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This past spring, Representative Jim Banks of Indiana, chairman of the House Republican Study Committee, wrote a curious policy memo, with the subject line URGENT: Cementing GOP as the Working-Class Party. He argued that Republicans should look to nail down working-class support through tough immigration policies, a crusade against Wokeness, and attacks against tech companies that censor Donald Trump and other conservatives, among other policies. The memo honored a time-tested Republican tradition: Wooing working-class voters by focusing not on economic issues like higher pay and runaway health care costs, but on polarizing social issues, like abortion and same-sex marriage.

Ahead of the 2022 midterms, Democrats may be inclined to dismiss such Republican attempts to appeal to working-class voters. Backed by President Bidens 21st Century New Deal, which includes an infrastructure plan that he says would create millions of middle-class jobs, the facts are on his partys side, dating back to F.D.R.s New Deal, that the Democrats are far more the party of the working class. Yet in an era when politicians often woo blue-collar voters by staging photo ops at coal mines and wearing hard hats, style and theatrics have often trumped substance and policy.

To many Democrats, including Representative Tim Ryan and Robert Reich, it is preposterous that Republicans, long viewed as the party of corporate America, suggest theirs is the party of the working class. Even so, Democrats must resist complacency. They cant stop fighting for the support of workers, no matter how ludicrous the Republican attempts at rebranding may seem. To do so, Democrats must deliver on their promises to workers or else hammer home the point that Republicans blocked their efforts.

When Republicans attempt to style themselves as the party of working people, it can be awkward. In 2019 when the House voted to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour from $7.25 a move supported by 62 percent of Americans only three Republicans backed the increase; the then-G.O.P.-controlled Senate, led by Mitch McConnell, refused to allow a vote on the increase. But the G.O.P. continues to maintain its chosen fiction: The uniqueness of this party today is were the workers party, Kevin McCarthy, the House Republican leader, said in an interview early this year. Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, agreed, tweeting, The Republican Party is not the party of the country clubs, its the party of hardworking, blue-collar men and women.

Originally posted here:
Opinion | On This Labor Day, Here's How Biden Can Help Democrats Become the Party of the Working Class Again - The New York Times

In the GOPs action in Fulton County, Democrats see the makings of a grand design to take control of local election offices in the metro Atlanta region, which would give Republicans the power to challenge election results, hold up certification and announce investigations in the counties that produce the most Democratic votes. In other words, it would enable them to execute the pieces of the Trump playbook that failed in 2020.

While the law only allows election boards in four counties at a time to be disbanded, that would be more than enough to swing a statewide election if those counties happened to be Fulton, Gwinnett, Cobb and DeKalb the states four most populous counties where the bulk of Georgias Democratic votes are concentrated.

It's hard to see how this isn't just a cursory act before the takeover, said Erick Allen, a Democratic state representative and candidate for lieutenant governor whose district sits in Cobb County, north of Atlanta. I don't know anyone that's thinking that this is not going to lead to what we think.

Fulton and neighboring Gwinnett, DeKalb and Cobb counties played key roles in turning the longtime red state into one of the most competitive battlegrounds in the nation. In a state that hasnt voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since 1996, those four counties combined netted Joe Biden a 625,000 vote margin over Donald Trump, enough to offset Trumps rural performance in Georgia.

That metro Atlanta coalition of Black, Latino and Asian voters also fueled the success of Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, whose campaigns ginned up historic turnout in the region during both the November general election and January 2021 runoffs.

Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) on Capitol Hill July 15, 2021. | Francis Chung/E&E News / Francis Chung/E&E News

Hanging over our heads, we're thinking, Big Brother's watching, said Jacquelyn Bettadapur, chair of the Cobb County Democratic party. If [Republicans] don't like what they see, are they gonna roll into town and want to do a performance review?

Republicans have largely dismissed Democratic concerns as overblown. Senate President Pro Tem Butch Miller, who is running for lieutenant governor, said that his statehouse colleagues have not yet made plans to establish election review panels in the counties around metro Atlanta.

We will get to those counties as time comes, if that's appropriate, but we're not going after [them], Miller, who co-sponsored the legislation, said. There's no, quote, hit list, unquote. We're just trying to take care of the business at hand.

The Fulton County review was initiated after Republican lawmakers sent two letters to the state elections board last month, citing long lines, administrative issues and late distribution of absentee ballots during the 2018 and 2020 elections.

Its true that there is a high bar to taking over a countys election board. While creating a review panel requires little more than a letter to the state elections board from at least one representative and one senator who represent an individual county, the process of disbanding a county election board is cumbersome.

It requires the review panel to find and document a breach of election law or multiple instances of wrongdoing over the last two years of elections before the state election board decides whether or not to vote to disband the county board. The wrongdoing is defined as demonstrated malfeasance or gross negligence.

Democrats, however, point to the partisan backdrop behind these efforts, which come after Trump pressured state elections officials to find 12,000 nonexistent votes in Fulton County in 2020. An independent elections monitor had already found no evidence of fraud in the county.

They note that Republicans will have a majority on Fulton Countys three-person election review panel and envision a troubling specter of white, conservative state election officials taking over county election boards in heavily Democratic, racially diverse counties.

All these things combined could have a negative impact on the minority vote in Fulton County, said Rob Pitts, chair of the Fulton County Board of Elections. And we are the reason for Biden winning, Ossoff winning and Warnock winning.

Statewide, Democrats are piecing together a strategy to fight the law, as activists vow to oppose it and fundraise to bring more suits against it. In Congress, Warnock and Ossoff have proposed a slimmed-down version of the For the People Act that would establish stricter guidelines for disbanding county boards of elections.

Several opponents of the law have challenged it in the courts, though few suits have directly challenged the election board provisions, however, and instead cited its voter ID requirements and ballot dropbox limitations, which they say unfairly handicap low-income voters and people of color.

Other groups say they plan to challenge the takeover provision if Republicans use their influence on county boards to alter election results. So far, several organizations including Fair Fight, the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP Legal Defense Fund have brought nearly a dozen lawsuits against the state law, according to a tracker from the Brennan Center for Justice.

At the county level, text chains and phone conversations between party chairs have occurred with greater frequency over the last few weeks since the formation of the Fulton County review board.

Some have aimed to learn more about the makeup of Fultons three-member review panel and its sole Democrat, Stephen Day. Day chaired the Gwinnett County election board during the 2018 midterm elections, in which Gwinnetts disproportionate rejection of mail-in ballots made it the center of a fight over election administration.

When reached via email, Day declined comment for this story, adding that all members of the election review panel have agreed not to discuss it publicly until the review is complete.

According to several county leaders, the main goal is to establish a playbook for how to navigate a possible review panel in their county.

It was a discussion in a potential way before. But now of course, it is in practice, actually, said Brenda Lopez-Romero, chair of the Gwinnett County Democratic party.

Still, all of those efforts might not be enough since Republicans control both state legislative chambers and the governorship, which will have total oversight over how the new provision will be implemented.

It does feel like our hands are tied in terms of what we can do, said state Rep. Bee Nguyen, a Democrat who is running for secretary of state. I think any voter in the state of Georgia, when they go to cast their ballot under the new provision, they will recognize that it was not as easy to be able to vote as it used to be.

The dire predictions are also stirring fears about the effect on Black, Latino and Asian turnout in the future if their votes are called into question in the counties where they are most concentrated.

It's targeting, literally, the sovereignty of the counties who run their elections. And they are targeting counties that are heavily Black, Allen said.

It could totally harm Democrats chances in 2022, said Lewanna Heard-Tucker, chair of the Fulton County Democratic party.

If we win these seats like we expect to, there is no stopping them [from coming for other metro Atlanta counties] at that point. They are going to pull out every single stop, Heard-Tucker said. Theyre trying to make sure that they secure a lineage for a decade or more.

See the original post:
The election gambit thats sending Georgia Democrats into a frenzy - POLITICO

The U.S. Supreme Court's failure to block a restrictive new Texas abortion law may have handed "ammunition" to progressives who want to see the court expanded, but reform remains unlikely, experts have told Newsweek.

The 5-4 decision not to grant an emergency application for a stay of Senate Bill (SB) 8 has renewed the debate about adding more justices to the nation's highest court, an idea referred to as court packing

Critics of the decision, including Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor, have said the Texas abortion ban violates the precedent set in the landmark 1973 case Roe v. Wade and criticized the majority for allowing the law to go ahead.

Calls to reform the Supreme Court are likely to become more urgent following the decision, while some Democrats were already public supporters of expansion.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the progressive "Squad" renewed her calls for expansion this week, as did Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), who is the cosponsor of a bill that would add four seats to the court.

Experts who spoke to Newsweek said that President Joe Biden would be under greater pressure, but it still remained highly unlikely that he would support the idea.

Paul Collins, a legal studies and political science professor at the University of Massachusetts, in Amherst, told Newsweek the Supreme Court may have bolstered proponents of expansion.

"The Supreme Court's five most conservative justices handed progressives substantial ammunition in the battle to expand the Supreme Court. By refusing to halt the law from going into effect, the court effectively overruled Roe v. Wade in the state of Texas, at least temporarily," Collins said.

"And they did it without giving the case full consideration, which will lead to calls not only for court expansion, but also for limiting the court's use of its shadow docket to make public policy."

"If the court were interested in avoiding being in the political thicket, it's difficult to imagine a dumber move. And other conservative states are likely to pass similar laws as Texas, adding more fuel to the fire," he said.

Gregory Caldeira, a professor of law at the Ohio State University who specializes in the Supreme Court, told Newsweek that Biden has other priorities.

"Of course, the court's response to the Texas abortion law will accelerate and intensify pressure on President Biden to support expanding the court," Caldeira said.

"But I doubt whether this pressure will move the president. First of all, he has shown little enthusiasm for the task of enlarging the court. Second, he has other, more pressing priorities in Congress; attempting to expand the court would tie up Congress and drag down his legislative program."

"Third, it seems to me, and I suspect to President Biden, expanding the court is a last-gasp move, if and when the court sets itself against all or nearly all of his legislative and executive priorities. We are far from that day," he said.

Thomas Gift, founding director of University College London's Centre on U.S. Politics, told Newsweek the court's inaction would lead to more progressive calls for reform.

"SCOTUS' failure to take action on the Texas abortion law will likely cause more rumblings among progressives to expand the size of the courtbut that doesn't mean it will lead anywhere," Gift said.

"Biden doesn't have anywhere near a mandate to pursue such a substantial reform, and he's personally too much of an institutionalist to go down that route," he went on.

"Earlier this year, the president did convene a commission to study the Supreme Court, including its size, but that was pure window-dressing to appease the left flank of his party. Biden has signaled no genuine intention of making court reform a priority, and SCOTUS' inaction on the Texas decision does nothing to change that," Gift said.

Susan Dunn, humanities professor at Williams College in Massachusetts, is the author of several books about Franklin D. Roosevelt, including 2018's A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days that Mobilized America. She has previously argued that Roosevelt's plan to reform the court in the 1930s could still be used.

Dunn told Newsweek on Thursday that conditions today are different.

"The country is deeply divided and polarized now, in a way it wasn't when FDR proposed expanding the court," she said. "In the 1936 election, FDR's opponent Alf Landon, the governor of Kansas, won only two states: Maine and Vermont."

"FDR had a huge mandate to govern, and yet the Supreme Court was declaring his New Deal legislation unconstitutional. Citizens were rightly asking who is sovereign - 'We the people' or nine unelected old men, appointed for life?" Dunn said.

Read more:
Supreme Court Shoot Themselves in Foot as Democrats Prepare for Battle to Expand Court - Newsweek

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THE MORTAL THREAT TO DEMOCRATS' PROGRESSIVE DREAMS, CONT'D.Yesterday I wrote about the realization among some Democrats that the party's once-hoped-for glorious future based on the support of millions of Hispanic voters might not actually happen. Democratic political scientist Ruy Teixeira, author of the influential book The Emerging Democratic Majority , which predicted just such a future, is now warning Democrats that the party is losing support among Hispanic Americans.

To that, add some striking information from the Republican pollster David Winston . A longtime adviser to some House GOP leaders, Winston notes that in 2020, congressional Republicans won 36% of the Hispanic vote up from 32% in 2016. That was better than President Donald Trump's performance with Hispanic voters, which was 32% in 2020 and 28% in 2016. And Trump's performance was better than Mitt Romney's in the 2012 election, a defeat that prompted much Republican debate over how the party could increase its appeal to Hispanic voters.

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So the GOP's improvement among Hispanic voters, and the Democratic Party's decline among that same group, extends beyond the candidacies of Trump himself. And the 36% for congressional Republicans indicates that a lot of Hispanic voters who think of themselves as independent chose to support the GOP. In the 2020 exit polls, Winston notes, just 20% of Hispanic voters identified themselves as Republicans, while 32% identified themselves as independents, and 48% identified as Democrats. Obviously, Democrats still have an advantage, but a majority, 52%, think of themselves as independents or Republicans.

Perhaps most important is ideology. Hispanics are clearly not as far to the left as today's Democratic Party. The numbers, again from Winston: 32% of Hispanics identify themselves as conservatives, opposed to just 10% of Democrats overall. On the other end of the spectrum, 46% of Democrats identify themselves as liberals, opposed to just 25% of Hispanics.

In the middle, 43% of both Hispanic voters and Democrats as a whole call themselves moderate. But the numbers clearly suggest that Hispanics tilt a bit right, while Democrats tilt much more to the left.

So Teixeira's warning from yesterday's newsletter "Hispanic voting trends have not been favorable for Democrats" stands up. This political moment holds great opportunities for Republicans to cement their progress among Hispanic voters not by pandering, but by offering all voters the same conservative message. We'll see if the GOP can do it.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe .

Original post:
Byron York's Daily Memo: The mortal threat to Democrats progressive dreams, contd - Washington Examiner

This week, Texas Republicans proved once again just how extreme and out of touch their party is and moved forward with outrageous laws that attack reproductive and voting rights across the state. In response, the DNC made it clear that the Democratic Party will stop at nothing to protect these rights and stand against Republicans extreme agenda.

Meanwhile, the DNC wrapped up its Build Back Better bus tour this week with stops in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, where DNC Chair Jaime Harrison and local leaders touted President Bidens success in bringing jobs back, securing a bipartisan infrastructure deal, and providing people in their communities with needed relief through the American Rescue Plan.

And in states across the country, including Georgia and North Carolina, state parties spent the week driving similar messages, making clear voters in their states know that the D in Democrat stands for deliver.

Finally, ahead of Labor Day, state parties across the country reminded people that President Biden and Democrats have put American workers at the forefront of their agenda, as the U.S. economy has created more than 4 million jobs and is growing at the fastest rate in nearly 40 years.

Read this article:
IN THE STATES: As Republicans Attack Reproductive and Voting Rights, Democrats Continue to Deliver - Democrats.org