It's Time to End the Filibuster

As the Biden Covid relief bill nears final passage - solely on the basis of Democrat votes - it is becoming obvious that congressional Republicans, especially the grim reaper of the Senate, Mitch McConnell (who has done immense harm to the nation), will do all they can to block passage of much needed legislation that has majority of public opinion support.  Why?  Two reasons, the first being they want Democrats to enter the 2022 mid-terms with little accomplished. The larger reason is that the GOP is terrified that Biden's big government programs will succeed and demonstrate to the American public that the GOP's opposition hurts average Americans and more government in their lives is a benefit, not a curse as stated by Ronald Reagan.  The main tool that Republicans will attempt to use is the outdated, Jim Crow era filibuster.  A piece in The Atlantic makes the case that the filibuster needs to be abolished so that a minority cannot exert tyranny over the majority.  Here are highlights:

Last week the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, a bill that would make voter registration automatic, end partisan gerrymandering, strengthen campaign-finance law, and bolster oversight of lobbyists. It’s the most sweeping package of democracy reforms in generations. Yet the mood among most democracy reformers was not giddy excitement but resigned dismay: Although H.R. 1 has passed the House, it remains in the pile of campaign promises—a higher minimum wage, an assault-weapons ban, comprehensive immigration reform, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, and more—that under current Senate rules need 60 votes or more to pass, an essentially insurmountable requirement in today’s deeply polarized, evenly split legislature.

It’s hardly surprising that a growing number of Democratic politicians now want to end the legislative filibuster entirely, or that Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and his fellow Republicans are rallying to its defense. What is surprising, however, is how few Americans know that we’ve eliminated it before: 130 years ago, after a debate that makes today’s seem placid by comparison, Republican lawmakers got rid of the filibuster—not in the Senate, but in the House of Representatives.

The procedural battle that took place more than a century ago holds an important lesson for lawmakers of both parties today: Ending the filibuster may be messy, but it won’t destroy a legislative body. In fact, in a polarized age, the only guaranteed cure for political dysfunction is majority rule.

Like the Senate filibuster, which was created when then–Vice President Aaron Burr accidentally removed a rule permitting a majority of the chamber to force a vote on a bill, the House filibuster was at heart a procedural loophole. . . . . Just as in the Senate presently, a minority of the House could kill a popular bill by denying it an up-or-down vote.

At the turn of the 20th century, partisan polarization was almost as bad as it is today, which meant that the assumption back then was the same as it is now: The minority party would use the filibuster to completely derail the majority’s legislative agenda.

What no one anticipated, however, was a legislator as devoted to getting rid of the filibuster as Speaker Thomas Brackett Reed. A 6-foot-3, 300-pound Civil War veteran who favored walrus mustaches and all-black attire, . . . . he became convinced that if a minority of lawmakers could kill a bill without allowing a vote on it, the House would become, in his words, “a tyranny.”

The filibuster’s defenders warned that the end of the filibuster would fundamentally change the House, and they were right. With partisan control of the chamber no longer threatened by obstruction, party leaders became far more influential. Speakers—not just Reed, but his successors as well—consolidated power at the expense of individual members.

The House also took a populist turn. When tabloid-fueled jingoism swept the country a few years later, America declared war on Spain. This likely would not have happened if anti-war lawmakers, Reed among them, had been able to deny their pro-war colleagues a quorum. It seems likely that eliminating the Senate filibuster today would have similar effects, consolidating power in the hands of the majority leader and making the chamber more susceptible to the fickleness of public opinion.

[I]t’s hard not to view the end of the House filibuster as anything but a success for democracy. The 51st Congress, expected to accomplish next to nothing, instead became one of the most productive in history. With full control of government, Republicans passed the Sherman Antitrust Act to rein in big business; established land-grant colleges for Black students in the South; expanded pensions for Civil War veterans and their families; laid the foundation for the National Parks Service; created the beginnings of the federal immigration system; granted statehood to the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, and Idaho; and much more.

[T]he existence of the House filibuster, once so crucial to the chamber, began its slide into obscurity. Today, the laws passed by the 51st Congress continue to shape American life. Yet the procedural debate that made those laws possible—and sent lawmakers running for the exits—is forgotten, even to many of the filibuster’s staunchest defenders today.

Perhaps this is the most important lesson a 130-year-old parliamentary battle holds for lawmakers in 2021: If we end the Senate filibuster, our descendants are unlikely to find themselves longing for its return. If anything, they’ll be surprised that such a bizarre and anti-democratic practice was allowed to hold back progress for so long.

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Concerns Grow Over the Super Heated Housing Market

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit a year ago many businesses closed, workers were laid off and economic uncertainty was widespread.  Amazingly, the real estate market took off like a rocket and many in the real estate industry had their best year ever despite the pandemic, thanks in no small part by the record low mortgage rates (I had my best year ever in 2020).  A piece in Politico looks at the still surging housing market and some concerns that the rising prices will price many, especially Millennials, out of homeownership which is one important way that families build wealth.  Due to far stronger mortgage loan underwriting requirements it would seem that a repeat of the 2008 housing market collapse is not in the offing.   Thus, the predictions for the coming year are that housing will remain strong.  Here are article excerpts:

The booming housing market helped stave off economic collapse in 2020. But soaring prices are starting to worry policymakers, who fear the market could lock a generation of would-be buyers out of homeownership.

Home prices in January — typically a slow month for the market — were up 14 percent over the same month the previous year, while sales jumped 24 percent, despite an unemployment rate that was almost twice as high. Demand for existing homes is so strong that the average residence is on the market for just three weeks, and inventory is at a record low after seeing its steepest drop last year since the data was first tracked in 1999.

It all threatens to freeze broad swaths of the population out of the market, leaving millions of Americans in a less secure financial position, widening the racial wealth gap and forcing millennials, already lagging previous generations in building wealth and forming families, to fall even further behind.

“The dream of homeownership is out of reach for so many working people,” said Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio). “Rising home prices and flat wages means that many families, especially families of color, may never be able to afford their first home.”

Brown, who insists on calling his panel the “Senate Banking and Housing Committee," vowed that these issues will be a top priority in the months ahead as the country struggles to recover from the pandemic-induced recession. Among other things, he said he plans to work with the Biden administration to address the rising cost of housing and expand access to homeownership “so that more families can rent and own homes in inclusive communities.”

The last time the U.S. saw such skyrocketing home prices, the ensuing crash brought down the global economy. Most industry analysts say the current boom is not a “bubble” akin to that frenzy of more than a decade ago, which led to the financial crisis.

Still, the current pace of home price appreciation is unsustainable, they say. “I am worried that the price run-up is going to choke off first-time buyers,” said Lawrence Yun, chief economist for the National Association of Realtors. “This simply cannot continue.”

For one thing, the crisis is unusually lopsided: White-collar employees who can work remotely have for the most part emerged unscathed, with many actually adding to their savings while reaping the benefits of higher stock prices. Historically low mortgage rates — a result of the Federal Reserve’s easy-money policy response to the crisis — nudged some of those buyers off the fence to buy a first or second home, according to analysts.

Meanwhile, a glut of millennials — the largest generational cohort in the country consisting of those born from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s — is reaching the prime age for buying first homes, and regional data suggests the pandemic spurred plenty of them to pick up stakes and head for the suburbs.

But there are simply not enough houses to meet the demographic demand, driving up the price of those houses that are for sale and potentially delaying many other millennials’ ability to become homeowners, the primary way Americans build wealth.

Another concern is that a potential spike in mortgage rates as the economy recovers could leave borrowers who rushed to buy when rates were low — and in some cases paid above asking price, given fierce competition for a limited supply of homes — in the lurch. And a sudden drop in home prices would hit sellers who have held off on listing their homes during the pandemic.

At first blush, market activity appears reminiscent of the boom before the 2008 credit crisis. Mortgage balances grew by $182 billion in the fourth quarter of 2020, the biggest quarterly uptick since 2007, according to the Federal Reserve’s latest report on household debt. More mortgages were originated in the fourth quarter of last year than in any single quarter since the Fed started tracking it in 2000, surpassing the previous high from 2003.

But the loans being made today are much stronger than they were then: 71 percent of originations in the fourth quarter of 2020 went to borrowers with credit scores above 760, considered a very strong number, compared with 31 percent of mortgages going to such creditworthy borrowers in the third quarter of 2003.

And unlike in the early 2000s, when there were too many homes, housing production has been low for years, plagued by a shortage of skilled labor and rising costs of raw materials. Homebuilders expect construction of single-family homes to pick up this year after freezing at the start of the Covid crisis, but lumber prices remain a major hurdle.

The price of lumber is up about 180 percent since April — an increase that works out to about $24,000 being added to the price of the average home, according to the National Association of Home Builders.

“I think we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to migration,” said Daryl Fairweather, chief economist at Redfin. “There are going to be more people who want to move once they get more clarity on what post-pandemic life will look like.”

Those shifts — what Zillow economist Matthew Speakman called “the great reshuffling” — are taking place against a backdrop of over 70 million millennials reaching peak home-buying years.

“There’s just a huge glut of young adults in the country now that wasn’t there a decade ago,” Speakman said. “The force driving the demand forward is here to stay and should provide more support in the year to come even as the pandemic craziness calms.”

If there aren’t enough homes to meet that demand, though, the largest generation in the country won’t be able to start building equity, which will in turn delay other financial decisions. Despite making up over a third of the workforce, millennials own less than 6 percent of all U.S. wealth, according to Federal Reserve data.

And Black and Latino Americans — who are twice as likely to rent as whites and more than twice as likely to report being behind on housing payments during the pandemic — could see the barriers to homeownership increase in the wake of the crisis. Renters behind on payments will face hits to their credit scores and potential eviction once the crisis passes — making it more difficult to rent their next home and more expensive to eventually buy one.

Most analysts expect home prices to continue to increase this year, even as gradually rising mortgage rates temper demand a little bit. But it could be years before the supply of housing can meet demand. In the meantime, millions of people will find themselves priced out.

Tuesday Male Beauty

 

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Will Republicans Torpedo the Immunization Push?

One of the key attributes of what nowadays passes for "conservativism" is selfishness and greed, but particularly selfishness. This selfishness runs from refusing to wear a mask and thus endangering others, to trampling on the rights of others to now a refusal to get the Coovid-19 vaccine. It goes without saying that much of this selfishness is centered in the Republican Party and its base of deplorables. The problem is especially pronounced among rural whites.  And if enough Americans are not vaccinated, the ability to reach "herd immunity" may not occur.  All thanks to a false sense of "liberty" and "freedom" that cares nothing for others.  A piece in Politico looks at the coming problem of the vaccine refusers. Here are highlights:

The Biden administration can finally ship large quantities of coronavirus shots into the American heartland, where health officials are encountering a reservoir of vaccine skepticism among rural Americans who’ve adopted former President Donald Trump’s denial of a virus battering their communities.

If a critical mass of people don’t accept Covid-19 vaccines, the country won’t achieve “herd immunity.” When there was just a trickle of vaccines, hesitancy didn’t matter as much because plenty of people were clamoring for the scarce shots. Now that the supply is ramping up, the challenge is to overcome fear, distrust and outright antagonism to the new vaccines shared by some groups in large numbers. That’s the path to save lives, slow the emergence of new virus variants, end the stress on the health care system and restore the economy.

Because the pandemic hit Black and brown communities so hard — at the same time as a broad and disruptive American awakening over race — much of the focus has been on getting the shots to minority communities and addressing their long distrust of a health care system that at times has ignored and abused them.

But polls have found that some of the deepest opposition to vaccines is among rural whites and Republicans, including some who say the risk of Covid-19 has been exaggerated. One coalition of health groups and nonprofits has even engaged a prominent GOP pollster and wordsmith to help them break through with pro-vaccine messages.

But the damage from months of mixed messaging about the virus’s severity, whether from Trump world or social media, has been done, say public health experts and health care workers administering shots in rural America.

Of course, rural America isn’t monolithic — it isn’t all white, Republican and poor. It’s found in pockets of the bluest states, as well as vast stretches of the red ones. But reaching the most vaccine skeptical in those communities — which polls regularly find are white, Republican and under 50 — will be a messaging challenge that helps determine the pandemic’s trajectory in the coming weeks and months.

Not all vaccine fears are identical. People who are worried about side effects for instance — a common theme — can be reassured, and there are already signs that such apprehension is dissipating as they watch friends and family get vaccinated without injury. But people who just don’t believe that the virus is a threat, or who viscerally oppose all vaccines, are a lot tougher. Others may be inclined to get vaccinated but aren’t willing to travel long distances for it.

“Vaccine hesitancy comes in a whole lot of different flavors,” said Alabama’s top health official, Scott Harris. His team is currently focused on the historically underserved rural “Black Belt” counties in southern Alabama but is planning a broader multi-media campaign aimed at building confidence in all demographic groups.

Given the high degree of hesitancy among Republicans and rural Americans, a coalition of health groups and foundations turned to Frank Luntz, a prominent GOP pollster and message crafter. He found that lecturing, shaming or even appealing to abstract notions of doing what’s right doesn’t change minds. What resonated is emphasizing how vaccines can make people and their loved ones safe — and how it can help life return to normal.

Kaiser’s most recent survey last month detected an encouraging shift out of the “wait and see” group. Those reporting they were “eager” to get vaccinated had risen to 55 percent, up from 34 percent from December.

But there was scant movement among the hard-line “no” groups. For instance, the share of Republicans who said they would not get a shot under any circumstances, or only if forced to for work, dipped ever so slightly, from 24 percent to 22.

Idiocy and insanity now define the right.

Final Sunday Male Beauty

 

Biden Is Rolling Back the Culture War

As noted in the prior post, Donald Trump sought to inflame the so-called culture war as part of his effort to maintain the loyalty of morally bankrupt evangelicals, Christofascists, and grifter scamvangelists always in a pursuit of power and, of course money.  State Republicans are seeking to employ the same tactic. Yet, so far the Biden administration's main focus has been on ending the Covid-19 pandemic, undertaking measures Trump could have implemented six months or more ago had his regime not been like a never ending version of a bad reality TV show. As part of this effort, he has relied on legitimate healthcare experts and he has sought to aid struggling Americans to whom the Republicans only offer racial division and religious intolerance as a distraction. Obviously, Biden cannot roll back the culture wars unilaterally, but by refusing to be distracted and ignoring insults flung by total hypocrites like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, both of whom have Ivy League resumes, who pretend to represent working Americans even as they throw them under the economic bus.  A column in the Washington Post looks at Biden's efforts.  Here are excerpts: 

One of President Biden’s early achievements does not get enough attention: He is rolling back the politics of culture wars. This is good news for his electoral and governing projects, but also for our country.

This assertion will invite contradictory dissents. On the one side, culture wars were bound to abate during a pandemic and economic downturn. The other response is: Are you kidding? If culture wars are over, why is Dr. Seuss all over Fox News?

To take the second point first: Sure, cultural conflict will forever be part of American life. Our habits, mores and assumptions are always in flux, especially given the United States’ exceptional religious, racial and ethnic diversity — along with our long-running feuds between big cities and the countryside. . . . . But what matters is how politicized these conflicts become. Republicans and conservatives have used culture wars as a way of encouraging working-class voters to cast their ballots on the basis of social, religious and racial issues rather than on economic questions.

Ever since the 1960s, the GOP has chipped away at the New Deal coalition by insisting that when the word “elitist” is used, it is a reference to cultural trendsetters and professors, not corporate titans.

And when Texas Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Princeton, Harvard Law School) claimed that Republicans are now the party of “working class men and women” in an interview on Fox News, he spoke of how their wages were being “pulled down” because they were competing with “people coming illegally.” Thus did undocumented immigrants become the class enemy. . . . A member of the party that has done everything it could for the past four decades to destroy organized labor, Cruz even had the temerity to say that Democrats “don’t represent unions anymore.”

His words came a day after Biden offered one of the most pro-union speeches ever given by a president. . . . . Of particular note here is how Biden linked the inequalities of class and race. Here again, he’s fighting against wedge politics aimed at dividing middle- and working-class voters along racial and ethnic lines — and immigration status.

Now, you could argue that Biden’s relentless attention to the pandemic, and the work of economic relief and recovery, is simply common sense. And it is. . . . But the president and his team have exercised enormous discipline in keeping the national conversation focused on bread-and-butter assistance to the vast majority of Americans. It’s one reason his $1.9 trillion aid package that cleared the House and then passed the Senate on Saturday with only Democratic votes polls so well.

And whenever he could, Biden has tried to shift the conversation about the pandemic away from cultural conflict and toward the practical work of ending the scourge.

Former president Donald Trump, and now his allies, keep trying to turn mask-wearing into a cultural question linked to personal liberty. Biden calmly but pointedly speaks for the roughly three-quarters of the American public that sees mask-wearing not as some esoteric form of compulsory virtue signaling but as part of everyone’s responsibility to help prevent the spread of covid-19.

The right wing tried to make a new flash point out of Biden’s rebuke to “Neanderthal thinking” after Republican governors in Texas and Mississippi lifted mask-wearing requirements.

But it hasn’t stuck, and Biden cares more about getting people to wear masks than in pushing the fight further. In any event, most Americans know how deadly it was to politicize mask-wearing in the first place, and it’s excruciatingly hard to turn Biden (D-University of Delaware, Syracuse University College of Law) into an elitist peddler of cultural radicalism. . . . . a 78-year-old White guy is harder for the radical right to demonize than, say, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Nancy Pelosi.

No wonder anti-Biden paraphernalia sold so poorly at the CPAC meeting, as The Post’s David Weigel reported. “I can’t give the Biden stuff away,” mourned merchandizer David Solomon.

As for Dr. Seuss, Republicans might yet help Biden turn that controversy into an economic question, too. After all, their resolute opposition to Biden’s proposal to help Americans in economic trouble makes them resemble no one so much as the Grinch . . . . 

More Sunday Male Beauty

 

State Republicans Introduce 108 Bills Targeting LGBT Citizens

During its four years of misrule, the Trump/Pence regime waged a relentless war against LGBT Americans both to pander to the Christofascist base of the GOP and to further Pence's animus towards the LGBT community.  While Joe Biden is diligently working to undo the anti-LGBT handiwork of Trump/Pence, across the country in GOP controlled legislatures a host of bills have been introduced by legislators eager to prostitute themselves to the Christofascists to inflame the culture wars to distract members of the party base from the reality that the Republicans are doing nothing to aid economically working class American (the South Dakota capitol is shown at right).  Indeed, Congressional Republicans voted against the Covid relief bill that will benefit millions of working families.   A piece in The Advocate looks at the state level war on LGBT citizens.  Here are highlights: 

As the new Democratic presidential administration is making progress on LGBTQ+ equality, far-right lawmakers at the state level are trying further marginalize the community, especially transgender people.

As of this week there have been 71 specifically anti-trans bills introduced in state legislatures around the country, along with 37 bills that target the LGBTQ+ population overall, according to the Human Rights Campaign’s latest count.

“In states across the country, we are facing an emergency,” HRC President Alphonso David said on a conference call with reporters Thursday (see video below). “Anti-equality forces are attacking our families. They’re attacking our children. They’re attacking our dignity, and they’re attacking our existence.”

Of the anti-trans proposals, 37 seek to restrict transgender athletes’ participation in school sports, with an emphasis on keeping trans girls and women from competing with cisgender females. Twenty-five are aimed at preventing trans minors from receiving gender-affirming procedures, even if the young people have the support of their families. There are nine other bills that would harm trans people in various ways.

Of the broader anti-LGBTQ+ bills, there are 21 so-called religious freedom bills that would enable discrimination against LGBTQ+ people, women, members of minority faiths, and more. Others seek to protect conversion therapy, limit sex education, or otherwise infringe on LGBTQ+ rights.

Most of the bills have been introduced in the South, the Great Plains, or the Mountain West, although there are a few pending in usually progressive states such as Minnesota, New Hampshire, and New Jersey. The two that are closest to becoming law are an anti-trans sports bill in Mississippi and a religious refusals bill in South Dakota.

As for the assertion that these bills are driven by a concern about women’s rights — those of cisgender women, anyway — the right-wing lawmakers behind them have generally shown little concern about funding for women’s sports, equal treatment in the workplace, or reproductive freedom (regarding the latter issue, they have sought to take away access to contraception and abortion). Anti-trans sports legislation is widely opposed by women’s and children’s rights groups.

Opponents of the anti-trans measures say there’s a coordinated effort by anti-LGBTQ+ groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom. The organization wrote Montana’s so-called Save Women’s Sports Act, and some other pieces of legislation have been modeled on it, LGBTQ+ activists say.

In targeting trans youth, far-right politicians and organizations are taking aim at the most vulnerable members of the LGBTQ+ community, and they may have been emboldened by the attacks that have come from Donald Trump and his ilk . . .

South Dakota is the only state where both chambers have passed a religious refusals bill, and it’s up to Gov. Kristi Noem, a rising Republican star, whether to sign it. The bill was introduced because of restrictions on religious services during the COVID-19 pandemic and sought to assure that religious and secular institutions were treated equally, Janna Farley, communications director for the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, said on Thursday’s conference call.

Her organization had no problem with that intent, but the bill was written so broadly as to open the door to the use of religion for discrimination against LGBTQ+ and two-spirit people, members of minority faiths, and others, Farley said. She mentioned a landlord in Minnesota who cited his religious beliefs in refusing to rent to an unmarried couple, and a police officer in Oklahoma who wouldn’t work at a Muslim event. The ACLU and others asked lawmakers to amend the bill to address these potential harms, but their concerns were ignored, she said.

The legislation is similar to a Religious Freedom Restoration Act adopted in 2015 in Indiana, when Mike Pence was governor. It was amended after much public outrage. David and others predicted a similar outcry if the South Dakota bill becomes law.

“South Dakota potentially risks the loss of business opportunities and the revenue that comes with it, significant legal fees, and damage to the state’s reputation,” David said in a statement this week. “We strongly urge Governor Kristi Noem to reject this dangerous and controversial legislation that would invite a world of problems for South Dakota amidst already difficult circumstances for the state and this country.”