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As the end of pandemic relief for student debt looms, progressives are pushing the White House for clarity on its plans for cancelling some student debt.

The administration has delayed movement on student debt cancellation while waiting for the Education Departments review of presidential authority to cancel debt, which has dragged on for more than six months. With the pandemic pause on student debt payments set to expire in January, a group of progressive House members, led by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), made clear on Friday that theyre tired of waitingand are demanding that the administration release the Education Departments findings in the next two weeks.

The resumption of payments on federally-held student loans weighs heavily on tens of millions of borrowers, wrote 15 House members in a letter they will send to the White House on Friday, as reported by Politico. The time has come to release the memo and deliver on your promise to cancel student debt. Doing so will benefit every citizen and support our communities. With a single signature, you can improve the economy, create new jobs, transform the lives of 45 million Americans, narrow the racial wealth gap, and maintain the trust of voters.

In April, White House chief of staff Ron Klain told Axios that the administration would make a decision about the presidents authority to cancel debt within the next few weeksthey were simply waiting to receive the relevant memo. But there has been no public word about the contents of this memo, or about the decisions that would stem from it. In their letter, progressives argue that the executive branch is already using its legal authority to cancel debt toprovidepandemic relief from student loans, which includes a pause on interest accrual.

It would be an exercise in legal gymnastics to suggest that the President had the authority to cancel the interest on student debt on his first day, but lacks the authority to cancel the principal on student debt moving forward, they write.

This move is the latest in an ongoing disagreement between progressives and Biden about student debt cancellation. On the campaign trail, Biden promised to cancel up to $10,000 in student debt for most individuals, but a group of congressional Democrats, led by long-time student debt foe Sen. Elizabeth Warren, have been pushing the administration to cancel $50,000 instead.

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Progressives Just Wrote a Letter to Biden Insisting He Make a Decision on Student Debt Mother Jones - Mother Jones

That has not, though, stopped both factions of the party from claiming that they are the ones seeking to assure passage of his agenda.

The result is quite a turnabout.

We are fighting for the Build Back Better agenda, said Ms. Omar, employing Mr. Bidens preferred slogan which would have been shocking at this time two years ago, when she rallied early to Mr. Sanderss candidacy.

Throughout 2019 and in the first months of 2020, Mr. Biden was an object of scorn from the left. He was too old, too moderate and an obviously bad fit for an increasingly young, diverse and progressive party, they said, often mocking him in harsh terms.

Mr. Biden believed liberals were the ones out of step with the Democratic center of gravity. And he effectively proved it by assembling a multiracial coalition that was animated by defeating Mr. Trump more than by any bold policy agenda.

Yet because his primary had largely centered on ousting Mr. Trump and unifying the country, he had little in the way of firm policy plans. And in making peace with progressives after he secured the nomination, he adopted a number of their ideas.

That has allowed left-wing Democrats to say, with wide smiles, that they are only trying to fulfill Mr. Bidens vision. The question now is whether his attempt to pass both bills will pay off or if his decision to not push for quick passage of the infrastructure bill will leave him with a protracted standoff, or nothing at all.

Whats certain, however, is that after Mr. Bidens all-things-to-all-people campaign, he has committed himself to many of the policies that his liberal critics were skeptical he would embrace.

For all of the progressives who kept telling me there was no difference between Joe Biden and Mike Bloomberg, said Representative Brendan Boyle, an early Biden supporter from Philadelphia, where Biden has come down in this internal debate shows how absurd that claim always was.

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Biden's Agenda in Doubt as He Aids Progressives in Fight With Moderates - The New York Times

Martin Bentsen

Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal has been all over TV trying to look reasonable with her ingratiating smile and syrupy references to the lefts interest in negotiations. At issue is the Democrats final number on its social spending bill.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was playing the sleazy salesman, inflating his original price to offer a discount. This took the form of noting that his $3.5 trillion figure was a markdown from the $6 trillion he previously wanted.

New York Rep. Mondaire Jones, meanwhile, says he has a problem with people applying the term moderate to Democrats not on board with the lefts social spending goals. He apparently thinks that progressives threatening to torpedo the wildly popular infrastructure bill if their demands arent met should henceforth be called the moderates.

What is it about the left that constantly wants to police language? It would seem part of an unconvincing charm offensive in a party whose majority increasingly resents the lefts serial extortion demands often delivered in words that hurt the very Democrats who have given them the ability to influence anything.

That ability shrunk in the 2020 election, as an electorate that preferred President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes also punished several House Democrats who held hard-won seats in purple districts.

Much of the blame goes to the far lefts incontinent radical talk about defunding the police. Jayapal, for one, said she would redirect law enforcement funding to other community programs. Translation: Take money from police. This was propitiously timed during a spike in crime rates. Public safety had become a concern among Americans of all races, but the left-wing gentry had posturing to do.

All this created a politically stupid diversion from calls to reform law enforcement practices, a response to serious incidents of abusive policing. Democrat Max Rose from Staten Island had voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, as did other swing-district Democrats, such as Abby Finkenauer of northeast Iowa and Anthony Brindisi from upstate New York. Rose, Finkenauer and Brindisi all lost in November. (Finkenauer is now running in Iowa for the Senate.)

A few months before the 2020 presidential election, while the Democratic primaries were still going on, 60 Minutes did a feature in which Sanders renewed past praise of Fidel Castro for his literacy program and for expanding health care. The former Cuban dictator also tortured and murdered dissidents, it was pointed out.

Pressed on the matter, Sanders said he didnt approve of the torture part, but that wasnt enough to save Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. She lost her Miami-area district, home to many Cuban Americans.

The left can complain all it wants about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and his insistence that the price for the social spending come down. But he and (the incomprehensible) Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have so much power, as Biden has noted, because the Senate is evenly divided. Democrats might have held more Senate seats were it not for the lefts habit of scaring moderate voters.

Manchin did offer to accept $1.5 trillion in increased social spending. That is not a small sum, and perhaps hed go higher. The left indicates it may go lower, but its already weakened the Democrats reputation as the party that can govern. It doesnt understand or care that the future of the country is also at stake as leaders of the opposite party work to destabilize democratic institutions.

The left is a minority within the Democratic Party. Its champions lost recent primaries in New York, Virginia, Louisiana and Ohio. The radical fringe seems larger than it is because it gets media attention, especially when it flames other Democrats. Only Democratic voters can exact a price for sabotaging the team.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

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Harrop: So-called progressives vs. the Democratic party - Daily Herald

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to be nearing its breaking point with Sen.Kyrsten Sinema.

Over the weekend, members of the nonprofit Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA,followed Sinema, D-Ariz., into abathroom at Arizona State University.

Activists recorded and shouted their grievances at her for not supporting more accommodating immigration reforms.

Progressives' frustration with Sinema goes beyond Arizona voters. A Saturday Night Live skit portrayed her as the senator derailing legislation central to the Biden administration,including the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure package.

Sinema has said that is too expensive for her vote, but hasnt said what she would support.

In this week'sepisode of The Gaggle, an Arizona politics podcast,hosts Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Ronald J. Hansenspeakwith Emily Kirkland, executive director of Progress Arizona, a progressive community nonprofit.She's breaking down why the left is angry with Sinema and what they're doing about it.

The best way to listen is to subscribe to The Gaggle on your favorite podcast app, but you also can stream the full episode below.

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Why are progressives fed up with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema? The Gaggle finds out - The Arizona Republic

Its now clear that the Biden administration, House and Senate progressives, and the handful of conservative Democratic spoilers are vectoring in on a deal. Build Back Better will be boiled down to something in the $2 to $2.5 trillion range.

Progressives can comfort themselves that once the infighting is behind us, and we can get past the echo-chamber stories of a failed presidency, Biden can get on with the business of governing. His approval ratings can go back up, and we can come back for more money in the FY2023 budget reconciliation next fall.

But hold on, the devil is in the fine print.

More from Robert Kuttner

For starters, the original White House plan also included over a trillion dollars in refundable tax credits, notably an extension of the Child Tax Credit, as well as expanded credits for child care and a more generous EITC. If these tax expenditures are included in a $2 trillion total, then the entire spending part of the package is reduced to not much more than the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has only about $600 billion in genuine new public investment.

And dont forget, these are ten-year totals. Two hundred billion a year is pretty puny, given the kinds of transformations the economy needs. The $60 billion a year in the bipartisan bill is business as usual.

One ray of hope is in the dynamic economic gains produced by these outlays. The White House has argued, correctly in my view, that many if not most of these social and economic investments will enhance productivity and GDP, thus reducing their net budgetary impact. And that could produce a consensus on a larger bottom line. Joe Manchin has said he is sympathetic to this kind of budgeting.

Seemingly, Manchin is sympathetic to higher taxes on rich people, while his fellow spoiler, Kyrsten Sinema, is not. Here again, using public investments to increase economic output allows offsets to the total budgetary impact, and Sinema could be sympathetic to that. Recognizing these gains is as close as economics gets to the proverbial free lunch.

The package would be even worse without the insistence of House progressives that they will compromise only so much. The Child Tax Credit and the other tax subsidies for working families should not be counted as part of the spending. This is no time for further retreat.

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Are Progressives About to Get Rolled Again? - The American Prospect