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NORTH ANDOVER It was a first on Sunday morning for the North Andover Democratic Town Committee, hosting avirtual breakfastwhile continuing a long-standing tradition of honoring the partys representatives and supporters.

The breakfast, led byMark DiSalvo,brought local Democrats together, including state legislators and candidates running for local office. The virtual event also featured special tributes to supporters.

U.S. Sen. Ed Markey returned to the breakfast this year asthe keynote speaker, thankingeveryone for their support during his reelection campaign and giving updates on the progress he feels is being made in Washington, D.C.

Markey was also the guest speaker a year ago.

I loved being with you last year, the senator said, adding that a lot has happened in the past year to make him very hopeful for whats to come.

There is a light at the end of this dark, year-end tunnel, Markey said. We want to get things done.

Markey said Democrats should be proud they won the trifecta, keeping control of the House of Representatives, winning the Senate and taking back the White House.

Markey also said President Joe Bidens $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan will bring relief and support to those needing it most as the pandemic continues.

It feels like our country is emerging from a very long and dark winter, Markey said. Its been a hard year but we have a lot of work to do. Its time to rise up, to put our justice agenda into action.

U.S. Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts sent a video message, thanking all for their support and hard work.

The committee honoredAndrea Holmbergas Democrat of the Year. Shereceived her official award at home Saturday.

Committee Chairman Michael Lis toldthe audience that Holmberg was deserving ofthe honor calling her a tireless campaign worker, party supporter and someonewho has held signs in rain and snow, helpedcomplete many tasks to support candidates, and has immeasurable generosity and commitment.

For Holmberg, it was a honor to be recognized.

She credited the many women in her lifewho helped drive her commitment to help others. That included her mother, friends, and even her young daughter.

Holmberg said she would continue to work for the candidates in whom she believes.

Former Eagle-Tribune reporter Paul Tennant was also honored by the committee, with DiSalvo saying Tennants work over the years covering local news has been valuableto the community.

And I always enjoyed attending and covering the North Andover Democratic Town Committee breakfast,Tennant said, adding that after the results of last falls election, he has a renewed sense of hope.

The last four years have been less than pleasant, Tennant said. Im seeing leadership that doesnt seek to divide.

In addition to state legislators giving their own views, local candidates running for several North Andover elected positions were invited to speak.

Those running for Select Board include incumbent Richard M. Vaillancourt, Joseph Finn and Janice Phillips. For School Committee, the candidates are Andrew McDevitt, David Brown, Joseph Hicks, Rebecca Stronck and Pamela Wall-Pietrowski.Max Butterbrodt hopes to win a five-year term on the Housing Authority.

DiSalvo is also running for another term as town moderator.

DiSalvo stressed that this part of the breakfast was nonpartisan, and all candidates were invited to participate.North Andovers election is March 30.

Those who attended the virtual breakfasttook part in an electronic straw poll asking for nonbinding opinions on several questions, including how participants feel about Bidens response to the coronavirus, Gov. Charlie Bakers response, and on the local front, North Andovers response.

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North Andover Democrats host their first virtual breakfast - Eagle-Tribune

Democrats are pushing a sweeping package of voting rights, campaign finance and ethics reforms as their top legislative priority in 2021. One of the pieces of the bill is a section requiring independent political groups that currently dont have to disclose their donors whose donations are known as dark money to finally do so.

This provision, previously known as the DISCLOSE Act, has been a major part of Democrats campaign finance reform agenda for years. But one major thing has changed since 2010, when Republicans dominated dark money spending: Today, its Democrats.

Democratic Party-aligned dark money groups nonprofits that are not required to disclose their donors spent more than $514 million on the 2020 elections, according to a review of FEC records by the Center for Responsive Politics. That compared to around $200 million by Republican Party-allied groups.

The totals reported by the Center for Responsive Politics include both independent expenditures made by dark money groups and contributions from dark money groups to super PACs, which do have to report their donors.

The Supreme Courts 2010 Citizens United decision legalized unlimited corporate, labor and individual political spending on third-party electoral efforts. This created an unintended disclosure gap by allowing nonprofit groups that accept corporate donations and do not disclose their donors to spend money on election campaigns.

The disclosure of political donations plays a central role in the U.S. campaign finance regulation system. That system favors disclosure, as citizens should be able to know who could be influencing their elected representatives and because donations carry the possibility of corruption and the appearance of corruption. The Citizens United decision, penned by then-Justice Anthony Kennedy, even included an endorsement of disclosure as it opened the door to dark money.

But Congress failed to pass the DISCLOSE Act to close that door. The bill fell one vote short of clearing a Republican filibuster in 2010.

Pool via Getty Images"Perhaps this slime machine can be a bipartisan concern," Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) told his colleagues in reference to dark money spending on elections.

The shift in dark money dominance from Republicans to Democrats began in the 2018 election cycle. This marked a major change after Republican dark money groups outspent Democratic groups 4-1 in the 2016 election.

Democrats created an entire ecosystem of dark money groups in order to take the lead away from Republicans in this field of campaign spending. The major Democratic Party super PACs associated with different offices each launched their own dark money arms.

For example, Priorities USA Action, which focuses on presidential races, launched Priorities USA; the House Majority PAC opened House Majority Forward; and the Senate Majority PAC launched Majority Forward PAC. These three dark money groups each spent tens of millions on the 2020 election.

They were joined by new dark money hubs that distributed undisclosed funds to super PACs to spend on election campaigns. The largest of these, Sixteen Thirty Fund and Future Forward USA Action, contributed $61 million apiece to super PACs that spent that money on the 2020 election.

And despite this newfound dominance, Democrats are still looking to pass the DISCLOSE Act now part of the voting, finance and ethics-focused For The People Act and end dark money spending on elections.

The Sixteen Thirty Fund unequivocally supports the For The People Act and its historic provisions to strengthen our democracy by expanding voting rights, enhancing ethics rules, and reforming campaign finance regulations, Amy Katz, executive director of the Sixteen Thirty Fund, said in a statement to HuffPost.

The bill has already passed the House on a nearly party-line vote (one Democrat voted no). Senate Democrats formally introduced the Senate version of the bill on Wednesday with all but Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) signed on as co-sponsors.

The topic of Democratic dark money spending came up in a March 10 Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on dark money in judicial appointment campaigns. Subcommittee chairman Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), previously the lead sponsor of the Senate DISCLOSE Act, sponsored the hearing.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) noted the increasing dominance of Democratic dark money spending. He remarked that he faced tens of millions of dollars in dark money spending that aimed to beat me into the ground.

All the people thundering about dark money are getting elected with it, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said.

But Whitehouse noted that the DISCLOSE Act, embedded in the For The People Act, would require both Democratic and Republican groups to disclose their donors.

Now, Republican colleagues have faced massive attacks leveled through Democratic front groups, Whitehouse said. So perhaps this slime machine can be a bipartisan concern.

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Democrats Now Dominate Dark Money Spending. They Still Want To End It. - HuffPost

WASHINGTON Dozens of U.S. House Democrats, including two Virginians, backed a resolution filed Friday to expel controversial U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene from Congress, an extraordinary measure thats only been successfully employed twice since the Civil War.

U.S. Rep. Jimmy Gomez filed the expulsion resolution, after introducing it in January. The text of the legislation is simple, noting that Greene, a Georgia Republican, is hereby expelled from the House of Representatives.

In a floor speech, the California Democrat cited Greenes role ininciting the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrectionand press reports that revealed that before being elected, Greene had expressedsupport online for violence against top Democrats,including former President Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

I take no joy in introducing this resolution, but any member who incites political violence and threatens our lives must be expelled, Gomez said.

The measure is unlikely to go any further, however.

An expulsion resolution requires a two-thirds majority in the House to pass, meaning it would need dozens of Republicans to sign on to be successful even if every Democrat supported it. And although Greenes GOP colleagues have been griping about her use of procedural tactics to grind debate on the House floor to a halt, they are exceedingly unlikely to back a push to remove her from Congress.

Pelosi had driven efforts tostrip Greene from her committee positions, a rare move the Houseapproved last month. Yet even Pelosi, at her weekly press conference on Friday, said shes lukewarm on expelling Greene.

Im not going to get into that, Pelosi told reporters. Members are very unhappy about what happened here and they can express themselves the way they do. What Mr. Gomez did is his own view. That is not a leadership position.

For her part, Greene swatted away the effort, claiming Gomez and the 72 Democrats who cosponsored the bill are radical socialists and have declared me Public Enemy Number One.

When asked for further comment, her spokesman sent along another tweet in which Greene claimed Democrats are threatened by strong Republican Women. Greene has also tweeted that Democrats are trying overturn the will of the People who voted for both her and Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa, whose November election in the states 2nd Congressional District isbeing challenged by Democrat Rita Hart.

Greene also insinuated that the effort was a conspiracy with social media giant Twitter after the platform suspended her account for 12 hours, a move Greene said she was told was an error.

Greene has also been fundraising off the expulsion effort, asking supporters to text a number and join her communications list. Her campaign sent out an email Thursday asking her supporters to donate $25 so she can have the resources to defend myself in the public sphere.

I must be able to defend myself against these nasty smear tactics and show that you and I and the America First agenda are not going anywhere!, the email read. Make no mistake, the Radical Left, led by AOC and the Squad, are trying to remove me from office for defending President Trump. And as President Trumps biggest supporter, Ive become Enemy #1. But in reality, theyre not after me. Theyre after you. Im just in their way.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, and fellow Squad members Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota are indeed cosponsors of the legislation. However, the measure also has support from members across the ideological spectrum in the Democratic caucus.

For instance, the measure had the support of moderate lawmakers, including Rep. Jim Cooper of Tennessee; Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado; and Pennsylvanias U.S. Reps. Brendan Boyle, Matt Cartwright and Susan Wild.

Several Florida lawmakers sponsored the measure: Reps.Kathy Castor, Ted Deutch, Alcee Hastings, Darren Soto, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Frederica Wilson.

Other members to sponsor the resolution include Arizonas U.S. Reps. Ruben Gallego and Ral Grijalva, Rep. Joyce Beatty of Ohio, Virginia Reps. Gerry Connolly and Donald McEachin, Rep. Dina Titus of Nevada, Rep. David Trone of Maryland, Rep. Dwight Evans of Pennsylvania and Rep. Steve Cohen of Tennessee.

The sole fellow member of Greenes Georgia delegation to co-sign her expulsion was Rep. Nikema Williams, a Democrat who joined Congress this year after the death of Rep. John Lewis of Georgia.

Congresswoman Greenes comments and actions are dangerous, unpatriotic, and a clear threat to every Member of Congress, Williams said in January, after backing an effort to censure Greene. It would be irresponsible for us to allow her to use the Peoples House as a platform to peddle discredited conspiracy theories that only fan the flames of hatred and violence.

Several members were expelled from Congress in 1861 and 1862 at the outbreak of the Civil War for supporting the Confederacy and secession. However, since then, only two members of Congress have been successfully expelled, and both were given the boot for financial corruption.

The most recent was Rep. Jim Traficant of Ohio, who was expelled in 2002 after being indicted on several counts, including tax evasion, racketeering and bribery. He served seven years in prison, and passed away in 2014, years after his release.

Before that, Rep. Michael Myers of Pennsylvania was the sole post-Civil War expulsion, after being caught on videotape accepting a $50,000 bribe as part of the Abscam FBI sting operation in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He served three years in prison.

The only expulsion before the Civil War happened in 1797, when Sen. William Blount of Tennessee was expelled for treason for helping the British in a ploy to conquer parts of Florida and Louisiana to keep them from French conquest.

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Resolution to expel Marjorie Taylor Greene signed by dozens of House Democrats, including two Virginians - Virginia Mercury

Just a year after the Empire State was clobbered by the coronavirus, New Yorks Legislature confronts an embarrassment of revenue riches. State taxes have rebounded more strongly than expected from the pandemic meltdown capped by a massive injection of $12.6 billion in no-strings-attached federal stimulus funds.

Yet among their budget priorities for the fiscal year starting April 1, the Democratic super-majorities in the state Assembly and Senate want to raise $7 billion or $8 billion more in new taxes mostly from a few thousand multimillionaire earners who already generate a disproportionately large share of the states revenue.

Gov. Cuomo opened the door to tax hikes in his mid-January executive budget, which called for a sliding scale of temporary three-year personal-income-tax surcharges on New York taxpayer incomes starting at $5 million.

Although Cuomo said the tax hike was needed to raise $1.5 billion, it has since become clear that receipts through fiscal 2022 will be billions higher than he originally projected. Indeed, his budget would generate a surplus without even counting stimulus payments that are more than twice as much as what he had counted on.

But thats not enough for the Legislature. Lobbied by a coalition of powerful public-employee unions and urban progressive activists touting a confiscatory tax the rich agenda as the solution to every problem, the Assembly and Senate majorities would raise the top income-tax rates to new historic highs.

Under current law, residents of New York City are subject to a combined state and local income-tax rate topping out 12.7percent 3.9 percent in the city, plus a statewide rate of 8.82percent including a supposedly temporary but repeatedly extended millionaire tax surcharge first imposed in 2009.

Both legislative majorities favor raising the top tax rate to nearly 10 percent starting on incomes of $1 million ($2 million for joint filing couples) and to 11.85 percent on incomes of $25million (the Assembly plan) or $50 million (Senate version). The combined marginal rate in New York City would thus rise to nearly 16 percent. On top of all that, lawmakers want to hit high-earners capital gains with a further 1 percent surcharge.

Lawmakers are turning a blind eye to the impact of the 2017 federal tax laws virtual elimination of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction, which boosted New Yorks effective marginal rate by 43 percent in 2018. The Assembly and Senate plans would raise the effective marginal rate on multimillionaire earners to nearly double the level of just four years ago.

Asked how targeted taxpayers might be expected to respond to this onslaught, legislative sponsors generally echo the complacency of Mayor de Blasio, who testified last month that hes unworried about an uptick in multimillionaire out-migration, because this is the place they want to be despite New York Citys well-documented increase in crime and disorder, the likely shift to more remote work and the tax hikes already resulting from the lost SALT deduction.

More than a few lawmakers probably share the attitude expressed by Sen. Luis Sepulveda (D-Bronx) during an online tax-the-rich pep rally last December.

Millionaires leaving if we increase taxes? Sepulveda said. Well, I say I will open the door and make sure it doesnt hit them on the ass on the way out. Because if youre that wealthy ... and if you dont have the heart to want to say, I will contribute more to help millions of people, then leave the state, find another place to live. Well find other millionaires that are chomping at the bit to move into this state.

Good luck with that, guys.

E.J. McMahon is a senior fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Read more here:
Democrats' bid to turn screws on New York's richest - New York Post

Had Donald Trump still been president, the stock market would have almost certainly topped his list of glorious achievements. We'd hear popping talk about how our 401(k)s are sizzling and how he is the reason. Sample tweet from August 2017: "Stock market at an all-time high. That doesn't just happen!"

No, Biden last week spoke of "a collective suffering, a collective sacrifice, a year filled with the loss of life and the loss of living for all of us." He spent a good deal of time on the anguish, but then he moved, happily, to his administration's successes -- boosting production of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, recruiting armies to give the shots, getting the vaccines into pharmacies.

It was a relief to hear a Democratic president bragging out loud about his accomplishments. But the message must move away from pain to prosperity. Biden has started on that path by touting the massive COVID relief bill that's sending checks to an overwhelmingly supportive public. His self-praise should expand to the stock market.

Democrats seem especially reluctant to use the stock market as a measure of their economic prowess. Under Barack Obama, the Dow hit record highs 118 times. Do you remember him ever talking about it?

Biden was basically right when he said, "Where I come from in Scranton and Claymont, the people don't live off of the stock market."

It's true that the wealthiest 10 percent of American families own 84 percent of Wall Street portfolios' value. The bottom 50 percent -- that's half of American families -- possess none or almost no equities. Last year, gains in the S&P 500 added an estimated $4 trillion to American portfolios, but $3.4 trillion of it went to the top 10 percent.

Many Americans don't understand that reality, as Trump knew well. Those in the middle who own a few shares, perhaps in their retirement accounts, do feel tied to movements in stock prices. Never mind that in 2019, the median portfolio size for households in this group was only $13,000.

Noninvestors, meanwhile, often associate a booming stock market with a good economy, even if they themselves are hurting.

It's odd how Democrats shy away from taking credit for bubbling markets, when, in recent decades, stock returns have done better under their presidents than Republican ones, Trump included. The Dow posted an annualized return of almost 11.8 percent under Trump, according to MarketWatch. That was good but short of Obama's 12.1 percent. And it was nowhere near Bill Clinton's 15.9 percent.

As MarketWatch also noted, even Clinton's numbers were blown away by the 25.5 percent annualized rise under Calvin Coolidge, a Republican. Of course, Coolidge had the Roaring '20s blowing wind in his economy's sails.

We're now in the 2020s. Many economists are predicting that with the virus in retreat, the economy will roar once again. The Financial Times cites such prods as pent-up demand, government spending and savings by the locked-down Americans who kept their jobs but had few places to spend money.

The stock market is off to a hot start in Biden's first year. We won't miss tweets like Trump's "Dow hit a new intraday all-time high! I wonder whether or not the Fake News Media will so report?"

But Democrats would be wise to at least applaud politely when stock markets sing of a new age of abundance now that they're in charge.

Froma Harrop is a nationally syndicated columnist whose work regularly appears in the Grand Forks Herald.

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Froma Harrop: The Democrats are finally bragging - Grand Forks Herald