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Democrats on Thursday unveiled Biden-backed legislation to overhaul the immigration system, which includes setting up a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. Jemal Countess/Getty Images for UndocuBlack Net hide caption

Democrats on Thursday unveiled Biden-backed legislation to overhaul the immigration system, which includes setting up a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Updated 4:25p.m. ET

Congressional Democrats unveiled a sweeping the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, an immigration bill that includes setting up a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

The measure is backed by President Biden and closely aligns with the plan he proposed on his first day in office. His administration and congressional Democrats are under pressure from immigration advocates to act quickly to move the bill, but it's unclear how quickly they will pursue passage.

"I look forward to working with leaders in the House and Senate to address the wrongdoings of the past administration and restore justice, humanity, and order to our immigration system," Biden said in a statement Thursday afternoon. "This is an important first step in pursuing immigration policies that unite families, grow and enhance our economy, and safeguard our security."

The Democratic bill includes a fast-track process for immigrants who were brought to the country by their parents at a young age (otherwise known as "DREAMers"), along with certain farmworkers and past recipients of temporary protected status, such as people who fled wars.

"We have 11 million undocumented people living, working and raising families in our communities without legal status," Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said during a news conference Thursday morning. "These are good and decent people who believe in the promise of America down to their bones."

Menendez was joined by Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., who shared her family's story of immigrating to the U.S.

"I am the daughter of immigrant parents from Mexico. They came to this country and they work hard and they sacrificed every day to provide for me and my brothers and sisters," she said. "Their story is like the story of so many others."

The plan seeks to boost the diversity visa program, a sharp departure from the Trump administration's goal to eliminate the program. The bill also replaces the term "alien" in U.S. immigration laws with "noncitizen."

It's anticipated that Republicans will oppose many provisions in the legislation, which could signal that Democrats will need to employ alternative measures to push it through the Senate where, under current rules, it needs 60 votes to proceed.

"The reason we have not gotten immigration reform over the finish line is not because of a lack of will," Menendez said. "It is because time and time again, we have compromised too much and capitulated too quickly to fringe voices who have refused to accept the humanity and contributions of immigrants to our country and dismiss everything, no matter how significant it is in terms of the national security, as amnesty."

During a CNN town hall on Tuesday, Biden indicated that though he considers a pathway to citizenship essential, he may be open to a piecemeal approach to immigration.

"There's things that I would deal by itself, but not at the expense of saying, 'I'm never going to do the other,' he said. "There is a reasonable path to citizenship."

Both former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush had attempted to put their stamp on immigration by unveiling proposals that included pathways to citizenship, but both plans were rejected by Congress.

Read more:
Democrats Unveil Sweeping Immigration Bill - NPR

AUSTIN Even as Texas Democrats on Friday blamed state Republicans for hardships faced by millions of state residents, they appeared to be road testing a message for voters next year: Government doesnt have to be this inept.

This weeks upending of electricity and drinking water supplies by arctic temperatures was predictable and preventable, top state Democrats said in a Zoom call with journalists.

While demanding probes of what happened and offering policy proposals for realigning the states power grid and safeguarding other crucial infrastructure, the Democrats signaled they will spend many months reminding state voters of one thing:

Austin is run by Republicans who arent inclined to govern vigorously and are in thrall to corporations and rich campaign contributors.

You wouldnt run a company with people that dont believe in business, said former presidential candidate and federal housing secretary Julin Castro.

You cant run a government effectively with people who dont believe in government, but thats what we have in Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick and the rest of them. That needs to change, Castro said. After what happened these past few days, a lot more Texans see that very clearly as well.

Spokesmen for Abbott, the Republican governor, and Patrick, the GOP lieutenant governor, did not immediately respond to emails requesting comment.

Castro, who has been mentioned as a possible candidate against Abbott next year, may have offered the strongest criticism of the two-term governor of the five politicians who joined the call, which was arranged by the Texas Democratic Party.

Earlier this week, Castro noted, Abbott issued successive announcements that hes declaring as emergency items for the Legislature an overhaul of the transmission grids manager, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas, and requirements that generating plants be winterized.

Dont be fooled and think its decisive action because its merely political theater, said Castro, a former San Antonio mayor.

Gov. Abbott follows the same playbook, whether were talking about his failures with Hurricane Harvey, the coronavirus pandemic or the events of the last few days, he said.

When citizens feel the pain of his incompetence and inaction, he suddenly declares that theres an emergency that needs to be placed on the agenda of the Legislature as though these problems didnt exist before, as though he and Republicans havent been in charge of the state for the last two decades and didnt have any opportunity to do anything about it.

U.S. Rep. Marc Veasey, D-Fort Worth, called this weeks loss of power, heat and water for millions of Texans a preventable crisis.

He urged state leaders to investigate, require winterization of power plants and tap rainy-day dollars to pay for them not consumers wallets.

Houston Democratic U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee said its time for all of Texas to be connected with national grids and for its electricity industry to be federally regulated.

It happened because we had a failed governmental system that did not turn ERCOT upside down and change its structure so that we had weatherization and hardening of our assets, she said.

Castros brother, U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio, said that he and nine Democratic House colleagues from Texas this week wrote to the Public Utility Commission and ERCOT asking if they had a plan for distributing equitable rolling outages and why grid managers waited until Sunday to announce outages and other measures to stabilize the power grid.

We received essentially non-responses, Castro said. If you look at the response from the Public Utility Commission in particular, which oversees ERCOT and the commissioners of the Public Utility Commission, who are appointed by Greg Abbott, their response is one of the most arrogant responses Ive ever seen from a government agency.

While ERCOT replied to the Democrats query in a three-page letter, Commission Chairwoman DeAnn T. Walker gave them just five sentences. Abbott has made ERCOT reform an emergency item this legislative session, she wrote.

Commission spokesman Andrew Barlow, asked about Castros criticism, said the regulatory agency is wholeheartedly committed to the process of discovery and discussion that is now underway with the grid restoration to normal operating conditions.

On the Democrats call, Michael and Anna Mendez of Austin recounted how they and their 10-year-old son lost power for 62 hours and were forced to forage for firewood and sleep beside and cook using their apartments fireplace. At night, they took turns getting up every two hours to replenish the fire, Michael Mendez said.

It was rough, he said. We just ultimately felt abandoned, and we feel like our city leaders and our state leaders just literally left us out in the cold.

Read this article:
Democrats look ahead to 2022 campaign with plans to hammer Texas GOP as inept in running government - The Dallas Morning News

A few weeks ago, it looked like Andrew Cuomo was on track to break a New York curse and make it past a third term in office. But now, roiled in a Covid scandal, his political future is looking less certain.

And getting aid money out quickly is crucial to keeping the economy afloat after the hit it took from the coronavirus, economists warn, given that any lapses in assistance will lead to a drop in consumer spending. Spending among low- and middle-income Americans who are receiving stimulus checks and unemployment benefits is slightly higher than it was before the pandemic, heavily bolstering the economy even though 10 million people remain unemployed.

When people talk about how startlingly strong the rebound was out of the depths of the initial part of the crisis, that was predicated on unprecedented support from the federal government, said Diane Swonk, chief economist at Grant Thornton.

The start-and-stop nature of unemployment aid and other benefits is already weighing on consumer behavior, dampening the effects on the broader economy, Swonk and other economists warn. If people are unable to count on regular unemployment checks or anticipate a change in the amount of benefits they are getting, they will spend less.

"It creates uncertainty, and uncertainty is a tax on the economy, Swonk said.

Among the stimulus policies that would most significantly increase cash to Americans, the package would boost the child tax credit and allow families to receive that money on a monthly basis, providing up to $300 a month per kid. But the IRS would not have to start offering those monthly payments until July 1.

The case for expanding the child tax credit as an immediate stimulus is weaker given the timing challenge, said Garrett Watson of the Tax Foundation, noting that there is also an argument for expanding the credit to reduce child poverty over the long term.

The IRS would also be charged with sending out new stimulus checks of up to $1,400 while at the same time facing the tidal wave of tax filing season. Leaders in the tax industry have already called on lawmakers to ensure the overburdened agency is not ordered to swiftly distribute all stimulus checks to the detriment of its core mission of collecting taxes.

John Koskinen, who served as IRS commissioner from 2013 through 2017, said the agency did amazingly well distributing stimulus checks last year despite being underfunded and short thousands of employees since a decade ago.

But there's a limit to what new things you can ask them to do without threatening the entire system, Koskinen warned.

In another tall order, the stimulus would require the Small Business Administration to launch a $25 billion restaurant grant program that the industry has been fighting for since the early months of the pandemic. Since then, about 17 percent of restaurants have closed, according to the National Restaurant Association.

The SBA, which has faced unprecedented demands from Congress during the economic and health crisis, has not fully implemented relief efforts from Decembers economic aid package. The most glaring example is a $15 billion grant program for shuttered live venues that has not yet launched and has no official start date.

Under the stimulus, the Federal Communications Commission also would receive $7.6 billion to subsidize Wi-Fi hot spots and other devices to help students connect to virtual classes. But the agency would get two months to set up rules for doing so, likely releasing that assistance with just a few weeks left in the school year.

At the state level, officials are already running out of cash from the previous stimulus.

Weve already had cities, counties, municipalities cutting staff to pay for Covid expenses, Kansas State Treasurer Lynn Rogers said Thursday during a call hosted by the advocacy group Invest in America Action.

Several states have yet to even begin distributing some of the unemployment assistance granted under the pandemic aid package that became law in late December.

Some centrist lawmakers in both parties warned congressional leaders early in the process that enacting a massive aid package would result in painful delays. Rep. Tom Reed (R-N.Y.), co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, said Congress should peel off funding for vaccines, as well as an extension of unemployment benefits, and pass those portions as soon as possible.

There is now a cliff hanging over Congress and the presidents desire to act, Reed said. There should be no reason to have that unofficial deadline of unemployment holding up what could otherwise be good policy.

Rebecca Rainey, Zachary Warmbrodt, David Lim, John Hendel and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.

Continued here:
Democrats shift Congress into top speed on Covid aid, but it may still be too slow for many - POLITICO

Once congressional Democrats pass a large Covid-19 relief bill, using the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Republican filibuster, the big question is how much further President Bidens legislative agenda will go.

The progressive wing of the party has a long and varied list of things they want to get done with their newfound congressional majorities tackling areas ranging from climate change to immigration to health care to voting rights to even adding states, among many others. Scrapping or otherwise reforming the Senate filibuster would likely be necessary to get many of these done. And some argue that if Democrats want to keep their narrow congressional majorities in 2022, they need to get as much of this done as possible.

What history tells us is that when Clinton won in 92, two years later, the Democrats didnt do as much as they should have. They got swept out by the Republicans, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) said on CNN last month. If we do not respond now, yes, I believe, two years from now, the Republicans will say, Hey, you elected these guys, they did nothing, vote for us, and they will win.

Moderates have a different view. They believe that the best way to maximize Democrats chances of winning in 2022 is to focus the agenda more narrowly on voters main priorities pandemic relief and the economy and set aside the more polarizing items on progressives wish list. And they fear that an overly broad agenda will instead inflame voter backlash.

If going supersized was the thing that voters wanted, we would be entering year five of the Sanders presidency, says Matt Bennett of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way. Instead, were entering year one of the Biden presidency. Because he understands that we have to go big to respond to these huge crises, which he has, but we have to connect it to people in ways that feel real and make a difference.

The risk of backlash is real. In every midterm election since World War II, the incumbents party lost House seats, and in most they lost Senate seats, too. Democrats control of Congress already hangs on a knifes edge a net loss of just five House seats and one Senate seat would give Republicans majorities.

If youre wondering why senators like Joe Manchin (D-WV) oppose abolishing the filibuster, the fear of backlash may be one major reason. Essentially, the filibuster constrains Democrats agenda to either what they can pass through the special budget reconciliation process or what they can get Republican support for. At least in theory, this would make the party less likely to overreach by sharply limiting what they can even do.

In contrast, liberals feel that by keeping the filibuster, Democrats are tying their own hands, preventing themselves from passing other policies that are both badly needed and could help them win. Theyre pushing for more, but in the end, the choice about whether to go bigger will come down to the partys moderates.

There is some disagreement in the Democratic Party about the substantive merits of a broad progressive agenda. But when it comes to the politics of such an agenda, the question boils down to one of voter backlash and specifically about whether backlash is inevitable, or whether Biden has a real shot of mitigating it with good strategic choices.

Historically, midterm elections have been extremely unkind to incumbent presidents parties, but Biden may have some factors working in his favor if the pandemic abates and the economy gets a boost from that abatement.

But Biden faces the additional problems of both chambers maps favoring Republicans, in the House due to gerrymandering (a new round of which is coming before the midterms), and in the Senate because white rural voters are spread out among more states. For the Senates 2022 map, Democrats are tasked with defending swing-state seats in Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, while their best pickup opportunities are in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and North Carolina all states that were more Trump-leaning than the national popular vote in 2020.

That is: For Democrats to keep their congressional majorities, Biden doesnt just need to do whats popular nationally, he needs to do things that will be popular in states and districts that lean to the right.

The 2022 midterms arent just important for the short term. A disastrous showing could put Democrats in such a deep hole that retaking majorities would become forbiddingly difficult for years to come. The 2024 Senate map, for instance, looks challenging for the party, with red-state incumbents Manchin, Jon Tester (D-MT), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH) all up during a presidential year. So though midterm losses might be tough for Biden to avoid, limiting the size of those losses could be important for Democrats hopes in the future.

Matt Grossmann, a professor of political science at Michigan State University, argues that Democrats midterm losses tend to be bigger when they succeed in passing an ambitious agenda. If anything, theres a negative relationship between the amount of major legislation that passes and what happens in the next election for Democrats, Grossmann says. Theres also a negative relationship between the amount of liberal policy that passes and the performance in the next election.

Grossmann cites 1966 (the first midterm after LBJs Great Society, encompassing civil rights and social welfare legislation), 1994 (Bill Clintons first midterm, after he had passed a controversial economic bill and then failed to pass health reform), and 2010 (Barack Obamas first midterm, before which he had passed stimulus and health reform and tried but failed to pass a cap-and-trade bill), all of which saw massive Democratic losses.

One counterexample is that FDRs Democrats did quite well in his first midterm in 1934, amid the Great Depression and New Deal. But, Grossmann argues, to the extent that we have evidence, its closer to the opposite of that story that doing a whole bunch of things helps the Democratic Party in the midterms.

So doing a lot can be risky for Democrats, but were in the midst of a pandemic that requires bold action to address; doing nothing is not an option. Happily for Biden, his first major priority is quite popular according to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 68 percent of respondents say they support Bidens stimulus proposal and only 24 percent say they oppose it.

The real strategic debate is about what to do after the stimulus. I spoke to Eric Patashnik, a political scientist at Brown University who is writing a book about backlash, to get a better sense of how it might be avoided.

Patashnik stressed that Democrats main concern should be making good public policy rather than legislating only with short-term electoral consequences in mind. But, he said, I do think the risk of backlash is important to recognize and acknowledge and manage. Sometimes, he said, a certain policy initiative is a risk thats worth taking; sometimes its a risk thats not worth taking because the policy gains arent worth the political blowback.

And according to Patashnik, there are several features that appear to make certain policies more likely to produce backlash, including:

There are tremendous incentives for policy overreaching, to prioritize policies that are more important to the base than to average voters, due to close party balance and the uncertainty of future control, says Patashnik.

None of this, Patashnik hastens to add, necessarily means ambitious policies that could match these descriptions shouldnt be pursued if Democrats think theyre substantively so important that theyre worth the possible political consequences. He mentioned democracy reform and the protection of minority voting rights as examples. But its important to be clear-eyed about what the political consequences might be, rather than simply to assume that backlash wont happen.

I also asked Patashnik about an argument made by Ezra Klein at the New York Times, that Democrats need to pass visible, tangible policies to create feedback loops, so voters will receive and understand their benefits. This argument is essentially that Obamas 2009-10 stimulus and health care bills were poorly designed because voters didnt understand their merits until later, if at all in contrast to, say, the stimulus money the Trump administration sent out in 2020.

I do think the political science evidence is stronger that creating positive policy feedbacks and reinforcing loops promotes policy sustainability over time and protecting measures against repeal, than that its going to guarantee immediate electoral gains, Patashnik said.

Voters might like policies like Obamacare and want to prevent their repeal later, but they wont necessarily reward the politicians who passed them. Good policies can be bad politics in the short run, Patashnik said. This fits with the story of Obamacare, which didnt seem to help Democrats electorally until Republicans nearly took it away in 2017. (Sarah Kliff did extensive reporting for Vox on why Kentucky Obamacare enrollees ended up voting for Trump.)

Progressives have spent much of the beginning of the Biden administration pulling their hair out about why moderates like Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) would agree to defend the filibuster, thus drastically limiting what Democrats can pass with their votes alone to whatever can get through the arcane budget reconciliation process. The pressure is already building to try to get them and other opponents of a Senate filibuster-ending rules change to reconsider, and this debate will likely dominate much of Bidens first year.

The weird quirks of how the filibuster can only be evaded through budget reconciliation on particular issues (see Dylan Scott for more on that) are a historical accident. But theyre a convenient accident for the partys moderate wing, which would prefer Congresss focus to remain on the economy and pandemic relief, and other popular topics like infrastructure which are passable through reconciliation rather than moving on to other long-held Democratic ambitions.

Indeed, when I asked Bennett of Third Way whether Biden could achieve his preferred agenda through budget reconciliation meaning, without changing Senate rules to end the filibuster he said, Absolutely, yes. Not every single item in Bidens proposal will survive, he said, but Biden can achieve what he needs to achieve to protect Dems going into the midterms and also what he needs to achieve substantively.

But those Democrats who believe that other issues that cant advance through reconciliation, like immigration reform and voting rights, are crucially important will be immensely frustrated that the filibuster is restraining their agenda.

Democrats are constantly arguing over whether they are talking about race and cultural issues too much, whether they are appealing to voters of color and/or white voters without college degrees at the expense of turning off either group, and whether they are tilting too far left or not far left enough, Perry Bacon Jr. writes at FiveThirtyEight. In a world where the filibuster remains as is, they are unlikely to pass the kinds of legislation that would benefit voters of color in particular (statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico, which have large populations of voters of color; voting-rights provisions; immigration reform), that relate to culture and identity (limiting gun rights, expanding abortion rights) or that lean fairly far to the left.

More broadly, canny strategists may think that the main use of the filibuster for Democrats is in fact to protect them from their base because, in effect, it settles what would be a bitter debate over which liberal policies to prioritize, by saying that Senate rules give them only very limited options. The policies that can pass through reconciliation are also the sorts of policies they think are less likely to produce backlash. They also happen to be the sorts of policies that Biden would prefer to focus on anyway.

This may, however, be too clever by half. To the extent that the filibuster limits Democrats ability to effectively respond to the pandemic and help the economy recover, it could hurt the partys chances in 2022. Additionally, progressives are onto this game, want the filibuster gone, and correctly understand that Democrats could get rid of it with a simple majority vote if they all agree. The question is whether Republicans will end up giving them a pretext to do it by blocking something all Democrats agree must pass.

The rest is here:
Are the Covid relief bill and other big policies the key to Democrats 2022 election success? - Vox.com

In 2010, the last time Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, they used the opportunity to pass sweeping health care reform legislation known as the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare.

But that legislative push was hardly easy. It divided many Democrats, and it ultimately came with an electoral price. In the midterm elections that year, Republicans won their largest share of seats in the House of Representatives since the 1940s, while Democrats who backed the ACA saw their vote share drop by an extraordinary 8.5 percentage points on average.

Now, though, Democrats are back in the drivers seat, with unified control of the federal government thanks to their Senate wins in Georgia. So, what lessons from their 2010 signature accomplishment should they apply to their efforts to pass legislation in 2021, whether its on COVID-19 or climate change?

As a political science professor studying public perceptions of the ACA, I see two core lessons for Democrats to keep in mind. First, to stop high-profile laws from becoming unpopular, it helps to keep them simple. And the ACA was anything but: It sought to increase access to health insurance through a complex patchwork of regulations and other policies, which included creating new health insurance exchanges, expanding Medicaid, adding new rules to guarantee insurance access regardless of preexisting conditions, and mandating that all Americans obtain health insurance.

Second, when the public evaluates a complex, multifaceted policy, like the ACA, there is a tendency to focus on its least popular parts. Most of the ACAs major provisions were actually pretty popular. In a January 2010 Kaiser Family Foundation poll, for instance, 67 percent of respondents said that they were more likely to support health care legislation that created insurance exchanges, while 62 percent said the same about expanding Medicaid. Yet, Obamacare as a whole was viewed unfavorably from 2011 until 2017. That was, in large part, due to one unpopular provision in the law: the individual mandate. In that same 2010 KFF poll, 62 percent said that the health insurance mandate made them less likely to support the bill. And for millions of Americans, the ACA became synonymous with the individual mandate.

The complexity of the ACA also masked its impact to a degree. For instance, the ACAs exchanges should have fostered support for the law after all, they enabled millions of Americans to get insurance, often with subsidies averaging thousands of dollars. Yet, as Cornell Universitys Will Hobbs and I find in our preprint, the 2014 rollout of the exchanges did not increase support for the ACA. In part, thats because the exchanges relied on private insurers, and so the governments role in facilitating the insurance was obscured. The exchanges were also designed to be bolstered by the individual mandate, but given the mandates unpopularity, it provoked a demonstrable backlash. We found, too, that exchange customers felt more negative toward the ACA if local premiums spiked. Once again, losses loomed larger than gains.

Not all parts of the law were unsuccessful, though. Take the ACAs expansion of Medicaid. It extended coverage to most low-income adults, including adults without children, and is a key source of support for the ACA. In fact, in a 2019 article I co-authored with then-University of Pennsylvania researcher Kalind Parish, we found that poorer residents in states where Medicaid had been expanded were notably more supportive of the ACA after its implementation. Thats evidence that tangible, positive experiences with the law had an effect, too.

Policy design clearly plays a role in a laws popularity. And policies that impose clear costs or obscure benefits are likely to be less popular, as we saw with the ACA. That said, there is one more key lesson here: Its really hard for politicians to control the messaging of any piece of legislation. According to research I conducted for a 2018 article, the messaging that the two parties used in the initial debates around the ACA did little to influence public opinion, or even the words Americans used to explain their attitudes toward the ACA. The rhetoric used by politicians remember former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palins infamous Facebook post suggesting that the ACA would create death panels corresponded very little with the language used by Americans when talking about the ACA. This echoes other research that has also found little evidence of opinions shifting in response to messaging. This holds true even among groups for whom the messaging is targeted (like older Americans). Rather, the key to successful legislation seems to hinge on how the policy is designed, not how it is discussed.

And that makes some sense, as the central goal of legislating is to shape policy, not public opinion. But this is not to say the two arent closely related. After all, the ACAs initial unpopularity undermined the Democrats ability to defend it, leaving the law politically vulnerable for years. It also had very real electoral consequences when Democrats lost the House in 2010. So, as the Democratic Congress gets ready to pass its agenda, it may be wise to internalize these lessons from the ACA to avoid the same pitfalls.

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The Democrats Have An Ambitious Agenda. Heres What They Should Learn From Obamacare. - FiveThirtyEight