Tag: White House
Why Won’t Biden End the Filibuster?
For all the passionate words President Joe Biden delivered in defense of voting rights in his speech yesterday, it was the one word he never mentioned that provoked the strongest response from civil-rights advocates: filibuster.
Nowhere in his remarks did Biden utter what may go down as the political word of the year. The Senate procedure known as the filibuster now stands as the insuperable obstacle to the new federal voting-rights legislation that represents Democrats’ best chance to counter
What Does Infrastructure Mean? – The Atlantic
On March 31, President Joe Biden unveiled a $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan that he lauded as “a once-in-a-generation investment.” The package recalled the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s and the public investments in the space race in the ’60s. However, this program is distinguished from those earlier ones not only by its price tag but in its unprecedented scope. Over the past three months, as Congress has debated Biden’s plan, three key questions have emerged:
How Democrats Lost the Courts—And Plan to Win Them Back
Every political coalition likes to talk about how its opponents are more organized, more ruthless, and better funded. As progressives plot their response to Donald Trump’s mostly successful project to remake the federal courts, they are reviewing the times they’ve been outworked, outfought, and outsmarted on judicial nominations. One not-so-familiar name jumps out: Before Merrick Garland’s stint in purgatory, before Brett Kavanaugh’s furious denial of assault allegations, before Amy Coney Barrett’s eleventh-hour confirmation, there was Goodwin Liu.
In 2010, Democrats
The Irony of Being Undocumented
The last time a Democrat lived in the White House, I was nearly detained outside of its gates. It should have been obvious to me, an undocumented immigrant, that giving my blank passport to a Secret Service agent could get me in trouble.
But I, along with a classmate, had been asked to be there for a meeting about college access hosted by first lady Michelle Obama’s higher-education initiative, and my security form had cleared the night before. And
There’s No Good Way to Protect the Presidency Anymore
When President Joe Biden announced in the weeks before his inauguration that he was committed to reestablishing an independent Justice Department, he didn’t say that it was going to be easy. During the first few months of Attorney General Merrick Garland’s tenure, the department has sparked ire among its critics on the left—and prompted annoyed statements from the White House—by taking a series of positions that seem, to some, uncomfortably close to the aggressive approaches staked out by the Trump
How Barr Finally Turned on Trump
Donald Trump is a man consumed with grievance against people he believes have betrayed him, but few betrayals have enraged him more than what his attorney general did to him. To Trump, the unkindest cut of all was when William Barr stepped forward and declared that there had been no widespread fraud in the 2020 election, just as the president was trying to overturn Joe Biden’s victory by claiming that the election had been stolen.
In a series of