McConnell made clear in a floor statement Wednesday, Republicans are willing to revictimize the survivors of child sexual abuse and their families.

They’re doubling down on support for Clarence Thomas, who in all likelihood knew about his wife’s participation in a conspiracy to overthrow the government and attempted to use his position on the high court to cover it up.

There really is only one thing Democrats can do to save the Supreme Court, the federal judiciary, and pretty much this whole 233-year-old constitutional experiment from Republicans: Expand the court. Dilute the malign power of the majority on this court that wants to overthrow a century of progress.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer will be stepping down at the end of the current Supreme Court term in June or July. Which has to be a blow to Mitch McConnell, who has been harboring nefarious plots for making sure President Joe Biden never had the opportunity to seat a Supreme Court justice.

Those plans weren’t even secret. McConnell baldly stated last summer that he was “highly unlikely” to allow Biden to fill a vacancy in 2024, should the Senate revert to Republican control in these midterms. He added that he might just refuse to hold hearings in 2023 as well, should a vacancy come up.

“I think in the middle of a presidential election, if you have a Senate of the opposite party of the president, you have to go back to the 1880s to find the last time a vacancy was filled. So I think it’s highly unlikely,” McConnell told Hugh Hewitt in a radio interview back in Jun. 2021. That’s McConnell’s further twisting of the supposed Senate precedent that the Senate shouldn’t confirm a justice case to a presidential election.

He had to add that qualifier of “Senate of the opposite party” to his supposed “rule” because he spearheaded seating Trump’s pick of Amy Coney Barrett on the court while actual early voting in the 2020 presidential election was happening. But to prove that there was no principle involved in his intentions at all, he added “Well, we’d have to wait and see what happens” if a vacancy occurred in 2023—fully a year before the presidential election.

As recently as last month, five Republican senators—all on the Senate Judiciary Committee—told CNN they would oppose any nominee from Biden. Period. “You know what the rule is on that,” said Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, the senior Republican on the committee. “You go back to 1886 and ever since then, when the Senate’s been of one party and the president’s been of another party, you didn’t confirm.” Which absolutely never has been a rule. Like that would stop Republicans.

Because Republicans nuked the filibuster for Supreme Court justices, they don’t get to have a say this year. That is unless they can get Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on their side again. It’s entirely possible that those two will figure that they’ve already burned the bridge with Democrats and Biden part way, so they might as well finish the job, but that’s probably not likely. Particularly considering they’ve already voted to confirm one of the leading contenders for Breyer’s replacement, Ketanji Brown Jackson, to the nation’s second-highest court, the D.C. Circuit. That probably gives her a leg up in the process, that and that she’s a kick-ass choice and a former clerk for Breyer.

The White House more or less confirmed Wednesday that the nominee will fulfill President Biden’s promise in the 2020 campaign to nominate a Black woman to the court.

Jackson isn’t the only contender, though she might have the edge as having so recently been confirmed with bipartisan support just seven months ago. Not just Manchin and Sinema voted for her, but also Republicans Susan Collins, Lindsey Graham, and Lisa Murkowski.

Politico reports that Breyer informed President Biden of his intention last week. The official announcement from Breyer could come as soon as Thursday- according to CNN.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer tweeted a statement promising “a prompt hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee” for the eventual nominee, and that they would “be considered and confirmed by the full United States Senate with all deliberate speed.” Reuters reports that a source says Senate Democrats “intend to confirm a Biden Supreme Court nominee on the same timeframe as the one-month timetable used by Republicans to appoint Justice Barrett.”

And Mitch McConnell and his band of saboteurs can’t do a damned thing about it.

Congressional Democrats have determined how to get the Freedom to Vote and John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement acts to the Senate floor for actual debate, something the Republicans have been blocking for months. It will allow the Democrats to skip the first, most undemocratic block Republicans have been using on this and all the other legislation: refusing to provide enough votes to even allow the Senate to proceed to debate on a bill. The process will allow Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, probably, to achieve his aim of having a vote on challenging the filibuster for these bills on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

It will force debate on the issue so that Republicans won’t be able to just silently block the bills without having to decide whether they’ll stand on the Senate floor and argue against the concept of free and fair elections, against the principle of “one person, one vote” or if they’ll be cowards and refuse to show up. It will also increase pressure on Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as Senate Democrats unite on the floor to make the case for saving democracy.

Here’s how it works: the House passes a bill that combines the two pieces of legislation, using a separate bill that has already been passed by the Senate and House and is being reconciled between the two bodies, but is not passed in a final form. They’ll use this bill, in this case a NASA bill, as a shell to carry the voting rights and elections reforms bills. Does it matter that it’s not the same legislation? No. Whatever the House adds in and passes as H.R.5746 - NASA Enhanced Use Leasing Extension Act of 2021 is the bill they pass and is technically and legislatively considered the NASA bill the Senate passed.

Because the Senate has already passed it, and the House and Senate have sent it back and forth as “messages” the requisite number of times, the motion to proceed to the bill cannot be filibustered—just 51 votes will bring the bill to the floor to debate. Republicans can’t kill it even before it gets a debate.

“The Senate will finally debate voting rights legislation, and then every senator will be faced with a choice of whether or not to pass the legislation to protect our democracy,” Schumer wrote in a memo sent to Senate Democrats and obtained by several news organizations Wednesday. “With this procedure, we will finally have an opportunity to debate voting rights legislation—something that Republicans have thus far denied,” Schumer said. “Of course, to ultimately end debate and pass the voting rights legislation, we will need 10 Republicans to join us—which we know from past experience will not happen—or we will need to change the Senate rules as has been done many times before.”

That’s the rub—while Republicans can’t avoid the debate, but they can filibuster at the other end. There has to be a vote to move from debate to final passage, and that requires 60 votes. This is the point at which Schumer will likely move to change the rules, and where Manchin and Sinema will be put on the spot. This process is likely going to take a few days to play out, keeping the Senate in session over the weekend and setting up a potential Monday showdown on the filibuster.

That’s Monday, which is also Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Schumer doesn’t lay out in the memo just how he would try to change the filibuster—restore the talking filibuster, carve out an exemption for elections and voting related issues, etc.—or exactly when the votes will occur. The Senate is likely to be in all weekend hashing that out and trying to find a process Manchin and Sinema might agree to. If they don’t agree to that process, the failure of this critical legislation will be on their heads. That’s the leverage Schumer is trying to bring to bear here.

There’s also going to be pressure on Sinema back home, so she won’t be able to escape there this weekend. Martin Luther King III, the eldest son of Martin Luther King Jr., will lead a march in Phoenix on Saturday calling for voting rights. The march is organized by Deliver for Voting Rights, which is also holding a march in D.C. on Monday.

The marches will “call on President Biden and the Senate to urgently pass federal voting rights legislation,” breaking the filibuster if needed. “From the Civil War to the Jim Crow era, the filibuster has blocked popular bills to stop lynching, end poll taxes, and fight workplace discrimination,” the organization said. “Now it’s being used to block voting rights. The weaponization of the filibuster is racism cloaked in procedure and it must go.”

While President Joe Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have been stymied in the Senate and by the courts and by a vengeful universe (the second year of COVID-19, which is ramping up with variants for the next year and beyond), there’s one first-year achievement worth crowing about: judicial appointments.

So you can forgive Schumer for taking a victory lap, but at the same time, no one should forget that his achievement was made possible by the decision of former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid—and a majority of Democratic senators—to end the filibuster for lower-court nominees.

All that Schumer is citing is true. The judges the Senate has churned through in a record place are historically diverse:

In a comprehensive report, Alliance for Justice has highlighted the many firsts among this crop of judges: the first openly lesbian judge on the Court of Appeals (Beth Robinson); the first Korean American to sit on the Court of Appeals (Lucy Koh); the first Muslim federal judge (Zahid Quraishi); the first Black judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (Tiffany Cunningham); the first woman of color to serve on the U.S. District Court in Maryland (Lydia Griggsby); the first Native American federal judge in Washington state (Lauren J. King)—the list goes on. According to Alliance for Justice, nearly 75 percent of Biden’s judicial nominees are women, and nearly 65 percent are people of color. For comparison, only 24 percent of Trump’s judicial nominees were women, and just 16 percent were people of color.

What’s more, they have professional diversity: “21 public defenders, 14 civil rights attorneys, 10 plaintiff-side lawyers, three former legal aid lawyers, three consumer protection lawyers, and one labor lawyer.”

It’s not all great news, though. For one thing, there are voting rights and civil rights and LGBTQ rights champions among Biden’s nominees, but “not a single nominee who specializes in protecting abortion access—no one like, say, Brigitte Amiri, the fearless ACLU attorney who thwarted the Trump administration’s efforts to stop undocumented minors from terminating unwanted pregnancies.” That’s a glaring omission—and a pretty scary one, looking at the future of abortion rights with the current Supreme Court.

That’s the other problem. All of these judges can make a difference, but only to the point that their cases stand and don’t advance to the Supreme Court. Because as it is currently constituted, thanks to being packed by Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, any significant progressive movement by the lower courts will be reversed.

In addition to recognizing that Biden achieved this because of filibuster reform, it’s also important to note that the minute he had the opportunity, McConnell also changed the rule for Supreme Court justices so that he could do just what he has done: pack it.

One would think old Senate hands like Biden and Schumer, who’ve had the questionable benefit of serving with McConnell and seeing what he’s capable of doing, wouldn’t be at all squeamish about doing what’s necessary to thwart him. Like expanding the Supreme Court to dilute the pernicious, regressive, and out-of-the-mainstream conservative majority, the last three of whom were literally packed on. Neil Gorsuch is in the seat McConnell stole from President Barack Obama. Brett Kavanaugh is serving under about five different ethical clouds, from alleged sexual assault to perjury before Congress. Amy Coney Barrett was shoved onto the court while people were casting their presidential ballots in the fall of 2020.

So, yes, Biden and Schumer should take this moment to celebrate, but they can’t rest on this achievement. There’s far more that needs to be done to secure the nation’s future.

If there is anyone in Washington, D.C. as stubborn, arrogant, and thick-headed as Sen. Joe Manchin this week, it’s Supreme Court Associate Justice Stephen Breyer. The 83-year-old remains doggedly committed to the fantasy that if he says the judicial confirmation process should not be politicized, it won’t be. As if the last decade of Sen. Mitch McConnell flexing his power hadn’t happened.

Speaking of which, at least five Republican senators have confirmed to CNN that they absolutely will not allow President Joe Biden to have any Supreme Court confirmations if they retake the Senate in 2022. Funny how they’re not heeding Breyer’s admonitions about politicizing the court. That puts Democrats in a delicate position: If they push Breyer too hard now about retiring so Biden and a Democratic majority can get a solid, progressive replacement, he’ll be even more stubborn about staying on the bench. Because old, entitled white men get to do that. They get to dictate the terms of everything to satisfy their own egos at the expense of, well, everyone else.

On the other hand, nothing makes the case for court expansion like Breyer’s intransigence—the court and the country and the entirety of our civil and reproductive rights being held hostage by a literal handful of people is just not sustainable. That destabilizes this whole centuries-old experiment we’ve been on.

While the White House can point to some historic and laudable achievements in the judiciary, there’s still the thorny Supreme Court problem. Biden and the Democratic Senate have pushed the biggest number of federal judges in a president’s first term since President Ronald Reagan. He’s made history with those nominees with their racial, gender, and professional diversity. There’s still some capacity in the lower courts to continue that, and every indication that Biden and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer intend to do as much as possible.

However, there are still Republicans, and those Republicans still have power at the district court level to block him. As of now, Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin is still honoring the blue slip process on those nominations, meaning he is giving deference to home state senators in nominations. And in states with two Republican senators, there have been no confirmations.

Some Republicans say they have been talking to the White House on nominees from their states, and some—notably Tennessee Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty—say there haven’t been substantive conversations. “That’s despite a senior White House official saying the administration had been speaking with the Tennessee senators about the vacancy since the summer,” The Washington Post points out. Gee, who are you going to trust to be telling the truth there?

The district courts feed the appeals courts, where Biden has seated nearly a dozen judges, with another half dozen either reported out of committee or pending there. Three more appeals court judges—Thomas Ambro of the 3rd Circuit, Diana Motz of the 4th Circuit, and R. Guy Cole and Helene White of the 6th Circuit—announced early this month that they’ll be taking senior status, which allows them to still hear some cases as they chose, but allows Biden to appoint permanent replacements for them.

There’s the possibility that some of these appeals courts will flip with Biden’s opportunities, but unfortunately the worst of them—the 5th Circuit—hasn’t had a vacancy. That’s the court that Republican states, with Texas in the lead, have used to push through every regressive lawsuit from the original Affordable Care Act challenges through the current abortion challenges from Texas and Mississippi.

As long as that appeals court continues to have a Federalist Society and wingnut majority of Bush- and Trump-appointed judges who can feed the Trump-packed Supreme Court challenges, democracy is endangered. Even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts has realized that and has warned his colleagues. The integrity of the court he leads, he wrote in a recent dissent, is in danger.

The 5th will be there to oppose every item of Biden’s agenda, to challenge voting rights, civil rights including marriage equality, and what’s left of reproductive health rights including access to birth control. The 5th Circuit, and the Trump-packed Supreme Court, might even decide the outcome of the next federal elections.

So, yeah, Breyer should wake up to reality and resign already, and Biden and the Senate should do the same when it comes to expanding the court. It’s time to start talking about it as what it is: a constitutional viable and rational solution to a problem created by Republicans manipulating a broken and dysfunctional system. Once they fix the court, they can start to work on the rest.

The whole point of this exercise for the two of them, it appears, is to open up the Republican donor spigot. That's were the really big political money is, and courting it is so much easier than doing the necessary work it takes to amass small donor donations. Like showing up in your state, holding town meetings, and being accountable to the people who put you in office. Besides, going to London and Paris in search of checks is so much more fun.

Both have been feted by Texas donor G. Brint Ryan at his $18 million mansion in Dallas. He advised the former guy on taxes during the 2016 campaign and says of Manchin and Sinema that they are "out of step with their party, but I tend to believe that they're in the right." He has a tax consulting firm and one of is partners, Jeff Miller, is a "close political adviser" to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Ryan and his firm are all-in on the two turncoats according to the Times: "In the days around the fund-raisers at his home, Mr. Ryan, his employees, his company's political action committee and a relative's law firm combined to donate nearly $80,000 to Ms. Sinema's campaign and more than $115,000 to Mr. Manchin's."

The two have set personal bests for fundraising this year, Sinema raking in $2.6 million in the first three quarters—"two and a half times as much as she raised in the same period last year"—and Manchin $3.3 million, which is a whopping 14 times as much as his haul from last year. Both are up for reelection in 2024, so this push isn't to save their seats in a difficult midterm election for Democrats. More likely, at least in Sinema's case, it's to try to scare off a primary challenger. She's been on an image-rehab tour for the past week or so. She spent most of the year sabotaging Biden behind the scenes, not making her demands public and earning the wrath of fellow Democrats and particularly the activists in Arizona who get her elected.

Sinema, who has broken her months-long silence in a "rare interview" fluff piece in Politico and another in the Washington Post, is now casting doubt on whether she'll support Biden's Build Back Better bill passed last week by the House. She's raising the same bullshit argument about inflation as Manchin, telling the Post she is "worried about inflation" and saying "new tax hikes could harm businesses."

At least she's talking, even if it is bullshit. Like when her spokesman tells the Times that all that Republican money she's raking in has nothing to do at all with her policy choices. That spokesman, John LaBombard, told the Times that "Senator Sinema makes decisions based on one consideration: what's best for Arizona."

Accountable.US crunched the numbers for BBB and just how much it will benefit Arizona. They look specifically at the fact that Arizona has the largest Native American population in the country—communities that could gain crucial funding through BBB. In total, the bill has at least $5.2 billion to help Native communities, including more than $2.34 billion for Native American health initiatives, including the Indian Health Service; more than $1.67 billion for Tribal housing, infrastructure, and community development; more than $485 million for climate resilience, conservation, and drought relief specifically for Native American communities; $200 million in grants to Native American language educators; and $523 million in other funding benefitting Native American communities, including funding for a Native American Consultation Resource Center. Jonathan Nez, president of the Navajo Nation, the Diné people, is pushing for the bill.

That's just one part of what the bill will do for the state. The White House breaks down more numbers for Arizona: child care to 430,000 young children, providing help to 90% of Arizona's young families; free preschool to more than 134,000 additional children; additional Pell grant assistance to 112,180 Arizona students; grants for job training to 19 community colleges; an additional 262,000 students getting free school meals; 158,000 uninsured people getting access to health insurance; and tax cuts of as much as $1,500 to 385,200 low-wage workers in Arizona. But Sinema is inexplicably more worried about the extremely wealthy who will have to pay more in taxes.

The White House also has the facts for West Virginia, one of the poorest and oldest states in the union. Right now, West Virginia families with two children pay as much as 22% of their income on just child care every year, about $5,871 on average (West Virginia salaries are not high). That's childcare for 94,170 families—child care that could allow parents to further their educations, or take on new jobs, or start businesses. Only a quarter of the state's children now has access to publicly-funded preschool, and private preschools average about $8,600 every year. An additional 27,753 children would be able to go to free preschool. A whopping 21% of West Virginia's children don't consistently have enough to eat. The bill would give free school meals to an additional 38,000 students in the school year and provide food to almost 205,000 students during summers.

There's a tremendous need in both states, with both ranking in the bottom 10 in the nation for the people living in poverty, Arizona at 43rd and West Virginia 44th. You sure couldn't tell it by the priorities of these two senators.

Four congressional Democrats wrote a scathing letter to President Joe Biden's Supreme Court reform commission this week, calling out the commission's failure to address or even examine the degree to which dark money groups with well-funded lobbying campaigns have influenced the court, both in terms of the justices appointed and their decisions.

In the letter, Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono, and Georgia Representative Hank Johnson remind the commission that they've already called this issue out: "We wrote to you earlier this year to emphasize that the issues your Commission is tasked to consider cannot be addressed without grappling with pressing judicial ethics concerns, including the role of secretive special-interest influence in and around the Court." The commission released its first discussion drafts last month, showing that it was failing to address some of the Court's fundamental problems—like the politicization of the court through groups like the Federalist Society—and downplaying others.

"As currently drafted, this report is a disappointment to anyone who had hoped for a clear-eyed effort to address the Supreme Court's deep troubles," the lawmakers write. "The Commission's draft report acknowledges in passing that 'confirmation battles of recent years have given rise to a multi-million dollar lobbying campaigns' to support and oppose particular nominations," the lawmakers note.

"But the Commission has failed to probe why such sums are being spent to control the Court's composition, or to ask who might be spending this money and—most important—what interests they may have before the Court. The Commission has also failed to consider whether these investments have actually shaped the substance and outcomes of the Court's decision-making, as they were no doubt intended to do."

The lawmakers also strike at the core of the commissions' failings, it's insistence on "both-sidesing" the politicization of the court. "This view that 'both sides' are equally to blame for the politicization of the Court, and the implicit assumption that members of the Court are themselves insulated and apart from this politicization, is an unproven proposition," they wrote.

"In the face of overwhelming evidence that the Court has been captured by partisan donor interests, it is wrong to perpetuate the fiction that it has not been," the lawmakers write. "By grounding its draft report foremost in the concern that the public must perceive the Court to be legitimate and independent, the Commission fails to consider the very real and much more dangerous possibility that it might not be."

The updated draft of the commission, released ahead of a Friday public meeting, shows that the commission is still not dealing with that fundamental challenge of this court. That's not too surprising—the commission includes a few staunchly anti-abortion lawyers and Federalist Society members.

Although the Federalist Society has succeeded in packing the court, the commission argues that expanding the court would endanger the court's legitimacy. "This uncertainty leads even some who fundamentally disagree with aspects of the current Supreme Court's jurisprudence to believe it is better to preserve the court's long-term legitimacy and independence than to open up the court to be packed by potentially dangerous and even authoritarian political movements going forward," the commission materials said. Again, as if this court, with three Trump appointees whose legitimacy is at best questionable, is above question.

The lawmakers detail the evidence of a broken court, influenced by political groups, and demand that the commission address these facts:

(a) that the last three Supreme Court vacancies were filled through the efforts of a private organization (the Federalist Society) receiving enormous contemporaneous, anonymous donations;

(b) that anonymous individual checks as large as $17 million funded Supreme Court confirmation battle advertising, with no way to know what business those donors had before the Court;

(c) that orchestrated flotillas of anonymously funded right-wing amici appear regularly before the Court, and achieve virtually perfect success with the Republican appointees;

(d) that a peculiar fast lane has emerged that rushes politically loaded cases to the Supreme Court through deliberate trial and appellate court losses;

(e) that intensely political partisan decisions have hinged on findings of fact that were not an appellate court's ordinary province, that were not supported by a factual record, and that ultimately were demonstrably false;

(f) that capture by special interests is not limited to administrative agencies but can infect courts as well;

(g) that as much as $400 million in anonymized money has been spent through an array of coordinated groups seemingly designed to capture the Supreme Court, a sum not usually spent without motive; and

(h) that, in civil cases decided by a 5-4 partisan Supreme Court majority during the Roberts era in which there was an evident Republican donor interest, the donor interest win record was an astonishing 80-0.

"These unpleasant facts do not disappear just because we may wish them to," the lawmakers write. "The American people are counting on this Commission. Please do your duty."

The commission is expected to release its final report on Dec. 15.

The announcement last week from the Bureau of Labor Statistics that consumer prices rose 6.2 percent over the past year in the U.S. The pain American consumers feel is very real (though their reported milk consumption might be exaggerated), and does pose a real political challenge to President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats if it lasts well into next year.

That's all very true. But how it's being reported and how it's being used by the traditional media are problematic. While the larger stories of the complexities of grocery store monopolies and how dairy farming and cattle ranching and meat production are manipulated are reported, the policy side of it is reduced to simple politics. And to this, fueling Sen. Joe Manchin's ill-informed and stubborn opposition to President Biden's Build Back Better plan on the basis of inflation.

Like this:

Pretty much every reputable economist (plus Larry Summers) is in agreement that this period of inflation is transitory, albeit more persistent than originally assumed, and that the way to deal with it is to get the COVID-19 pandemic under control and then support the still-recovering economy with the boost from BBB. That's what 17 Nobel laureates in economics, including Joseph Stiglitz, have argued. The investments in BBB, they assert, will increase "the ability of more Americans to participate productively in the economy, helping to improve our low employment-working age population ratio."

Because the bill is financed by tax increases, they argued that "the inflationary impacts will be at most negligible—over the medium term outweighed by the supply-side benefits; and their progressivity will help address one of the country's critical problems, the growing economic divide."

Harvard Economist Jason Fruman points out that even for those (like Summers) how have argued that the current inflation has stemmed from the $2 trillion in COVID relief overheating the economy—the theory Manchin seems to have bought into—there's really no basis for comparison. The COVID relief was pumped into the economy all at once; the money from Build Back Better with few exceptions won't start reaching people until this inflationary period is likely over—it's spent over one and five and 10 years. University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee predicts that inflation is "a short-run phenomenon," and that "The fiscal impulse from the reconciliation bill in the next six to 18 months wouldn't be that big."

Furman argues that universal pre-K and paid family leave will be drivers in reducing inflation, by increasing the workforce and productive capacity. This year's annual survey from Care.com found that "85% of parents, compared to only 72% in 2020, report they are spending 10% or more of their household income on child care," and that "94% of parents have used at least one major cost-saving strategy to save money on child care in the past year, including reducing hours at work (42%), changing jobs (26%), or leaving the workforce completely (26%)." That's a quarter of respondents saying they quit working because they couldn't afford child care. It's a crisis heightened by the pandemic, but by no means over.

There's also the part about how this bill will actually be paid for by raising taxes. "Something that you raise taxes to pay for," Goolsbee said, "doesn't really have that strong a stimulative effect." As currently written, though that might not last, the bill actually hikes taxes for rich people and cuts taxes for everyone else. That's according to a new analysis from the Tax Policy Center.

People who make about $885,000 or more—the top 1%—would pay about $55,000 more than they currently do, and the top 0.1% would pay nearly 6% more than under current law. Those are the people making $4 million and more, who would pay and additional $585,000 annually, on average. It also increases corporate taxes to the tune of $830 billion. That could be one of Manchin's true motivators in derailing the bill, which would be really ironic.

Because, as the Wall Street Journal reports, a whole lot of inflation is happening on purpose because some of the biggest U.S. companies are "seizing a once in a generation opportunity to raise prices to match and in some cases outpace their own higher expenses, after decades of grinding down costs and prices."

"Nearly two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies have reported fatter profit margins so far this year than they did over the same stretch of 2019, before the Covid-19 outbreak, data from FactSet show," the WSJ reports. How fortunate for them. Glenn Richter, the chief financial officer of International Flavors & Fragrances, a supplier to big food companies, admitted that his company is exploiting the situation, because as the WSJ explains, "Widespread inflation makes it easier to broach the topic of raising prices with customers."

If anything is going to drive inflation, it's corporate greed. "The risk to the economy is that price hikes not only stick, but convince customers more increases are inevitable, spurring inflationary demand and sparking a vicious cycle," says the WSJ. The best way to combat that, other than taxing the hell out of them, is with the kinds of investments in people that BBB represents.

And to get there, it's key to understand why we're experiencing inflation—pent-up demand, supply-chain problems, labor shortages, and corporate greed—and address them. Passing this bill could also help solve those political problems.

The House and Senate are both in recess this week, neither planning floor sessions. However, that doesn't mean that they're not working on the critical half of President Joe Biden's big economic, climate change, and family agenda he's calling Build Back Better (BBB). It's the companion bill to the hard infrastructure bill that both the House and Senate have passed. Now that House Democrats have decided to trust Biden's ability to bring recalcitrant Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema along and do it in the next three weeks, with the Thanksgiving holiday thrown in, the pressure is very much on. Because it's not just BBB that has to be dealt with by Dec. 3.

The conservative House Democrats who have been fighting that larger budget reconciliation bill agreed that they would allow for a vote on the package "no later than the week of Nov. 15." So that's the immediate job. There won't be any time to rest if that achievement is met because Congress agreed to give themselves that Dec. 3 deadline for two rather important things: lifting or suspending the debt ceiling, and providing government funding for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2022 (we're already almost a month and a half into it).

Republicans are going to help with neither task. Which means it would make a lot of sense for Democrats to get one of those big must-pass things done as quickly as possible—they need to put the debt ceiling suspension in the budget reconciliation BBB bill, which will pass with only Democratic votes.

There's a lot of good reasons to do that. Joe Manchin is one big one. He backed the idea as recently as a few weeks ago, saying, "Democrats have the responsibility, being the majority party right now, to do it through reconciliation" if Republicans refuse to help. Republicans will refuse to help.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised that, and he can't back down. He's already been blasted by other Senate Republicans who said he caved on extending the deadline in early October. For his reward, the former guy is renewing his attacks on McConnell. Republicans aren't going to help.

It would be a sweetener for Manchin—as much of an obstructionist asshole as he is, he's not willing to play with that particular fire, the full faith and credit of the United States. But he is going to be more than willing to delay and delay and delay the BBB budget reconciliation bill. It's been a constant game of whack-a-mole for Democrats with him, as he takes turns with Sinema to pose objections that Democrats have to address—because this thing doesn't pass without them.

If it's the only game in town for lifting the debt ceiling, or better yet forever eliminating it as a weapon for McConnell, then Democrats had better do that.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has blessed the strategy. On the way to the Glasgow climate summit last week, Yellen told reporters that Democrats should be willing to do it. "Should it be done on a bipartisan basis? Absolutely. Now, if they're not going to cooperate, I don't want to play chicken and end up not raising the debt ceiling. I think that's the worst possible outcome," Yellen told The Washington Post. "If Democrats have to do it by themselves, that's better than defaulting on the debt to teach the Republicans a lesson."

The Senate Budget Committee has ruled out that approach previously, but they could and should change their minds, and they should do it using the process Greg Sargent at the Post discussed with Georgetown law professor David Super. The reluctance of Democrats to deal with the debt limit in reconciliation has been because this form of bill requires specific amounts of either spending or revenue increases, and they don't want to saddle themselves with having passed a $3 or $4 or whatever trillion increase. But, Super has argued, they don't actually have to specify a number: "You can probably change the number to something you don't spell out in ink, but that you describe," Super explained. "You tie it to the national debt. That is a number. It's just not a number you wrote out." The number is the national debt, and the debt ceiling is set is tied to that number. Period. No more need for Congress to ever get involved.

Resolve those two things by Thanksgiving (a tall order, but not impossible). Then Congress can focus all of its attention on government funding, which is also mired down right now by Republicans refusing to help appropriators in the Senate set spending levels. They want to skip the budgeting and appropriations process completely and just have another full-year continuing resolution—the kind of stop-gap funding measure that continues funding for everything at current levels until a date specified in the resolution. The current one runs until Dec. 3.

"An endless cycle of continuing resolutions is not a responsible way to govern," Appropriations Chairman Patric Leahy said in response to the proposal. "It means cuts to veterans, cuts to national security and defense, handcuffing our response to the pandemic, and not meeting the challenges of climate change. We have made clear what we are for. What are they for? We are ready to get to work as soon as they come to the table."

They will not come to the table, and they don't have to. There are 50 of them, just like there are 50 Democrats, and they have Manchin and Sinema willing to continue giving Republicans veto power over the Democrats' agenda. As long as the two of them insist the filibuster remains, McConnell has minority rule, with the exception of budget reconciliation. So Democrats need to use it, and they need to make Manchin help. That would make the next two months just slightly less hellish.

The House and Senate are both in recess this week, neither planning floor sessions. However, that doesn't mean that they're not working on the critical half of President Joe Biden's big economic, climate change, and family agenda he's calling Build Back Better (BBB). It's the companion bill to the hard infrastructure bill that both the House and Senate have passed. Now that House Democrats have decided to trust Biden's ability to bring recalcitrant Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema along and do it in the next three weeks, with the Thanksgiving holiday thrown in, the pressure is very much on. Because it's not just BBB that has to be dealt with by Dec. 3.

The conservative House Democrats who have been fighting that larger budget reconciliation bill agreed that they would allow for a vote on the package "no later than the week of Nov. 15." So that's the immediate job. There won't be any time to rest if that achievement is met because Congress agreed to give themselves that Dec. 3 deadline for two rather important things: lifting or suspending the debt ceiling, and providing government funding for the remainder of Fiscal Year 2022 (we're already almost a month and a half into it).

Republicans are going to help with neither task. Which means it would make a lot of sense for Democrats to get one of those big must-pass things done as quickly as possible—they need to put the debt ceiling suspension in the budget reconciliation BBB bill, which will pass with only Democratic votes.

There's a lot of good reasons to do that. Joe Manchin is one big one. He backed the idea as recently as a few weeks ago, saying, "Democrats have the responsibility, being the majority party right now, to do it through reconciliation" if Republicans refuse to help. Republicans will refuse to help.

Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already promised that, and he can't back down. He's already been blasted by other Senate Republicans who said he caved on extending the deadline in early October. For his reward, the former guy is renewing his attacks on McConnell. Republicans aren't going to help.

It would be a sweetener for Manchin—as much of an obstructionist asshole as he is, he's not willing to play with that particular fire, the full faith and credit of the United States. But he is going to be more than willing to delay and delay and delay the BBB budget reconciliation bill. It's been a constant game of whack-a-mole for Democrats with him, as he takes turns with Sinema to pose objections that Democrats have to address—because this thing doesn't pass without them.

If it's the only game in town for lifting the debt ceiling, or better yet forever eliminating it as a weapon for McConnell, then Democrats had better do that.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has blessed the strategy. On the way to the Glasgow climate summit last week, Yellen told reporters that Democrats should be willing to do it. "Should it be done on a bipartisan basis? Absolutely. Now, if they're not going to cooperate, I don't want to play chicken and end up not raising the debt ceiling. I think that's the worst possible outcome," Yellen told The Washington Post. "If Democrats have to do it by themselves, that's better than defaulting on the debt to teach the Republicans a lesson."

The Senate Budget Committee has ruled out that approach previously, but they could and should change their minds, and they should do it using the process Greg Sargent at the Post discussed with Georgetown law professor David Super. The reluctance of Democrats to deal with the debt limit in reconciliation has been because this form of bill requires specific amounts of either spending or revenue increases, and they don't want to saddle themselves with having passed a $3 or $4 or whatever trillion increase. But, Super has argued, they don't actually have to specify a number: "You can probably change the number to something you don't spell out in ink, but that you describe," Super explained. "You tie it to the national debt. That is a number. It's just not a number you wrote out." The number is the national debt, and the debt ceiling is set is tied to that number. Period. No more need for Congress to ever get involved.

Resolve those two things by Thanksgiving (a tall order, but not impossible). Then Congress can focus all of its attention on government funding, which is also mired down right now by Republicans refusing to help appropriators in the Senate set spending levels. They want to skip the budgeting and appropriations process completely and just have another full-year continuing resolution—the kind of stop-gap funding measure that continues funding for everything at current levels until a date specified in the resolution. The current one runs until Dec. 3.

"An endless cycle of continuing resolutions is not a responsible way to govern," Appropriations Chairman Patric Leahy said in response to the proposal. "It means cuts to veterans, cuts to national security and defense, handcuffing our response to the pandemic, and not meeting the challenges of climate change. We have made clear what we are for. What are they for? We are ready to get to work as soon as they come to the table."

They will not come to the table, and they don't have to. There are 50 of them, just like there are 50 Democrats, and they have Manchin and Sinema willing to continue giving Republicans veto power over the Democrats' agenda. As long as the two of them insist the filibuster remains, McConnell has minority rule, with the exception of budget reconciliation. So Democrats need to use it, and they need to make Manchin help. That would make the next two months just slightly less hellish.

This week's U.S. Supreme Court rocket docket hearing on Texas's abortion ban demonstrated that the court might not be ready to turn citizens into vigilantes when it comes to enforcing their political wishes. That was an argument worthy of scaring Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who seemed to take to heart the amicus brief from the Firearms Policy Coalition, which argued that "it takes little in the way of creative copying for States hostile to the Second Amendment—New York, California, New Jersey, Hawaii, etc.—to declare that the ownership or sale of a handgun is illegal … and set up a bounty system with the same unbalanced procedures and penalties adopted by Texas in this case."

Speaking of guns, the court also heard a challenge to New York state's 108-year-old concealed handgun permit law, which requires that applicants show "proper cause" before getting an unrestricted license to carry. It's looking like that law will go down, or at least be narrowed. Chief Justice John Roberts seemed to sum up much of the conservative majority's view when he asked during oral arguments: "You don't have to say, when you're looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that your speech is particularly important. So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you're entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?"

National polling continues to reflect support for sensible gun regulations, and abortion access and - overwhelmingly rejects Texas-style bans. Large majorities, too. Yet we've got a Supreme Court majority on the far-right fringe of mainstream America. There's increasing momentum to change that, though.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU)—one of North America's largest labor unions—announced its support for expanding the court in comments to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, urging that panel to restore the court's legitimacy. Writing for the group, International President Mary Kay Henry represents the "union of approximately two million working women and men." That's two million workers who "stand in the unique position of being the targets of a long-running, coordinated, and well-funded effort to strip them of their organizing and other rights via federal-court litigation." What's more, Henry writes, "many SEIU members, as BIPOC citizens, are also targets of an additional campaign to strip them of their voting rights. That anti-voter campaign, like the anti-worker effort, has found success with this Supreme Court."

"We firmly believe that this democracy rests on a razor's edge and came, within the last 12 months, very close to falling apart," Henry tells the commission, in large part because the "interests of poor and working people have been largely shut out from government and the law, feeding the rise of anti-democratic forces to which people throughout history have turned in desperation." Henry pleads with the commission to "not forget where we have been in the last twelve months" and to "not get lost in all the academic talk and mundaneness of Zoom meeting rooms."

Henry makes a powerful argument for substantive reform, for the commission to not do the thing most presidential commissions do: "Please be wary of meaningless gestures at reform and of resistance to change that is camouflaged as seemingly reasonable restraint, and please interrogate what may be even your own inherent biases against change." Such gestures include a reform the commission seems to be considering, instituting term limits, which is nibbling around the edges of a 6-3 majority that is intent on rolling back decades of progress. Spending valuable time and political capital on such a limited effort, that could ultimately be rejected by that extremist majority anyway, puts that idea "in the category of apparent reforms that may achieve nothing."

"We believe it is long past time to expand the size of the Court," Henry writes on behalf of the SEIU. "You have an opportunity to lend your credibility to serious suggestions that can lead to real change. Please do not waste it."

As of now, wasting this opportunity appears that's what the commission is inclined to do, scheduled to finish its work with a final report on December 15. The commission should recognize within itself what Henry warns it against, that its members are "blessed by power, prestige, and expensive educations, […] very good at cloaking their arguments in what sound like high-minded principles."

Meanwhile, the effort to build a coalition in Congress to do the job the commission doesn't seem to want to take on continues and strengthens. There are now 40 House members cosponsoring the Judiciary Act of 2021 to expand the court.

President Joe Biden has done some outstanding work identifying and seating federal judges. As of Oct. 1, 14 federal circuit and district judges had been confirmed. Remarkably, this month the Senate has confirmed 11 more, with the Senate adding six more just this week. That's the most confirmations in a president's first term since the Nixon administration.

Biden is also making history in who he is nominating and getting confirmed. Public defenders, civil rights defenders, and non-corporate attorneys—many of whom are people of color—are being elevated to the courts in an unprecedented effort to make the judiciary look like America. He's rightfully receiving praise, as is Majority Leader Chuck Schumer for prioritizing these votes. "Leader Schumer is doing everything you could want in terms of using floor time to quickly confirm President Biden's nominees, as well as in recommending professionally diverse nominees for New York-based judgeships," Brian Fallon, executive director of the progressive advocacy group Demand Justice, told Reuters. But that doesn't mean all is well in the Senate when it comes to nominations.

Because this: "Out of [the] 38 district court nominations, 35 have come in states with two Democratic senators. The only exceptions are the three Ohio nominations announced last month." That's because Judiciary Committee Chair Dick Durbin is maintaining the "blue slip" tradition for district-level judges, and Republicans aren't playing along.

The Senate tradition, from days of yore when the Senate was a place where members felt like they had to fulfill their constitutional duty, was for the president to collaborate with senators on nominations from their home states. When the White House and the senators had agreed on a nominee, the senators would indicate they were ready to advance that nominee with a form printed on blue paper, aka a blue slip. The tradition has come and gone in the past few decades, pretty much depending on who is president and who controls the Senate.

Basically, Democrats have respected the tradition and Republicans have thrown it out the window. Under President Barack Obama, Republicans boycotted the process while Democrats were in control, and simply didn't return their blue slips. While Democratic Sen. Pat Leahy was in charge, that worked. He honored the courtesy of blue slips and so didn't bring nominees to committee from those states. That left a lot of vacancies for Trump to fill, and with Trump in the White House and Republicans in control, of course they abandoned the blue slip process for the really important courts—appeals courts—and packed them.

So far, that's what Durbin is doing, honoring blue slips for district judges and ignoring them for appeals court positions and so far that's working okay—they can get a lot of good people in those district court positions. And they have been! But there are a lot of district court vacancies in Republican states, too, that are going to have to be filled eventually and the sooner, the better.

"The White House strategy up to this point has been low-hanging fruit," Jill Dash, vice president of strategic engagement at liberal legal organization the American Constitution Society, told Sam Mellins at Balls and Strikes, a newsletter produced by Demand Justice. "There's a lot of work to do on judicial nominations before we get to any pitched battles."

The White House and Senate can point to what they've accomplished thus far and be rightfully proud of it. It's a fantastic achievement, particularly because of the backgrounds of the judges that are being seated. The problem for the country, though, is that they're only covering half the states. The rest of the states, even the red ones, deserve to have the same diversity on their courts as the blue states.

Faudlin Pierre, a Miami-based civil rights attorney who practices in federal court, told Mellins how important it is to have a judge who has experience in public defense or civil rights. "It matters when you're in practice, because they see the world a different way," he said. "When it's a close call, judges, like any other human being, go with their biases. They go with their life experiences. That's why we need to have a more diverse judiciary."

That's better for the residents of those states, but it's also better overall to help dilute the power of conservative-packed higher courts. The cases that reach the appeals courts come from those district courts, after all. "You need good intellectually competent judges to set the stage for the Eleventh Circuit," Pierre said, referring to the conservative appeals court covering Florida, Georgia, and Alabama, where he works. "You need people at the bottom to say, 'Here's the roadmap and here's the reasoning why you should affirm [the district court's decision].'" Seven of the 13 appeals courts have majority Republican appointees now, after the Trump/McConnell court-packing scheme.

The Biden administration has also been trying to find nominees that Republicans will agree to, according to Dash. That means the administration is "not putting the same kinds of nominees in red or purple states as in blue states." Again, back to Florida and Pierre.

Recent developments in Florida, which is represented in the Senate by two Republicans, demonstrate how Republican obstruction can warp the nomination process. A commission led by Florida's congressional Democrats drew up a list of potential nominees for two open district court judgeships in the state; a separate commission led by Republican Senator Marco Rubio drew up its own list in opposition. There were two common names between the lists: Detra Shaw-Wilder, a corporate lawyer, and David Liebowitz, a former federal prosecutor whose billionaire uncle is a major Rubio donor—hardly the stuff of progressive dreams.

Right now those nominees from Florida are at an impasse, and Pierre is frustrated. "There's been nothing. And I'm just like, 'Hey, we're important too,'" he said. "I don't think that the administration appreciates the sense of urgency that we on the ground feel. […] This has to be a multi-front attack," Pierre said. "We need people at the front lines who can intellectually combat the nonsense that comes from the other end."

That means ditching blue slips and getting as many good, diverse judges in all the vacancies as possible, as soon as possible. There are no guarantees about Biden having a Senate majority to confirm his nominees come November 2022.

It's been over one month since the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 subpoenaed former Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Deputy Chief of Staff Dan Scavino, former Pentagon Chief of Staff Kash Patel, and Stephen Bannon. They were given two weeks to submit documents and were required to be deposed one week later. Meadows and Patel got short postponements and Bannon got a contempt of Congress charge.

Meadows is asking for the same by continuing to delay and obstruct. According to multiple sources to CNN, the committee is considering giving him a new deadline to comply with the subpoena and holding him in criminal contempt if he does not. "Our patience isn't unlimited, and engagement needs to become cooperation very soon," one of the sources told CNN. "As we've already made clear, anyone who tries to stonewall our effort will face the consequences."

Chair of the committee, Rep. Bennie Thompson, told CNN that they are not at the point yet where they can take Meadows to court, but "If and when the staff says to us it's not going anywhere, there won't be any hesitation on the part of the committee to make the referrals." As opposed to Bannon, the complication with Meadows is that as the former chief of staff, Meadows can claim at least a degree of protection under executive privilege.

In addition to wanting to know what Meadows was doing and what was happening in the White House in the lead-up to Jan. 6 and that day itself, the committee wants to know his role in attempting to overturn the election—with his subpoena noting that he had communicated with "the highest officials at the Department of Justice requesting investigations into election fraud matters in several states."

It's been well-reported for months that Meadows was neck-deep in multiple schemes to "nullify" the election and allow Trump to remain in charge. That included efforts to pressure Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" votes, communications with Republican members of Congress, and a fantastical scheme in which Meadows pushed the Department of Justice to investigate whether Italy had interfered with the election using satellites.

But that's likely not all the committee wants to talk to Meadows about. Now that two of the insurrection organizers are talking, Meadows should probably think about negotiating his best possible deal. Several House Republicans have been named by those organizers as active in planning the protest, and both have been in contact with the committee. The two canaries are subjects of an unrelated investigation, and said that Rep. Paul Gosar used to get them to plan the Ellipse protest. If they went along with organizing this protest, they said, Gosar promised Trump would give them "blanket pardons."

"Our impression was that it was a done deal," the organizer said, "that he'd spoken to the president about it in the Oval … in a meeting about pardons and that our names came up. They were working on submitting the paperwork and getting members of the House Freedom Caucus to sign on as a show of support." Guess who else hangs out in the Oval Office for these kinds of meetings? Yep, the chief of staff.

The Biden White House rejected claims from Trump for executive privilege over records held by the National Archives this week. White House counsel Dana Remus told the National Archives that Biden has determined that shielding the documents from Congress "is not in the best interests of the United States." She added, "Accordingly, President Biden does not uphold the former President's assertion of privilege." Trump has asked Meadows to claim executive privilege to evade the subpoena.

Meadow's compliance might be influenced by what, if anything, Attorney General Merrick Garland decides to do about Bannon and the contempt charge against him. Garland told lawmakers last week, ahead of the contempt vote, that the Justice Department will follow "the facts and the law" moving forward on Bannon's case.

"I will say what a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of Columbia said I think yesterday or a day before," Garland told a House committee. "If the House of Representatives votes for a referral of a contempt charge—then the Department of Justice will do what it always does in such circumstances, we will apply the facts and the law and make a decision consistent with the principles of prosecution."

Biden potentially complicated things a bit last weekend by telling reporters, "I hope that the committee goes after them and holds them accountable," referring to people resisting subpoenas. Presidents aren't supposed to do anything that looks like pressuring Justice, never mind four years of Trump doing just that. Asked in follow-up whether these people should be prosecuted by the Justice Department, he answered, "I do, yes." That led to Department of Justice spokesman Anthony Coley following up with a statement: "The Department of Justice will make its own independent decisions in all prosecutions based solely on the facts and the law. Period. Full stop."

That was Oct. 15. Since then Bannon has accused Garland and the FBI in removing Trump from office in a coup. For real.

House Democrats on and off the committee are urging Garland to act. "The U.S. attorney [general] obviously has a decision to make; they have charging criteria. There are rules for prosecutors, they'll run it through their analysis. And, you know, we think that the public interest is obviously overwhelming in seeing that this subpoena is respected and that this crime is prosecuted," committee member Rep. Jamie Raskin told The Hill.

"I think there's a real desire on the part of the attorney general, for the most part, not to look backward," Rep. Adam Schiff said on the Yahoo News "Skullduggery" podcast last week. "Do I disagree with that? I do disagree with that, and I disagree with it most vehemently when it comes to what I consider even more serious offenses. For example, a taped conversation of Donald J. Trump on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state from Georgia, trying to coerce him into fraudulently finding 11,780 votes. […] Because I think if you or I did that, we'd be under indictment by now."

Sen. Joe Manchin could be signaling that he's willing to President Joe Biden's entire agenda hostage, according to journalist David Corn, by having associates spread the word that he's got a plan to leave the Democratic Party if his ransom demands for the big reconciliation bill on Biden's plan are not met. It can entirely be a bluff on his part, and since the outlet reporting it is Mother Jones, that's definitely a possibility.

For the record, Manchin told reporters after the story came out "It's bullshit," and "I have no control of rumors." On the other hand, he might very well have control of rumors and whether he has someone drop word a detailed plan for his exit into a journalist's ear. He's made threats like this before, like in 2018 when he was telling colleagues he was going to retire. On the other hand, Joe Manchin is an asshole.

Corn reports that sources say Manchin is threatening to leave the Democratic Party if Biden and 269 other Democrats in Congress "do not agree to his demand to cut the size of the social infrastructure bill from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion. […] Manchin has said that if this were to happen, he would declare himself an 'American Independent.'" He has also plotted a two-step "exit strategy": first, a letter to Majority Leader Chuck Schumer removing himself from leadership and if that doesn't get the concessions he's demanding, he'd change his voter registration to independent. Then, presumably, he'd hold out on a decision to either caucus with Democrats or with Republicans, the latter decision would make Mitch McConnell majority leader.

Whether or not this is a possibility, he has been making obnoxious demands on Biden. Manchin has supposedly come up from what he's insisted was his ceiling of $1.5 trillion for the already negotiated-down package—progressives said $6 trillion was necessary to fulfill Biden's agenda, but dropped that down to $3.5 trillion. Now he's supposedly willing to go $1.75 trillion. That's on the condition that every program be means tested, "everything from paid family medical leave to elder and disabled care." Manchin's insistence that the continued child tax credit payments be both means-tested and subject to work requirements had already made news.

That's not flying with Manchin's Democratic colleagues in the Senate, like Sherrod Brown, another red state Democrat who has never felt the need to punish working people in order to keep his seat. Brown told The Washington Post's Greg Sargent that he had a long talk with Manchin, reminding him that the child tax credit payments are helping both of their constituents. "It's dropped the child poverty rate by 40 percent in West Virginia and Ohio—I made that case to Joe," Brown told Sargent. "Why change something that's working so well?"

"He was listening," Brown said of Manchin, and maybe he was. Brown said he would work with Manchin on potential phase outs of the child tax credit for high earners, but that Manchin's proposal to end payments for households making $60,000 annually and add work requirements would set the nation's families back, and punish people. "He has seen a number of families, as I have, in Appalachia and everywhere I guess, where parents couldn't take care of their kids and grandparents stepped in," Brown told me. "A work requirement makes no sense for grandparents." Manchin "emphasized that the money should follow the child, which of course it should," Brown continued. "I think he was listening."

We'll see. As for the larger package, here's where things stand as of Wednesday: two years of free community college is likely entirely out of the package. The tax credits included in the COVID-19 relief plan to make health insurance more affordable will be shortened, as would the duration of the expansion of CTC monthly payments, possibly to a year. Biden is now looking at around $2 trillion for the package.

Manchin's means testing for the child tax credit, one source told CNN, would stay in, though it might look more like Brown's phase out for higher incomes than Manchin's harsh and unrealistic $60,000 limit. Biden told lawmakers that providing an expansion of home healthcare for the elderly and disabled would be cut from an already skinny $400 billion to less than $250 billion. He talked about the expansion of Medicare to include vision, dental, and hearing care as a "pilot project," suggesting that it will be scaled significantly back from what lawmakers have envisioned. A paid leave benefit would be shrunk drastically, from 12 week of leave down to four.

Biden has been meeting with House progressives, along with House conservative Democrats, Manchin, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, and seems to be leaning with the progressives' argument that all of these programs are worthy, and doing most of them for a shorter duration is preferable to doing too little. "I think he is with us that we need to invest in as many of those transformational areas as possible, even if it means for some of them a shorter amount of time," Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal told Roll Call after meeting with Biden Tuesday. On the CTC: "I don't think it will be as many years as we want," Jayapal said. "There was some pushback on having it be too short, so we'll see where that ends up."

What's entirely up in the air is the climate provisions in the bill, and how to meet the goal of cutting carbon emissions in half this decade when Manchin has nixed Biden's $150 billion "clean electricity performance program." That's the program Manchin has been supposedly working with Sen. Tina Smith from Minnesota on for months. He pulled the rug out from all that work, and from his colleague Sen. Smith, last week. He's not offered any alternatives.

"We have to continue to have these conversations and I can't point to anything specific that he's offered," Smith said of Manchin. Since he's not offering anything, one potential solution Democrats have returned to is the idea of a carbon tax, charging polluters for the greenhouse gas they emit. Manchin seems to also be ruling that out, telling reporters Tuesday that it is not on the table.

There's lots of encouraging talk from negotiators that they can have a "framework" for putting the reconciliation bill together by the end of the week. But who knows what else might be in store from Manchin. Or for that matter, Sinema. She's been suspiciously absent from the news lately.

The day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blinked and scraped together 11 Republican senators to prevent a global economic meltdown, he was back to making threats to blow it all up in December. Next time, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a typically obnoxious letter to President Joe Biden, next time Republicans are really going to blow up the global economy. Oh, and he took credit for not blowing up the global economy. Because of course he did.

Never mind that it was essentially a face-saving exercise on his part because being dragged into doing the right thing did not go over well with his fellow Republicans. "Republicans are folding here," Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina railed. "This is a complete capitulation."

"The reason the Republican leadership took the deal is because Democrats threatened […] to nuke the filibuster," Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas' answer to the Zodiac Killer said. "Unfortunately, Republican leadership blinked in the face of the Democratic threat to nuke the filibuster." That's Cruz, by the way, trying to deflect attention from his own self, because the Republicans were ready to agree to letting a simple majority pass the debt ceiling hike in a voice vote. It was Cruz who refused to go along with that, and insisted on a recorded vote. Meaning every Republican had to go on record on their willingness to blow up the economy.

While we're talking filibuster, though, yes. That. And while we're at it, get rid of the filibuster and the whole concept of the debt ceiling in one go.

There's no guarantee that McConnell is going to capitulate again on or before December 2. He remains intent on forcing Democrats to include hiking or suspending the debt ceiling in their reconciliation bill that will include President Biden's Build Back Better human infrastructure and climate initiatives. Lumped together, he believes, the debt and the new package will provide a message for the Republicans who, frankly, need it. Because all they've got right now is "Trump."

Unfortunately, it's a message that certain Democrats fear and are happy to amplify. It's unfortunate, because a) the debt ceiling is about the money the government has already spent with a huge chunk of it attributed to the GOP tax scam of 2017, and b) the things they would be spending money on are massively popular. That's even though they don't really know these plans are in the big package.

In the new CBS polling, which shows that public knowledge about Biden's plans is not good, 88% of support federal funding for lowering prescription drug prices; 84% support federal funding for Medicare coverage for dental/eye/hearing care; 73% support federal funding for paid family/medical leave; 67% support federal funding for universal pre-school. Those majorities are going to be swayed a lot more by those things making their lives better than by the cost. Because that's how it works. Which McConnell knows and which is why, in a recent example, the Republicans fought so hard to keep the Affordable Care Act from passing and then getting established.

McConnell is keeping the two fronts of this fight—debt ceiling and the reconciliation bill—tied together to kill the latter. But there is a very straightforward path for Democrats: nuke the filibuster. They could do just a carve-out for the debt ceiling (to go with the 161 exceptions that already exist), but that would be pretty crappy considering they haven't yet decided to do it to restore the Voting Rights Act, you know, saving democracy.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is all for making the debt ceiling as an issue go away. "[T]here is an enormous amount at stake," Yellen told George Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week" Sunday. "A failure to raise the debt ceiling would probably cause a recession and could even result in a financial crisis," she continued.

"I have said I support, personally, getting rid of the debt ceiling. I believe that, once Congress and the administration have decided on spending plans and tax plans, it's simply their responsibility to pay the bills that result from that," she said. "And that means we have had deficits for most of the post-war period. And that means raising the debt ceiling. It is a housekeeping chore. [W]e should be debating the government's fiscal policy when we decide on those expenditures and taxes […] not when the credit card bill […] comes due."

That's all very true, as is the threat we exist under that, next time, Republicans are going to force a breach. Better that Democrats to take that threat away entirely, and soon.

The House and Senate are out for most of this week, observing Indigenous People's Day/Columbus Day. The House, however, will have a short session Tuesday to finish the job of temporarily lifting the debt ceiling, taking up the bill the Senate passed last week to extend the nation's borrowing limit to pay its bills until December 3.

The hellish Fall we could see coming back in August is fully upon us, with Senate Republicans stretching out their sabotage for maximum effect. They didn't shut down the government on October 1 but agreed to a continuing resolution to keep funds flowing for government operations until December 3. Yes, the same day the debt ceiling will have to be dealt with. Republican leader Mitch McConnell is going to drag the pain out as long as possible. His primary aim remains to be forcing Democrats to deal with the debt ceiling in their budget reconciliation bill, the package they are using to pass President Joe Biden's big human infrastructure bill. He's trying to derail that bill, with an assist from Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, by making the perceived cost too high for the deficit peacocks.

Never mind that the original price tag of the bill isn't that big, relatively. Yes, $3.5 trillion sounds like a lot of money, but it's just 1.2% of the nation's economy over ten years. What is getting lost in the reporting, almost everywhere, is that the bill as written covers 10 years of spending and taxes—and that the taxes part of it could pay the whole thing. And while the traditional media, with a big boost from Republicans and the aforementioned turncoat Democrats, is entirely focused on that number, it is missing the larger story: the costs of not acting in a big way, particularly on the environment, but also for greater racial and economic equality.

While Manchin is making public noise about the human infrastructure side of the package, trying to force Democrats to decide among priorities for helping working families, it's on the climate side, where Manchin is doing his worst.

Manchin makes $500,000 every year from coal investments (more than $5.2 million over the past decade from coal investments). He is also the top recipient among Democrats for fossil fuel industry dollars and the number-one recipient for the coal, mining, natural gas, and oil and gas industries.

One of Manchin's confirmed demands in return for his vote is that the Energy and Natural Resources committee, which he chairs, has "sole" jurisdiction on writing a clean energy standard—presumably locking out other committees and lawmakers, as well as the Department of Energy and government experts. He's resisting the administration's efforts to accelerate the transition to clean energy generation and is continuing to push energy legislation that includes "all energy sources."

In a hearing on September 28, he reiterated that. "I believe that natural gas has an important role in the energy transition," he said, arguing that helping utilities switch to renewables would somehow create electrical grid instability. "If we give them and pay them incentives to basically change their portfolio by 2030, reliability will be the loser." According to the Energy Information Administration, 76% of new electricity generation in the country came from renewable, clean sources. The one glaring example of a highly unreliable grid system came last winter in Texas, which gets most of its grid power from gas-fired plants.

Manchin demands that any tax credits granted for solar and wind power can only be included if "fossil tax credits are not repealed." That puts him in direct opposition to his Democratic colleagues. "I'm not interested in rewarding oil and gas companies who have had 100 years of tax benefits when we weren't providing other benefits to other types of energy," Sen. Debbie Stabenow from Michigan said. That's despite her work with Manchin on a separate initiative to provide tax credits for manufacturing industries to use clean energy.

Manchin's even demanding that "[v]ehicle and fuel tax credits shall not be limited to electric vehicles—they must include hydrogen." That's because hydrogen fuel cells require electricity to be produced, and, at least right now, that would be done through natural gas or coal-fired electric plants. "The overwhelming majority of hydrogen in use today is produced via an emissions-intensive, fossil fuel-based approach, and there are a multitude of cost hurdles, resource constraints, and pollution-heavy alternatives standing in the way of such a pivot to green," Julie McNamara, a senior energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists, has pointed out.

All that's spelled out in an "agreement" Manchin came to with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in July, in which Manchin demanded Democrats slash the whole package to $1.5 trillion, and accommodate a whole series of other demands. Schumer noted in signing the document that he "will try to dissuade Joe on many of these." He'll be backed up by other Democrats in both the Senate and House.

For example, another powerful Senate chair is Oregon's Ron Wyden, and his Finance Committee—in charge of tax-writing—has a say in writing energy tax credits. Wyden told Roll Call that he'll be talking to Manchin about his desires, but also "that the days of fossil fuel companies getting whatever handouts they seek are over."

Manchin still has a big stake in the bipartisan bill that he and Sinema helped negotiate. Here's where the commitment of leadership—and the White House—to link the two bills remains so vital. Without bending, Manchin is jeopardizing his bill, and he's not doing a great job of courting fellow Democrats. "It is possible to find middle ground in many areas of politics," Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts said at an event Thursday. "I know because I have done it, but we cannot compromise on science. There isn't a middle ground between a livable and unlivable world. We cannot pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill without the reconciliation package. We cannot slash climate funding in this package."

There's also the majority in the House, which is not in the mood to take nonsense from Manchin or Sinema. They proved that in an October 1 meeting of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in which they decided they are not prepared to "give an inch publicly" despite pressure from Biden to start carving away their priorities. "We're at the table," the CPC chairwoman Rep. Pramila Jayapal reportedly told the group. "Do not negotiate against ourselves." That's what the group is doing, at least for now—standing together under pressure. "I've made it really clear to the caucus, and people agree. The reason we got to where we got to is because we took a collective position," Jayapal told the Washington Post. "And we have to stay collective in our asks."

That feeds into a growing narrative from the progressives that they're not the ones preventing Biden's package from passing and succeeding—it's the centrists. The progressives are those who will push Biden's agenda through. "This isn't a moderate versus progressive conversation, it's a 96% versus 4% conversation," Jayapal said. "So there's no point to negotiate against ourselves."

That echoed Sen. Bernie Sanders, who's been on a tear against Manchin and Sinema for a few weeks.

It only helps McConnell to have Manchin and Sinema in there negotiating (or not, in Sinema's case—she still won't say what she does or doesn't want to see in the package, beyond having "sources" tell The New York Times that she wants $100 billion in climate protection slashed).

It helps McConnell, and dooms the planet.

Maybe this is entirely coincidental: The day that news dropped of a "massive lobbying blitz" by corporate America "to kill key parts of Democrats' $3.5 trillion economic plan," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell spoke about the bill, telling Democratic Sens. Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin that he's counting on them to help sabotage it.

In other words, he's reminding Sinema and Manchin which side their bread is buttered on, in the event that the "torrent of political groups representing some of the country's most influential corporations—including ExxonMobil, Pfizer, and the Walt Disney Company" and their planned lobbying onslaught reported by The Washington Post don't get the job done.

The Post lists pretty much ever single major industry behind the effort to kill Biden's economic agenda: "drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers and oil-and-gas giants." In other words, Manchin and Sinema's buddies, and the House Sabotage Squad's best friends. Well, them and Republicans.

The barrage that is about to come from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and all those industries has to happen fast if they're going to influence the bill writers—it's being completed right now, with an intent to try to pass it within weeks. So they've got to hurry to get their attacks in, or they could be putting all their eggs into the Manchin/Sinema basket and betting that they'll intervene at the last minute.

The corporations have washed-up, has-been Democrats helping on this effort, aimed mostly at trying to preserve the Trump tax cuts, so you definitely know who the main targets are. "Any increase in the rate would position our country even further behind global competitors like China—and carry devastating consequences for American workers, who ultimately bear as much as 70 percent of the corporate income tax," said former Sen. Blanche Lincoln. She's now the "chief adviser" to the RATE Coalition, which includes Capital One, Disney, FedEx, Lowe's, and Lockheed Martin among its funders. They've got a "seven-figure digital advertising campaign to oppose Democrats' plans" in the works.

You might remember Blanche Lincoln as the ConservaDem who just kept tacking right—and right out of her Senate seat in 2010. She's not the only defeated Democrat getting in on the corporate cash-cow that is defeating popular policy for the sake of corporations' zero-tax bills. Former North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp is in on it, too, starting up a new dark money group called Save America's Family Enterprises (SAFE) to perpetuate the myth that estate taxes actually hurt middle-class family businesses and farms, and to stop capital gains from being taxed at death.

It might do well for Manchin and Sinema to look at the part where these two Democrats are ex senators. Or not, since they're probably making some pretty good bank. It's hard to imagine what else the two would be after, since it's certainly not the friendship of their current Democratic cohorts. Making nice with Republicans didn't do a whole lot for Lincoln or Heitkamp when it came to the voters.

And voters—even Republican ones—are pretty darned excited about what's in Biden's big human infrastructure bill. Data for Progress conducted a poll at the beginning of August finding strong majority support—66%—for a $3.5 trillion (it even included that figure ) plan including funding to improve long-term care for seniors, expand Medicare benefits, expand pre-K, modernize the electric grid, and extend the child tax credit expansion. A plurality of Republicans even support it, according to that poll, with 47% in support and 44% opposed.

A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released Aug. 25 finds 52% support. "It's a long time coming," said one of the participants, Republican John Plaskowsky, 55, a business manager from Suwannee, Georgia. He supports both the hard and human infrastructure bills, saying the latter is necessary because it can help many people more than "a better road or a better bridge," he said.

The provisions of Biden's Build Back Better plan—investments in children and families, workers, health care, education, and the environment—would sure help a lot more people than keeping those Trump tax cuts for the super rich. Now it's entirely possible that the Sabotage Squad, Manchin, and Sinema are looking beyond their current gigs and trying to figure out how to get in where the really big money is. It's hard to see what else they'd be aiming for.

At the behest of business interests, a Sabotage Squad of 10 House members tried to derail President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan last week, but most failed. Nonetheless, the fact that the 10—spurred on by Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—managed to delay consideration of the budget resolution that will contain Biden's plans and also got the promise of a vote on the hard infrastructure bill from the Senate on a certain day. Not much of a win considering they went in saying they would accept nothing less than a vote on that Senate bill there and then.

But it was enough of a win for the business lobbyists to feel smug about having 10 House members and two senators in the bag for them, and they're certain that with those 12, they can defeat the tax hikes and the spending measures in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. "The business community has made progress with certain Democrats on legitimate policy concerns with some of these proposals and their implications on the economy and international competitiveness," an anonymous lobbyist with ties to Senate Democrats told The Hill. "A lot of those arguments are landing."

Yes, "certain Democrats"—identified in the next paragraph as Manchin, Sinema, and Sabotage Squad ringleader Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. Manchin and Sinema—as well as Gottheimer and the others—won't say what about the bill they don't like. They'll wax on and on about the deficit and the future and too much money, but they're not saying what they want to see cut from the bill. For example, the bill will extend Medicare coverage to vision, dental, and hearing care for seniors. Are the 12 opposed to that? Are they okay with millions of seniors who can't afford a dentist visit and have such bad teeth they're malnourished?

Because that's a very real thing. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found that nearly 20% of adults over age 65 have lost all their teeth, that includes more than a quarter of people over age 75. Illnesses among older people, including arthritis, diabetes, heart diseases, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) make this population more likely to get gum disease, but also more likely to get dental care than other adults who don't have these illnesses. Many of the medications older Americans take cause dry mouth, which increases the risk of cavities and tooth decay—something 96% of adults over 65 have experienced with cavities. And 1 in 5 of them have untreated tooth decay.

This has profound consequences for overall health. Nearly half of people over age 65 don't have dental insurance because it is not included in traditional Medicare. Some purchase it through Medicare Advantage plans, "but the scope of dental benefits, when covered, varies widely and is often quite limited, which can result in high out-of-pocket costs among those with serious dental needs or unmet need," the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) has found.

"Almost half of all Medicare beneficiaries did not have a dental visit within the past year (47%), with higher rates among those who are Black (68%) or Hispanic (61%), have low incomes (73%), or who are in fair or poor health (63%), as of 2018," KFF found. The average out-of-pocket spending for those who did get care in 2018 was $874, and one in five spent more than $1,000 on dental care.

The health effects are very real, particularly when seniors can't eat a balanced diet because of missing teeth or mouth pain. That can lead to malnutrition, weight loss, and declining physical and cognitive abilities. It curtails their social lives. As does not being able to hear and not being able to afford hearing aids.

Sen. Bernie Sanders is including this expansion in the reconciliation bill, because, as he says: "Dental care is health care, and dental care must be part of any serious health care program in the United States." This would give older people and disabled patients on Medicare access to pay for their care. The idea is hugely popular, with 84% of voters supporting it, including 79% of Republicans.

So is this something Manchin, Sinema, and the saboteurs want to see stripped out of the bill? Would making seniors' lives healthier be less important than the deficit? They need to tell us. Is this what they want cut from Biden's agenda?

House committees are presumably hard at work now, trying to meet a Sept. 15 deadline for completing their parts of the budget reconciliation bill that will fund President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan, the $3.5 trillion companion bill to the $550 billion hard infrastructure deal agreed to in the Senate. The reconciliation bill will originate in the House, but passage in the Senate requires that they work closely with committees there to avoid pitfalls. The 50/50 partisan split in the Senate and the persistent deficit peacockery of Democrats Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin complicate the venture. The reconciliation bill can pass with just Democratic votes—it's the whole point of using this process, but all Democrats have to be on board—plus the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Complicating everything is the calendar and self-inflicted pain. The new fiscal year starts Oct. 1, which requires a funding mechanism for government by that day. The self-inflicted pain is the result of a decision two years ago to take the weapon of the debt ceiling away from Donald Trump and suspend it until July 30, 2021. The Treasury Department has been using the various tools it has to move money around to avoid hitting the limit, but can only do that into October or early November at the latest. Which means Congress has to raise the debt ceiling, and Senate Republicans remain adamant that they will not vote to do so: 46 of them signed a letter saying so.

Putting a debt ceiling hike or suspension in the budget reconciliation bill—which, again, needs just 51 votes—seems like the obvious solution, but Senate Democrats are just as intent on forcing at least six of the 46 Republicans to break that pact. What they'll likely do is tack a short-term debt ceiling hike onto a short-term government funding bill and force the Republicans to decide if they want to shut down the government as well as risk the nation defaulting on its obligations, which include things like paying the troops, or veterans benefits, or Social Security payments, or food assistance as well as interest payments on debt.

Add to this general mess a summer of the worst wildfires in history as well as Hurricane Ida and whatever the rest of the hurricane season has in store. The Federal Emergency Management Agency had about $32 billion available at the end of July. More need for disaster spending is a big possibility.

There is also an urgent need for Congress to pass a federal eviction moratorium, with the Supreme Court's emergency order last week blocking it and upwards of 11 million at risk of being kicked out in the streets. More than 60 House Democrats have writing to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi to demand quick action.

"Millions of people who are currently at risk of eviction, housing insecurity, or face becoming unhoused desperately look to their elected representatives to implement legislation that will put their health and safety first and save lives," the lawmakers wrote. "As your fellow colleagues, we implore you to act with the highest levels of urgency to advance a permanent legislative solution in a must pass legislative vehicle in order to extend the life-saving federal eviction moratorium for the duration of the deadly global health crisis." With the House now back in recess until Sept. 20, that quick action isn't likely and would also likely be blocked by Senate Republicans should the House pass it. That's another potential reconciliation bill provision.

House Democrats are looking at the debt ceiling from the reverse angle, contemplating a resolution that gives the president the power to waive the debt ceiling unilaterally, but gives Congress the right to veto him if they can come up with the votes to do so. Since Democrats control the floor in both chambers, that's a vote that would be unlikely to happen. And even if it did, it would be subject in turn to a presidential veto. But again, this would require Republican votes, which aren't likely to be there in the Senate.

Tying the debt ceiling to government funding still seems to be the plan Democrats want to follow, assuming that when they get to the edge of the cliff Republicans will decide not to jump after all. House Budget Chair John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat, told Politico: "As difficult as they can be, I can't imagine there aren't 10 Republicans who would vote not to default."

"We can't negotiate over it. We shouldn't negotiate over it. And Republicans are going to have to answer if they choose not to pay America's bills," said Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy. The scenario of Republicans pulling everyone off of the cliff and then being made accountable for it afterward is less than comforting, but Democrats do have to show that they're willing to be as irrational and dangerous as their Republican colleagues in these kinds of negotiations. As horrifying as that is.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer could also be using this whole process to demonstrate to Manchin, Sinema, and whatever other filibuster reform cowards might be hiding behind them just how dangerous it is to continue giving Republicans veto power over everything. Blowing up the global economy—in the middle of pandemic resurgence—is just about as dangerous as it gets. Proving that there aren't 10 Republicans willing to buck their party to save the nation might just be what it takes to turn Manchin and Sinema. They're not going to care about poor people being evicted, no more than they care about poor people and people of color being denied the right to vote. But when the business lobby and the banks and the Chamber of Commerce get panicked about the debt ceiling, it might just be enough to bring them around.