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Excerpt from:
Froma Harrop: Our cities need conservative liberals | Editorial ... - The Daily Advance

The debt ceiling might be the single dumbest feature of American law. Congress decides to spend money and later schedules a separate vote on whether the government will pay its bills. If the government doesnt pay its bills, calamity ensues.

Moodys Analytics estimates that even a short debt ceiling breach could cause a recession. An analysis by the White Houses Council of Economic Advisers modeled a more protracted default and foresaw a crash on the order of the 2008 financial crisis: The stock market falls 45 percent, unemployment rises by five points, and Americas long-term borrowing costs are much, much higher. All of this to pay money we already owe and can easily borrow. Madness.

Defenders of the debt ceiling will tell you that the limit has been around a long time and has largely operated to the good. America has never defaulted on its debts, but the debt ceiling has often motivated compromise between the two parties. That may be true, but its a bit like saying that since America has won every game of Russian roulette its played so far, it should keep playing.

And so I understand and share the interest in ways to render the debt ceiling null and void. Democrats should have eliminated the debt ceiling when they held Congress and the White House in 2021 and 2022. But they didnt.

Now two more unconventional tactics are proving particularly popular in the liberal imagination.

In one, President Biden simply declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, pointing to the 14th Amendment, which holds that the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned. Five Senate Democrats, including Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are circulating a letter calling on Biden to do just that. On Friday, 66 progressive congressional Democrats sent the president their own letter making a similar case.

In the other, the Treasury Department uses a loophole in a 1997 law to mint a platinum coin of any value it chooses a trillion dollars, say and uses the new money to keep paying the governments debts.

In remarks after a meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Biden said he was considering the argument that the debt ceiling is unconstitutional. The problem, he continued, is that it would have to be litigated. And thats the problem with all these ideas and why, in the end, its doubtful that Biden or any Democrat will try them.

The legality of the debt ceiling or a trillion-dollar platinum coin doesnt depend on how liberals read the Constitution or the Coinage Act. It depends on how three conservatives read it: John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch, who are the closest the Supreme Court now comes to having swing justices.

Its easy enough to come up with counterarguments that conservative justices are likely to find persuasive. Michael McConnell, a former judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, to which he was appointed by President George W. Bush, just offered one in these pages. For the United States to fail to pay interest or principal on its debt would be financially catastrophic, but it would not affect the validity of the debt, he wrote. When borrowers fail to make payments on lawfully incurred debt, this does not question the validity of those debts; their debts are just as valid as before. The borrowers are just in default.

The coin gambit is similarly easy to poke holes in if one wants to. Preston Byrne, a partner at the law firm Brown Rudnick, notes that the Supreme Court has often looked at statutes for which a simple reading of a limited law would seem to grant the executive almost unlimited powers. In many such cases, the court struck down those readings. Congress, the court has said, does not hide elephants in mouse holes.

My point is not that more conservative readings of these laws are right in some absolute sense. Its that no such absolute sense matters. We just watched this Supreme Court wipe out decades of precedent to overrule Roe. It has repeatedly entertained cases that even conservative legal scholars thought farcical just a few years earlier. I still remember Orin Kerr, a law professor who clerked for Justice Anthony Kennedy, telling me at the beginning of the Obamacare case that there was a less than 1 percent chance that the courts would invalidate the individual mandate, only to update that to a 50-50 chance as the court prepared to rule.

The Supreme Court does what it wants to do. Does it want to let the Biden administration dissolve the debt ceiling using a novel legal theory?

If testing the question wouldnt cost anything, there would be no harm in trying. But I dont think it would have no cost. The strength of the Biden administrations political position is that it stands for normalcy. The debt ceiling has always been raised before, and it must be raised now. But if the administration declares the debt ceiling unconstitutional, only to have the Supreme Court declare the maneuver unconstitutional, then Biden owns the market chaos that would follow. Who will voters blame in that scenario? Republicans, who say they just wanted to negotiate over the budget, as is tradition? Or Biden, who did something no other president had done and failed?

Right now, at last, the positions are clear. The White House is open to budget negotiations but opposed to debt ceiling brinkmanship. Republicans are the ones threatening default if their demands are not met. They are pulling the pin on this grenade, in full view of the American people. Biden should think carefully before taking the risk of snatching it out of their hands and holding it himself.

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Opinion | Liberals Are Persuading Themselves of a Debt Ceiling Plan That Won't Work - The New York Times

May 15, 2023

Ottawa, ON The Liberal Party of Canada has announced the four Team Trudeau candidates for the federal by-elections happening in Manitoba, Ontario, and Quebec on June 19, 2023.

Liberals are excited to welcome a strong team of by-election candidates ready to work with Justin Trudeau to continue delivering real results for workers and families in their communities, and right across the country, said Sachit Mehra, President of the Liberal Party of Canada. With diverse backgrounds and decades of combined experience in community leadership roles, our Team Trudeau candidates will continue that tireless work to connect with Canadians, share our positive plan, and bring their communitys voice to Parliament.

The four official Team Trudeau candidates are:

In the lead up to these by-elections, thousands of Liberal volunteers participated in 4 Days of Action this year to continue sharing our positive plan to Canadians in every corner of the country. And earlier this month, more than 4,000 Canadians from across the country took part in the 2023 Liberal National Convention, participating in innovative campaign trainings and policy discussions ready and focused on building winning campaigns, and shaping the ideas that will build a better future for Canadians.

In these important by-elections, Canadians have an important choice. While Pierre Poilievre and the Conservative Party have no serious plan and continue to promote reckless policies that would move our country backward, Justin Trudeau and our Liberal team remain focused on making life more affordable, delivering better public health care, creating middle class jobs, taking strong climate action, and building an economy that works for all Canadians.

By-election candidate biographies.

See the article here:
announces four Team Trudeau candidates for federal by-elections ... - Liberal Party of Canada

Speaker Kevin McCarthys demand that any deal to raise the debt limit must include stricter work requirements for social safety net programs and President Bidens hints that he might be willing to accept such a bargain has drawn a backlash from liberal Democrats in Congress, underscoring the tricky politics at play in bipartisan talks to avert a default.

The proposal has become a central issue in negotiations between Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy, which entered a new phase this week as the two offered glimmers of hope that they could reach a deal to increase the borrowing limit, now projected to be reached as early as June 1, and avoid an economic catastrophe.

House Republicans debt limit bill, approved last month along party lines, would impose stricter work requirements for beneficiaries of food stamps, Medicaid and Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and the speaker said this week that Republicans would insist on such a provision as part of any deal. Mr. Biden has pointedly left the door open to the idea, noting that he voted for work requirements as a senator.

Talk of such a compromise has set off a wave of anger among liberals on Capitol Hill, who have begun openly fretting that the president might agree to a deal they cannot accept.

I cannot in good conscience support a debt ceiling proposal that pushes people into poverty, said Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania.

The pushback reflects the political crosscurrents at play in the talks between Mr. Biden and Mr. McCarthy, both of whom have to contend with slim majorities in Congress and uncompromising political bases that will find any agreement hard to swallow.

The hard-right Freedom Caucus called on Mr. McCarthy on Thursday to stop negotiating with White House officials until the Senate passed House Republicans debt ceiling bill legislation that would slash federal spending by an average of 18 percent over the next decade and is anathema to Democrats.No more discussion on watering it down, the group tweeted. Period.

The growing unhappiness in both flanks highlighted how difficult it will be for negotiators to cobble together a debt limit bill that can win the votes to pass both chambers. Lawmakers on both the hard left and right may end up withholding their support, with conservatives arguing thatthe deal does not go far enough in reducing spending and liberals arguing thatit goes too far.

Mr. McCarthy was unusually upbeat on Thursday about the state of the talks, telling reporters that negotiators could reach a deal in principle as early as this weekend.

Were not there, we havent agreed to anything yet, but I see the path that we can come to an agreement, he said.

Mr. Biden has repeatedly shown an openness to negotiating with Republicans on work requirements. The president told reporters on Wednesday before he left for Japan that it was possible he would accept some G.O.P. proposals on the issue, but that he would not agree to making changes of any consequence.

Im not going to accept any work requirements thats going to have an impact on the medical health needs of people, Mr. Biden said.

Mr. McCarthy has not been precise about what kind of work requirements he would demand, suggesting that he might be willing to narrow the scope of those included in the House Republican bill. Republicans have long pushed for more stringent work requirements, arguing that they lift Americans out of poverty and increasethe labor force participation rate, and there has been little in the way of bipartisan consensus on the issue since President Bill Clintons welfare overhaul.

While no agreements have been reached in the current round of debt talks, work requirements are among the issues negotiators on both sides have agreed to discuss, which also include capping federal spending, clawing back unspent funds allocated to address the coronavirus pandemic and loosening restrictions on domestic energy projects.

The bill House Republicans passed in April would make able-bodied adults without dependents who receive food benefits subject to work requirements until they are 55 years old, raising the current age from 49. It would require Medicaid recipients between the ages of 19 and 55 who are able-bodied and do not have dependents to either work, engage in community service or participate in a work-training program for at least 80 hours per month to remain eligible for benefits.

Liberal Democrat dismiss the idea as draconian.

Its absurd to come up with a proposal that will result in children being thrown off of child care, off of health care, be devastating to elderly people, said Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont. We cannot be blackmailed into balancing the budget on the backs of the most vulnerable and leaving the most affluent alone.

Instead, progressives have increasingly rallied around the idea that Mr. Biden should invoke the 14th Amendment, which says that the validity of the United States public debt shall not be questioned, to continue issuing new debt to pay bondholders, Social Security recipients, government employees and others even if Congress fails to extend the governments borrowing authority when the limit is reached.

A group of 11 senators led by Mr. Sanders wrote to Mr. Biden on Thursday urging him to prepare to exercise your authority under the 14th Amendment.

Republicans unwillingness to consider one penny in new revenue from the wealthy and large corporations, they wrote,along with their diminishment of the disastrous consequences of default, have made it seemingly impossible to enact a bipartisan budget deal at this time.

That would amount to a constitutional challenge to the existence of the debt limit, arguing that language in the 14th Amendment overrides the statutory borrowing limit, which currently caps federal debt at $31.4 trillion and requires congressional approval to raise or lift.

If members of his hard-right flank balk at voting for a deal he negotiates, Mr. McCarthy would need Democratic votes to pass the bill in the House.

Russell T. Vought, the former Trump administration budget director who now leads the far-right Center for Renewing America and has become a guru for Freedom Caucus lawmakers, has begun to show signs of unease with the talks. Any deal that tosses the Houses first year cut to 22 spending levels ($150 billion cut to nondefense spending) is unacceptable, he wrote on Twitter.

Democrats, too, threw cold water on the negotiations, saying their side should not compromise given that Republicans would need their votes to pass any final compromise.

McCarthy has nowhere near the votes for a deal and therefore cannot negotiate debt ceiling, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter. You need 218 votes. GOP has maybe ~150. They will need anywhere from 50-100 House Dems to pass anything.

Carl Hulse contributed reporting.

Originally posted here:
Liberals Balk at G.O.P. Push for Stricter Work Requirements in Debt Limit Talks - The New York Times

The federal Liberals 2019 election pledge to plant two billion trees in 10 years has barely sprouted.

A recent audit found the program has missed its targets to date, with less than 3 per cent of the promised total in the ground, and far too many are ending up in single-species tree farms, rather than future forests.

Tellingly, the endeavour is expected to create more greenhouse gas emissions than it captures until 2031.

The 2 Billion Trees program is an important commitment, and Ottawa needs to make adjustments to succeed. As auditor Jerry DeMarco, the federal Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, noted, there is no solution to climate change and biodiversity loss that does not involve our forests.

To plant a tree or two billion is an action for future generations. But like so many Liberal promises on climate action, ambition has not been matched by sufficient action. This initiative is supposed to use the power of nature to help fight climate change: New forests can absorb carbon, and they can enhance biodiversity. In urban areas, tree canopies can mitigate against extreme heat, improving human health.

The $3.2-billion program formally launched in 2021 and although it was expected that it would take time to line up land, seedlings and tree planters, even the modest targets for the first two years have not been reached.

The targets were not unreasonable: In the time since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his plan, British Columbia has planted about one billion trees, separate from the federal initiative. With the massive forest losses owing to beetle kill and wildfires, the provinces land base could easily accommodate far more. Before this seasons wildfires began, B.C. had about 2.7 million hectares waiting to be replanted half the size Nova Scotia, and close to the same as burned in 2017 and 2018, two of B.Cs worst-ever fire years.

The vast wilderness in B.C., waiting for replanting, is just one province. There are opportunities across the country.

The federal plan hinges mostly on cost-shared partnerships, and that has proved to be a vulnerability. To achieve its goals, Ottawa needs co-operation from provinces, territories, local governments, Indigenous communities, plus farmers and other private landowners. The key partnerships are with the provinces, and those have been slow to blossom. B.C. and Alberta have recently signed on. Ontario and Quebec are among the holdouts, a major risk to the programs success.

In the best-case scenario, the audit found, the program was only expected to reach 2.3 per cent of its overall goal after the first two years. And the delays will just compound. Canadian nurseries told the auditors that they would require up to two years of preparation before planting seeds, and one to eight more years before seedlings would be available for planting. They need commitments before ramping up.

Once in the ground, it takes another decade before the new trees start to deliver net benefits to Canadas greenhouse gas reduction ambitions. Ottawas targets, set at the beginning of the program, were to reduce emissions by up to two megatonnes annually by 2030. Since then, Natural Resources Canada has concluded the program would be a net greenhouse gas source until 2031, because of initial emissions caused by site preparation and planting activities. The goal by 2050 is to cut emissions by 12 MT a year 1.8 per cent of Canadas current level of 670 MT.

Since nature can be capricious, the audit called for more consistent monitoring to be sure that seedlings are thriving after planting.

Finally, plantations of a single species of tree are handy for the forest industry if the intent is to cut the trees down in the future. But one of the goals of this program is to preserve and protect biodiversity, and that means Canada needs to be more thoughtful about what it is planting.

A report by the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada, released in March, warned that almost one in four tree species in Canada is now at risk. The threats include pests and diseases, land development, and the growing impacts of climate change. This only underscores the urgency to get this program right.

This week, much of Western Canada is facing extreme wildfire hazards, with smoke from numerous out of control fires choking the skies in Calgary and thousands evacuated from their homes. There is work to be do. Ottawa needs to motivate the provinces to start putting shovels in the ground.

The Decibel: The missing two billion trees Trudeau promised

Tree-planting drones seed the dangerous places where human planters cant tread

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Globe editorial: The Liberals promised two billion trees by 2030. Only 2 per cent have been planted. What's going ... - The Globe and Mail