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The beefed-up child tax credit from President Joe Biden's stimulus law has been touted by Democrats as a key measure designed to slash child poverty in half. They aim to make it permanent, a step that would represent a major expansion of the American social safety net.

The one-year measure authorized in mid-March is set to provide a $3,600-per-child benefit to parents with children aged 5 and under, issued through "periodic payments." It will be $3,000 for each child between 6 and 17. Democrats want to enable the option of a monthly check and they've been touting that, too.

Biden said on Wednesday at the White House that a family with two children under the age of 6 would "get $500 a month mailed to you by the federal government. That's life-changing."

That last part could be a hurdle, as the Internal Revenue Service simply may not be able to meet a monthly schedule of payments.

Congress is giving the IRS three-and-a-half months to stand up the sweeping new initiative, set to start July 1. But this comes in the middle of one of the most daunting tax seasons in its history, as the agency grapples with a large backlog of at least 12 million tax returns. It's such a big task that the IRS recently extended the tax-filing deadline by a month from April 15 to May 17 for individuals.

IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig cited thissignificant strain at a recent House committee hearing when he warned of potential delays in distributing the child tax credit benefit by July. The readiness of the IRS to carry this out poses a major challenge to Democrats' goal of getting payments out the door to 66 million American kids every month.

"I would not be surprised to see payments start in July, but I would also not be surprised see this turn into a quarterly benefit where the first payments came in October and the second payment in December," Elaine Maag, a tax expert at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center, told Insider.

Maag said carrying it out this year is "lightning-fast" and the IRS is well known to use old computer systems and databases.

Other experts also noted the brief time-frame the IRS was given to devise a program from the ground up, another burden on a historically underfunded organization already facing several sets of problems this tax season.

"Setting up a program in three months is not something that's typically done and any agency would have had challenges," Samantha Jacoby, a senior tax analyst at the liberal-leaning Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, said in an interview.

The original law underpinning the benefit, known as the American Family Act, gave Treasury and the IRS a year to set up a monthly benefit system. Some Democrats worry about any comparisons to the mismanaged rollout of another signature expansion of the safety net: the Affordable Care Act, specifically the healthcare.gov website.

H&R Block CEO Jeffrey Jones, speaking to Insider earlier in March at the beginning of tax season, said the IRS hadn't made any decisions yet on how to actually execute the changes involved with the child tax credit. Calling it "one of the most underappreciated civil servants in the country," he said the agency's underfunding problems are well documented and even in a normal year, "their system gets taxed," or overwhelmed.

The IRS faces a hectic spring. Maag said on top of distributing stimulus payments, it is also implementing tax forgiveness for unemployed workers and attempting to issue refunds for people who filed early.

"The child tax credit is not first in line right now and the IRS has limited staff that they can devote to any problem," she said. "It is problematic that they have a lot of things to do and limited resources to do it with."

Rettig also told House Ways and Means lawmakers the decision to prolong tax season by a month would cut into the ability of its employees to develop a new online portal. That's supposed to be the space for Americans to share up-to-date information about their income and number of children.

"We're focused on trying to get these payments out to people in a meaningful manner, in a meaningful time frame," he said.

Democrats provided the IRS with nearly $2 billion in extra funding to bring on more personnel and upgrade aging systems, after a decade of Republican-led budget cuts.

Still, Democrats involved with the measure say they'll work with the IRS in the months ahead. Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut said she was confident the IRS would be successful. She cited the additional money for the organization and "the will to get these payments out monthly."

"We will work through issues as they arise and ensure the IRS has the tools they need to make these payments to everyone who has qualifying children," the senior Democratsaid in a statement to Insider.

Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington, another architect of the child benefit, echoed DeLauro.

"I'll still continue to work with them as they implement this program because those resources are so important to families right now and we want to make sure that it is done well from the get-go," she said in an interview.

Experts say the success of the program hinges on the capacity of the federal government to issue payments to people who don't typically pay taxes because they don't earn enough income to be required to file.

"The IRS' outreach efforts are going to be really important trying to get new populations of people into the tax system," Jacoby said.

Lawmakers are eager to avoid problems that could overshadow the early rollout of a highly-touted Democratic program. They want to dodge comparisons to the bungled unveiling of healthcare.gov, a website created under President Barack Obama to allow people to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act. Many struggled to obtain coverage for weeks.

"Everyone wants to avoid any potential healthcare.gov 2.0.," a House Democratic aide familiar with ongoing discussions told Insider. "Looking at the healthcare.gov example is a great justification for making sure we get this right and making sure the IRS is thoughtful that they really kick the tires on this and they are thoughtful in implementing so it's easy to use and families aren't confused."

Regardless, people are likely to receive a substantial sum of money this year, though it may not be through monthly installments as Democrats originally envisioned.

"This was always going to be hard," Jacoby said. "Whether it's monthly or quarterly or something else, People are still going to get a lot of money they need in 2021 even if there's administrative hiccups along the way."

The White House did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment.

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Democrats are touting monthly checks for parents in the stimulus, but they may not be monthly after all - Business Insider

Now heres some lawyering that may turn out to be too clever by half.

Democratic litigator Marc Elias on Monday submitted his latest brief on behalf of defeated congressional candidate Rita Hart. He wants the House of Representatives to overturn the election in Iowas 2nd district, which Ms. Hart lost by six votes to GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks. But rather than asserting that if state election law is strictly followed his client would win, Mr. Elias tells House Democrats that they may need to bend the law to reach their desired outcome.

His brief responds to questions from the Committee on House Administration. In the first response, on procedures the committee should use in adjudicating the election challenge, Mr. Elias says the Committee is certainly not bound to follow state law. The quote is from a 1985 case when the House overturned an Indiana election to seat the Democrat.

That sentence wasnt a slip. Mr. Elias adds that when voter intent can be determined but a ballot is not, for one reason or another, in strict conformity with state law, it should be counted. He urges the Committee to exercise its discretion to depart from Iowa law, and adopt counting rules that disenfranchise the smallest possible number of voters.

Mr. Elias is right as a constitutional matter that each house of Congress has sweeping authority to judge its Members elections. But the explicit suggestion that state law be discarded gives the political game away.

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Democrats Give Their Iowa Game Away - The Wall Street Journal

In the aftermath of last weeks mass shooting in Georgia that killed eight people, political leaders and the Asian American community are grieving and calling for justice.

Let me start off by saying this: The role of an activist is not the same as the role of a politician. That has been true of grassroots campaigns and activists campaigns since the beginning of time. It was true during the civil rights movement, said Guy Cecil, chair of Priorities USA, during a recent briefing with reporters. Having said that, in the aggregate, when you look at the totality of the election, defund the police in the aggregate neither helped nor hurt the cause.

One analysis by a Democratic consultant, provided exclusively to POLITICO, measured the effectiveness of GOP attack ads on defunding the police. House candidates recently shared the report to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to a person familiar with their communications.

Matthew Weaver, an adviser for battleground Rep. Matt Cartwright (D-Pa.), said he conducted the study because he wanted to look at it in a very rigorous and statistical way, as opposed to via anecdotes, which is where a lot of the debate seems to be right now.

His findings: The GOP attack ads accusing Democrats of wanting to strip resources from cops were not any more powerful than other TV spots run by Republicans. On the other hand, Democratic ads that refuted the GOPs claims that they were looking to defund the police made a difference: Those candidates who aired such spots performed better than President Joe Biden by 1.5 percentage points for every 1,000 gross ratings points a measure of advertising impact run.

The lesson, Weaver said, is that not addressing certain false allegations explicitly and head-on is a strategic error that many cannot afford to make. But only a quarter of House Democratic candidates in the most contested races countered the GOPs blitz on broadcast television, he said.

The DCCC may be part of the reason why. During the 2020 election, some at the committee advised Cartwright not to reply on TV because candidates should never repeat a negative, said a person close to the conversations. With the help of a former local police chief who backed him up, Cartwright ultimately shot down the defund idea in ads anyway, and he won his competitive district by nearly four points; Biden lost it by more than four.

The DCCC is now under new leadership: New York Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney became chair after the election. Helen Kalla, a spokesperson for the DCCC, did not respond directly to questions about the discussions with Cartwright or where it stands now on the issue.

As for its preparations for attacks over defunding the police in the future, she said, We expect that Republicans will continue spreading lies and misinformation about our candidates and their positions, and Democrats will be ready to combat those Republican lies and make clear to voters where they stand.

Cartwright, an attorney by trade, said that he decided to respond to his opponents negative ads because he decided they were a kill shot an attack, which if believed by the decision-maker, either a jury or, in politics, the voter, will end your chance of success. He called Weavers analysis fascinating.

Cartwright confirmed that there were voices at the DCCC who were giving the archetypal when youre responding, youre losing advice. But once he explained, for instance, the large number of lawn signs in his district expressing support for police including in yards without any campaign signs at all others at the committee supported his efforts to push back.

Once they got the picture, Cartwright said, "they were all in."

Some of Priorities USAs findings were similar to Weavers. During a Zoom briefing with reporters last week, Cecil said the net effect of Republican attack ads over defunding the police was neither negative nor positive.

Certainly there are people that respond negatively to defund the police. There are people that respond in our surveys by the way, of all races, all income brackets, that respond negatively to defund the police, he said. What's also true is that the activism and the energy and the attention that was brought to this issue, without a doubt, led to more votes, and more voters coming into the fold for the first time.

Another item from Priorities USAs research demonstrates how potent Democrats response to this issue and racial justice could be in the midterms: Asked about their decision to go to the polls, 91 percent of new Biden voters said "they wanted someone that would address racism and stand up for racial justice, said Cecil.

Many activists say they are not arguing for the wholesale elimination of police funding but rather the reallocation of resources.

There is another effort underway that will likely play a major role in influencing the debate around the net political effects of defund: a Democratic post-mortem being done with the help of the CBC, CHC, CPC and other caucus groups.

The partnership of centrist and liberal groups examining the impact of the call to remove funding from the police, along with other hot-button issues such as socialism and the Green New Deal, includes Third Way, Collective PAC, Latino Victory Fund and End Citizens United. No conclusions from the report have been made yet, and it will be finished around the end of May, said Matt Bennett, a co-founder of Third Way.

Given the fact that the study is being aided by both moderates and progressives, as well as powerful institutional players such as the CBC, its findings could go in multiple directions and will likely have a big impact.

At the same time, Black Lives Matter activists are discussing the possibility of holding a press conference or making some other kind of formal response to moderates claims, said Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party and a leader in the Movement for Black Lives coalition. They considered the option last year but deprioritized it because they were busy in the aftermath of former President Donald Trumps efforts to overturn the election as well as the insurrection at the Capitol, he said.

I do think that there is a conversation that needs to happen that puts Democrats on notice around what our movement would consider harmful to our efforts in their efforts to push back on these attacks, he said. If they buttress themselves with law enforcement validators and tried to prove that they were more law-and-order than Republicans, then what you're doing is you're ceding and youre re-ascribing these far-right myths that make it harder for Democrats and harder for people in general to be able to critique and challenge what is by most measures a failing criminal legal system.

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A conversation that needs to happen: Democrats agonize over defund the police fallout - POLITICO

I am a pediatrician. It is my job to respond to young peoples needs. I listen and see them as the experts of their own lives. But even within medicine, not everyone does this, and the needs of Black people are systematically ignored. The physical pain that Black people experience is both under-recognized and undertreated, and young people are no exception. In a study of appendicitis management in emergency departments, for instance, Black children were less likely to receive the appropriate pain medication despite reporting the same pain scores as white children.

Emotional pain is even less visible and, therefore, harder to recognize. Adults caring for young people need to trust their expressions of anxiety or feeling unsafe and protect them from harm. But when Black students demand an end to ongoing trauma from police, the adults charged with protecting them often dismiss their voices. Black and brown youth activists have called for police-free schools, citing the disproportionate harm to Black and brown students, including extreme punishment for minor offenses, sexual harassment, and anxiety in the presence of policeall of which is supported by research.

In the 2015-16 school year, Black high school students nationwide made up 31 percent of arrests and referrals to law enforcement but only 15 percent of school enrollment. A 2018 Texas-based study found that increasing the numbers of school resource officers led to a decline in high school graduation and college-enrollment rates for all students. An investigation of the Chicago public schools in 2017 found that school resource officers had little oversight, accountability, or training and put Black students at higher risk of incarceration. As a pediatrician, I aim to see every child thrive by providing the resources they need to succeed within their context. The school-to-prison pipeline has threatened the futures of young Black and brown people for decades, and school resource officers contribute to this crisis.

The killing of George Floyd and the protests that followed brought national attention to the police-free school campaign. A few cities across the country, including Minneapolis; Oakland, Calif.; and Portland, Ore.; ended their district contracts with school resource officers. And the debates continue in districts throughout the country. As I see it, the continuance of school resource officer programs, despite their demonstrated and verbalized harms to Black students, reflects a much larger and problematic issue by extension: as a nation, we have been conditioned to distrust Black young people.

Black children are not given the same grace as white children because adults, including police officers, tend to see them as more mature than they are. According to one study, Black children as young as 5 to 10 years old are no longer viewed as innocent or worthy of protection, but rather as bad.

But they are not bad. Tamir Rice was playing with a toy gun, an age-appropriate activity, when he was killed by police at the age of 12. Trayvon Martin was 17, wearing a hoodie on his walk home, when, unprovoked, George Zimmerman, a volunteer neighborhood-watch coordinator, approached and then killed him. We see this pattern of criminalization also in public schools. In 2020, 17-year-old Caleb Reed shared his experience of being arrested and held for six hours by a school resource officer. His crime? He left his ID card inside the gym when he stepped outside of a school sporting event. I cant watch the news or scroll through social media without seeing videos of police officers slamming students to the ground. These assaults by police officers in school are tracked on an #AssaultAt map by the Alliance for Educational Justices initiative, We Came to Learn. I counted a total of 12 incidents nationally in 2019. I worry that a return to school with resource officers present will once again make Black students disproportionately vulnerable to arrest.

We need to believe Black children. Believe their hurt. Believe in their innocence. Believe that they deserve to learn from their mistakes without a criminal record. And not hold them to a different standard from their white peers.

In Chicago, where I live, Black students have four times as many police interactions in school as white students. The extent of their arrests and feelings of unsafety has been alarming. As both a physician and Black woman, I felt compelled to get involved, to demonstrate with actions and not just words, that Black lives matter.

During the last year, I leveraged the expertise of my fellow physicians to amplify the voices of Chicagos young people. I texted friends who readily joined the cause. As physicians for police-free schools, we showed up wherever there were conversations: social media, protests, City Council meetings, even one-on-one meetings with school board members. We strategized with youth-serving community organizations, organized presentations for our peers, and co-led a webinar for hundreds of health-care providers in Illinois. Chicagos board of education voted against ending the school resource officer program by only one vote. Yet 17 schools voted to remove SROs, decreasing the districts contract expenditure by $18 million. Chicago public schools also introduced new reforms, such as implementation of school resource officer selection criteria, increased training, compliance monitoring, and research.

Although police may represent security for some, they do not signal or provide safety for Black young people. Their presence in schools as school resource officers amplifies those feelings of unsafety through continued discriminatory treatment on school grounds. To make learning environments truly safe for Black students, equip them with the resources that address the root causes of trauma and free them from the harm of overpolicing, we must invest in behavioral-health staffing and restorative-justice training. In 2019, the American Civil Liberties Union released an analysis of 2015-16 federal civil rights data showing that 31 percent of students nationwide attended schools that have school resource officers but no psychologist, nurse, counselor, and/or social worker. Black children, like all children, deserve to be seen, loved, and treated as children.

As we start to see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, we see more and more districts across the country discuss how to safely reopen their school buildings. But at this moment, lets not forget that COVID-19 isnt the only thing that threatens school safety. If we really want to make schools safe for Black children, we must remove school resource officers from campuses.

Until we do so, our work for school safety is not finished.

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We Ignore the Pain of Black Children (Opinion) - Education Week

By Shayna Gee

sgee23@mail.ccsf.edu

This years Womens History Month theme is We Keep Each Other Safe. The programming offers a series of 13 free remote events including multiple healthy relationship workshops with Project SURVIVE. The Womens and Gender Studies department, Womens Resource Center, Queer Resource Center, and Associated Students have also organized events.

Beginning February through April, the events embody what it means to keep each other safe. The series included a book event with author and artist Chanel Miller, an Anti-Imperialist Feminist Leadership event with combat veteran and activist Brittany DeBarros, a Workplace Rights Workshop with Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, and many more.

Project SURVIVE is City Colleges sexual violence prevention and healthy relationship promotion program that has been operating for more than 25 years. They train and pay peer educators on multi-layered topics.

In a recent event on healthy relationships, peer educators Hold, Diamund White, and Michael Rosenthal facilitated a Zoom workshop. The presenters jotted down community answers describing what healthy relationships look like surrounding a graphic of a heart with the text Healthy Relationships in the center.

The presenters also role-played a date scenario between two people who had differing power dynamics. The moderator took time to debrief the role-play, asking the presenters how they felt playing their character roles and addressing autonomy and accountability. Overall, the scenario taught what a healthy interaction includes.

Part of Project SURVIVEs philosophy states that, We can learn and share strategies to keep ourselves and each other safer, but rape is never a victims fault.

After the roleplay scenario, presenters and the audience brainstormed risk reduction strategies that can be used before and during a date. Project SURVIVE provided many resources for the audience including a healthy relationship handbook and a handout titled Protect Yourself and Your Friends. In addition, they have a club that meets every Monday where students can drop in, build community, and share space.

In a White House brief on March 17, the House of Representatives passed the expired reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), a law that protects domestic abuse and sexual violence victims, with a bipartisan vote of 244-172. The reauthorization of VAWA can aid funding for campus programs such as Project SURVIVE.

Project SURVIVEs commitment to social justice is united to Womens History Month, which celebrates all women, in which many historical as well as current movements have been led by women of color.

Womens History Month programming kicked off with an event honoring Marsha P. Johnson. Johnson was a prominent figure of the 1969 Stonewall riot which birthed the Gay Liberation Front against police and state repression. Johnsons activism and radical love for trans liberation and justice for people of color revolutionized the movement for the LGBTQ+ community.

The #MeToo movement was created by Tarana Burke, a Black woman in 2006 who wanted to empower marginalized women to reveal the magnitude of sexual harassment and assult. Although the movement has been popularized by white women and has since changed meanings, Burkes Myspace post opened dialogue for sexual assault survivors around the world.

Labor leader, civil rights activists, and co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) union, Dolores Huerta, organized for workers contracts while directing the first national boycott, the 1965 Delano grape strike.

Huerta attended the University of Pacifics San Joaquin Delta College, where she received an associate degree. Through the Dolores Huerta Foundation, Huerta continues to be a defining leader for immigrants, workers, and the womens rights movement.Patrisse Cullors, Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi are radical Black organizers who created #BlackLivesMatter. The project started in 2013 after Trayvon Martins killer, George Zimmerman was set free. Their project now has a global network that centers women, queer and trans people in leadership.

These women and their contributions have laid forth the continual strategic organizing we see today. Importantly, women around the world are leading the workforce as frontline workers during the pandemic. This March 2021 marks one year since San Francisco and the nation went into shelter-in-place.

The once invisible narrative of essential workers has brought to light how important food, agriculture, health care, janitorial, and many more essential service workers are to maintaining our everyday operations and care.

According to the national report from the Center of Economic and Policy Research, from 2014 to 2018, Women make up approximately 64% of frontline workers, despite making up half of all workers. In other reports including the Economic Policy Institute, this percent increased after 2018.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, women make up approxiately 76% of essential healthcare workers. The Mercury News reported a key finding from the National Nurses United, A third of registered nurses who have died of COVID-19 in the US are Filipino, despite Filipino nurses only making up 4% of the nursing population nationwide.

In addition, when examining intersecting identities, Immigrants are overrepresented in Building Cleaning Services and in many frontline occupationsabout one-in-six frontline workers, 17.3% are immigrants, the report said.

Many people are still home, enduring new challenges with heightened social and political uprisings, mostly through digital screens. Women, particularly immigrant women of color have always been and continue working on the frontlines of this pandemic. From cashiers to health care to social service workers, what does protection look like for women and marginalized communities and how can we keep each other safe?

For more information and the list of full events on Womens History Month, visit tinyurl.com/WHMccsf.

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Survival Beyond The Pandemic: Women's History Month The Guardsman - The Guardsman Online