Daily Archives: April 9, 2020

More thana dozen House Democrats led by California Reps. Norma TorresNorma Judith TorresOvernight Health Care Presented by PCMA US now leads world in known coronavirus cases | Unemployment claims soar by over 3 million | House to vote on stimulus Friday | Ventilator shortage sets off scramble Democrats ask Trump for evidence that medical supplies are available Hispanic Democrats demand funding for multilingual coronavirus messaging MORE and TJ Cox are calling on the Trump administration to haltits efforts to produce county-specific social distancing guidelines, citing concerns over the potential misclassification of low-income and rural communities that lack access to coronavirus tests.

Nearly two weeks ago, Trump sent a letter to U.S. governors outlining a plan to classify counties in the U.S. based on their risk factors and rescind social distancing guidelines accordingly. The presidentprioritized reopening the economy, which has ground to a halt as a result of social distancingmeasures, leaving millions unemployed.

Our country does not presently have the testing infrastructure to accurately gauge the prevalence of COVID-19. Determining a risk classification based on insufficient testing could have a devastating impact on our national efforts to combat this disease, and in particular, on low-income and rural communities, the lawmakers wrote in a letter addressed to the president and the public health officials in his Cabinet.

In Trump's letter sent March 27,the president said counties will be ranked based on robust surveillance testing. Such a plan could scale back social distancing measures in communities that unknowingly have an outbreak because of a lack of testing, posing the risk of the virus further spreading.

Cox said the administration cannot use incomplete and inaccurate data in matters of life or death and challenged the administration to commit to, at the very least, widespread testing access, before implementing a system.

We need tests, not county classifications, and the fact that this president is trying to ease social distancing guidance without the data to support his claims should alarm every single American, Torres said, adding that testing facilities that serve low-income and rural communities are already stretched thin.

The lawmakers many of whom represent districts withlarge low-income and minority populations noted pre-existing health care inequities pose a barrier between their constituents coronavirus cases being accurately counted.

Further, low-income individuals may not seek testing out of fear of other associated medical costs, especially if they are uninsured, and individuals in rural areas may be unable to reach testing sites given an already low number of health care facilities in their areas, the lawmakers added.

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Democratic reps ask Trump not to issue region-specific social distancing guidelines | TheHill - The Hill

Former Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein responded to the end of the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by telling her followers to exit the Democratic Party, and many Democrats were incensed at the suggestion.

"Bernie Sanders ran a good race. Now it's clearer than ever: establishment Dems' top priority is sabotaging progressives to maintain their own power," Stein tweeted on Wednesday.

"@GreenPartyUS welcomes all who understand that the fight for people, planet & peace must continue," she added, with the hashtag "DemExit."

Stein supported the Sanders campaign, but many Democrats blame her and her supporters for the stunning loss of Hillary Clinton to then-candidate Donald Trump in the 2016 election.

Many on the left took to Twitter to excoriate her for throwing her support away from the establishment candidate, Joe Biden, after Sanders exited the race.

"You need to be airdropped straight into Moscow. And stay the hell there. Freaking traitor," tweeted feminist Ellen Hopkins.

"Didn't you sabotage the last election allowing Trump to win? Hard to take this comment seriously," responded blogger Tom Coates.

"When the @DrJillStein idiots were willing to lose two Supreme Court seats to Mitch McConnell that's when I knew they were full of s**t and had no intention of overturning Citizens United or anything else. They just wanted to blow things up," replied film blogger Sasha Stone.

"INTO THE SUN may she f**k right off," tweeted author Cherie Priest.

"Jill Stein felt all kinds of wrong, like she was a pawn or something even more nefarious," responded author Raquel Cepeda.

"Jill Stein threatening DemExit is like Tanya Harding threatening to quit figure skating," said one user.

Stein says Clinton promoting 'unhinged conspiracy theory'www.youtube.com

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Jill Stein encourages followers to leave the Democratic Party after Bernie drops out, and Democrats are melting down - TheBlaze

Sherrod Brown has always defied easy categorization. A Yale graduate from a well-off family, he became a state representative in Ohio at the age of 21 and spent his free time in local union halls, absorbing the stories of auto and steelworkers. In the 1990s and 2000s, when Bill Clinton and the New Democrats preached the gospel of globalization, Brown, then a congressman, warned about the ugly consequences of free-trade deals like NAFTA jobs shipped overseas, factories abandoned, towns and cities hollowed out. During the Obama years, Brown, now in the U.S. Senate, pleaded with his party brethren not to abandon their working-class roots, only to watch Donald Trump win in 2016 with the help of the white working class on Browns home turf.

Brown, 67, is one of the last true progressive populists. He insists that Democrats should campaign through the eyes of workers and honor the dignity of work a message he used to win a decisive re-election victory in Ohio two years after Trump won the state. The pleas for him to run for president flooded in. It came on me so sudden, he recalls. I looked at who the cast of characters were, and I came from the right place with the right message and the right politics and the right history, perhaps.

But his heart wasnt in it.

I didnt have the ambition, he tells Rolling Stone during one of several long conversations this past winter and spring. One of the things about Ted Kennedy was his joy of life, his joy of service. I bring that to my campaigns; I bring that to this job. I dont think I couldve brought it to a presidential race, and fundamentally, that more than anything kept me out.

You could argue that Browns candor and modesty two qualities you dont often find in United States senators might be precisely what the country needs in a president right now. But Brown has found other ways to make himself heard. Last November, he published his third book, Desk 88, a hybrid of memoir and history that traces the lineage of progressive senators (Hugo Black, Bill Proxmire, Bobby Kennedy, and others) who sat at the same desk on the Senate floor now used by Brown. In February, he wrote a scathing op-ed for The New York Times about the power of fear and how it stopped Republicans from holding Trump accountable during his impeachment trial. (The piece also featured a sly reference to Lizzo. More on that later.)

And as the novel coronavirus pandemic swept the country, Brown blasted Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the Senates sluggish response and foot-dragging in taking up the first of several major relief bills. A video of Brown tearing into McConnell received more than 1.5 million views and earned him comparisons to Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Who can say anything but this is a national crisis? Brown bellowed on the Senate floor. Were going to make our unwillingness to do anything contingent on some parliamentary trick? No.

Brown has a message for his fellow Democrats, too. If they want to win back not only the working-class voters they lost in 2016 but also mobilize the multiracial coalition they need to beat Trump, theyll need to rethink the American electorate altogether. Its a message that Brown will soon be sharing on behalf of former Vice President Joe Biden; this week, Brown voted (early) for Biden in Ohios primary and plans to help Bidens campaign later this year. Voters dont see politics as left or right, he says. This whole idea that independent voters are in the middle that theyre less liberal than Democrats and less conservative than Republicans is crap. People dont see themselves as conservative/liberal; people see themselves. And people see politicians as Whose side are you on?

What happened in that moment on the Senate floor during the coronavirus debate?[Democratic Sen. Dick] Durbin was impatiently, for all the right reasons, saying we needed to do this tonight. A Republican stood up and gave some parliamentary sleight-of-hand reason for the delay. And so I just took off on that. Why arent we doing this? Three, four, five days of delay when people are scared, when people are angry, when people are anxious about their future? They know theyre about to lose their job or theyve already lost it. They dont know if theyre going to be able to pay their rent. They dont know whats going to happen to their sister whos not feeling well but has to choose between going to work or taking a day without pay, or even worse, cant get a test for what she thinks might be the coronavirus.

More than 600 days ago, you raised the issue of Trump and John Bolton disbanding the pandemic team inside the National Security Council.I wrote the letter, I think, about a week after he disbanded it. The admiral in charge of this office had worked for [George W.] Bush, managing the international combating of malaria. Then he worked for Obama on a global-health-security office, where the function of the office was to surveil countries around the world for epidemics that might evolve into a pandemic.

One of the greatest things we do in our country, we send health care people around the world to help them with problems. We partly do it for our own interest, to keep it out of the country, but we do it for humanitarian reasons. The White House had nobody doing that. This guys job was to do that. If he had been there in November, he maybe sees this before the Chinese acknowledge it. Maybe it wouldve been the 10th of December, he wouldve had the wherewithal and gravitas and position to go to the president and say, Weve got to start preparing for this.

But for the rest of December, all of January, all of February, [Trump] didnt declare a health care emergency. Until March. All that time lost, more people get sick and more people die.

Should we listen to what the president says in the middle of this pandemic if hes going to say things that are wrong?We should listen to the public-health professionals. What Pence and Trump say moves some people, but theyre not reliable spokespeople to combat this pandemic, so I listen to the public-health professionals who have done this before. Theyve never seen something quite like this, but they are the best equipped to do it. What the president says is either misleading or wrong or outright lies or always for his political benefit. I just dont think any of us have time for that.

Tell me about the New York Times op-ed you published right after impeachment, where you said Republicans acquitted Trump out of fear. Theres a line in it I want to ask you about.If its the Lizzo line, it wasnt mine. The article was absolutely mine. Lizzo displaced the line Thou doth protest too much. When my wife [journalist Connie Schultz] read it, she thought that was too clich. Katie Mulhall Quintela in our office came up with Lizzo. [Ed. note: The line in question is, In the words of Lizzo: Truth hurts.]

Several people, unprompted, noted it in my circles: Sherrod Brown listens to Lizzo?Well, I do now. The article really started when I was just watching Republicans and listening to their fear. I remember going up to [Sen.] Patty Murray and saying, Im really struck by the fear on the other side. I just thought it was a story that needed to be told, because people ask all the time, How could Republicans not vote, for Gods sakes, for witnesses [to be called in the impeachment trial]? What are they thinking? And I said its really two things. They like what Trump gives them, and theyre scared to death. And fear does the business. And when fear does the business in a legislative body, the decision is almost always wrong for the country long term.

There was a line in the op-ed: For the stay-in-office-at-all-costs representatives and senators, fear is the motivator. When did staying in office at all costs become the be-all and end-all of ones existence here?Im not sure the assumption is right, When did it become? I mean, look I dont have much empathy for that attitude, but we all have it to a point. Everyone has some fear of losing their job. Its just much more unseemly if its a U.S. senator, because we can find something. The SEIU member in Cincinnati, if she gets some supervisor harassing her? She doesnt have a lot of options. I think politicians have always had that illness. Weve always voted in ways to keep our jobs that we probably shouldnt have. Ive never wanted to let fear do the business. I think I am even stronger in that view today than I was my first term. Partly that its OK if I lose, partly its the voters want authenticity, and partly because Ill sleep better.

There is now a trendy observation among the politically savvy that Ohio is a red state. It cannot be won by a Democrat apart from you, apparently. How do you respond to those who say Democrats should write off Ohio and campaign elsewhere?You dont write off a state thats voted for the winning candidate for president more times in the last 100 years than any state except maybe New Mexico. The state hasnt dramatically changed in the last 10 years; its just the politics of the country has changed.

We knew in my [2018] race we had to get one out of seven Trump voters. We knew it was mostly female Trump voters, and we did. And we did it with progressive populism, not the phony divide populism of Trump. Real populism is never anti-Semitic and never racist and never divisive. It brings people together. You campaign through the eyes of workers, and you govern through the eyes of workers. You do it in an inclusive way.

Ive had an F from the NRA my whole career. I was for marriage equality for 20, 25 years. I dont compromise on economic justice or civil-rights issues or womens issues ever.

Theres a multiracial coalition that your campaigns put together that I feel like is a model for someone running for president. A Democrat probably isnt going to beat Trump without building that kind of coalition. What are the lessons from your elections that you think have some broader applicability?I think you can do it and this isnt meant at any candidate you can do it by vilifying, demonizing, and attacking less. And I do plenty of that. I understand that, because you need to make contrasts. But [it should be] more about talking about workers and talking about peoples lives.

Whether you punch a clock or swipe a badge or work for tips or are raising kids or taking care of sick parents [Martin Luther] King said that no job is menial if it pays an adequate wage. And you illustrate that in part by stories.

I was at an AFL-CIO dinner in Cincinnati some years ago, and there was a table of middle-aged women, probably half white, the other half Latino and black. They were janitors. They had just signed their first union contract, SEIU, with downtown Cincinnati business owners. I sat down at that table next to a woman and said, Whats it like to have a union? She said, For the first time in 51 years, Ill have a paid, one-week vacation. You tell stories like that and you show what a union can mean and what issues of justice are all about. People respond to that. Thats a story Donald Trump could never match. For one thing, hes probably got all kinds of workers that hes contracted with that hes stiffed. I guess you do have to make the contrast and demonize from time to time.

Is there a misconception of what the working and middle classes look like? After the 2016 election there was a lot of hand-wringing about how Democrats failed to appeal to the white working class in the Midwest.Generally, when people say workers, maybe theyre thinking construction; theyre thinking maybe more of men than women. Theyre thinking not necessarily more white than people of color; I dont know if thats the case or not. But weve got to always speak expansively.

My wifes mother was a home-care worker. She died at 62. Her dad died at 69. Connie has said that they wore out their bodies so we didnt have to wear out ours.

I was at my high school reunion, I think my 40th. They had an easel with the pictures of kids who we know have died of the 400 in the class. And it was a pretty consequential number, and they were mostly low-income white and black kids. The other thing I remember: I sat across from a woman in my class. She worked at JP Morgan Chase as a bank teller for 30 years. She was making $30,000 a year. We ought to be thinking about them as workers.

Its a broad group of people that do most of the work in the day. Its the people that youre allowed to ignore. Its the food-service -worker; its the custodian in this building [the Hart Senate Office Building]. This building is way too white during the day, and its a whole lot of Latina and mostly women, not entirely, and black people that come in and clean up. Theres too much of that in society.

Your mom grew up in the segregated South, but ended up being a civil-rights activist, a progressive.In every way.

Your dad was from Ohio, a doctor, but a conservative, at least for a time.Till his kids changed him.

You and your two brothers all went to Ivy League schools. You went to Yale. But you go back to Ohio and become the defender of the worker and the dignity of the working class in Congress. How do I connect all those dots in your life?My dad always took care of people whether they could pay or not. I remember he had a thing of arrowheads in his office, a display of them. A patient had given them to him because they couldnt pay.

People would say to me in high school, Your dad spends time with us, he talks to us, he always finds a way to give us a bunch of pills that we dont have to pay for. He takes care of us. He had the reputation, and I didnt really know this growing up, as being the best diagnostician in town. I dont think it was science-based as much as it was listening-based. If you listen to somebody you can often tell whats wrong with them if youre a good doctor, without blood tests. Not that he didnt do those too.

My dad was a conservative, but only because he really didnt think about it. His dad was a conservative. Thats probably why. But then he changed. Nixon changed him, Agnew changed him. He changed in the Sixties, because he voted for Goldwater. How many people voted for Goldwater, then McGovern, right? Not very many. It was a small group.

You first got elected to the Ohio Legislature when you were 22?I was 21 when I got elected, turned 22 right after the election. Because I was young, I didnt need a lot of money to live on. The Legislature paid $17,500 in 1975; that was a living wage for sure. That was plenty of money to live on in Mansfield, and I didnt have another job; so when the Legislature wasnt in session, I would go and just hang out at the steelworkers hall and the UAW hall, and Id listen to workers talk.

That really did have a socializing effect on me. I heard what theyd say about scabs. I walked picket lines. It was a Republican county overall, but with a strong union presence. I guess thats where I learned politics more than anything.

How have the conversations in that steelworkers hall or that UAW hall changed in the years that youve been going there?I think there was a certainty in 1978 that My kidll have it better than I will. There was a certainty among the parents that their kids would have it better off, partly because they carried a union card, partly because there were economic opportunities abounding. They just all thought there was more opportunity than they think now. And thats because of bad trade agreements. Its because of terrible tax policy. Its because of elected officials that have not looked out for them, frankly.

Whose fault is that? Is it Democrats as much as Republicans?Of course not. But Democrats arent blameless. Democrats passing bad trade agreements, Democrats giving in to Republicans on tax issues. Most of us dont most of the time, but enough of us do enough of the time to get to a bad place.

One of my favorite Lincoln lines is when he was in the White House, his staff said, Stay in the White House and win the war and free the slaves and preserve the Union. Lincoln said, No, Ive got to go out and get my public-opinion bath.

Pope Francis said and my wife hates it when I use this one, but shes not here, so what the heck? but Pope Francis exhorted his parish priests to go out and smell like the flock, which has a different connotation, but it really is go out and be among the flock. I think that none of us does that enough. I think I do it more than most, but I dont do it nearly enough.

Speaking of history, where do you look in history to make sense of the moment were in now? [Note: This question was asked in mid-February, before the full-blown coronavirus crisis emerged.]Well, I start with this isnt the worst time in our countrys history, not even close. This is not the divisions of 1968, when a large swath of people couldnt vote because of their skin color. This isnt McCarthy, where people couldnt stand on street corners and criticize the government, or at least that part of the government. This isnt the Depression. Its not the Civil War. Its not Jim Crow. Its not those days, so thats good.

But Trump is the worst president in our history, and I also think if he has a second term, it could become one of the worst times it could reach the level of those periods or worse. That to me is whats at stake in 2020.

Did it surprise you to see Biden have such a good night [on Super Tuesday]? Or were those Biden is done narratives wrong?A little of both. Hes so well known. Hes very well-liked among voters and among party activists. Not necessarily their first choice, maybe. But personally, hes very well-liked. People all have seen his empathy, borne in part Im making too much of this, perhaps the same way Franklin Roosevelt had such empathy, because of his personal life. Few people have suffered as much as Joe Biden. People know that about him: that you either turn bitter from that tragedy or you grow and have great empathy. Thats the Joe Biden that people like. They know what theyre getting.

Was this the quote-unquote Democratic establishment lining up behind Joe Biden? Or is it Democratic voters finally saying, OK, we think Joe Biden is going to be our guy?I dont know what the Democratic establishment is. Its not a bunch of people in a back room that made all those people in South Carolina and made all those people in Texas and Minnesota and Massachusetts and Tennessee and North Carolina and Arkansas and Oklahoma vote for Biden. I know that some are going to characterize the Democratic establishment as pushing him over, but this was huge numbers of voters that made their decision.

What did you think seeing these stories that said you were going to be a white-knight savior of a divided Democratic Party?Im flattered, I guess, but the voters will work their will, and well have a nominee, and our nominee is going to beat Trump. Im confident of that, increasingly confident of that.

What is your theory for how this president won in 2016? And how does that inform the Democratic Party nominee defeating the president in 2020?First of all, he lied to people about protecting Social Security and Medicare. He sold people a phony populism to make them feel like he was on their side, and then he betrayed them. He uses racism and bigotry to divide people to distract from the fact that hes used the White House to enrich himself and his family. Populisms never racist. It doesnt push some people down to lift others up. We fight his phony populism with real populism that fights for all people. Thats what the whole dignity-of-work message is about. Thats where Trump has just missed it. It may have paid off for him in 16, but its not going to pay off for him again.

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Senator Sherrod Brown Knows How to Save the Soul of the Democratic Party - Yahoo Entertainment

Donald Trumps response to the global pandemic will cost an untold amount of lives. His denial of the viruss seriousness, failure to stockpile and manufacture the necessary protective gear, dismissal of the pandemic team, and spread of misinformation and pseudoscience means, quite literally, that hundreds of thousands of people could die who otherwise may not have. The rot goes all the way down: The Republican Party is using this crisis to jam through the largest corporate bailout in history, while doing almost nothing in comparison for the millions of Americans who are now without jobs or had little income to begin with.

None of this is unexpected. Yet as Republicans militantly push through their policy prioritiesone might say they are politicizing the pandemicDemocratic leadership has been largely absent. In what is not simply a political opportunity, but a historic moment of unprecedented need, the party that supposedly represents the working people is barely putting up a fight.

Joe Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, is nowhere to be found. Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are operating as if its business as usual, ceding whatever power they have to Republicans. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren quickly folded and voted for the stimulus bill, perhaps in part because of the bruising primary process. And, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez railed against the bill, shes only a single freshman representative. The working class is still vastly underrepresented in the House and the small but newly emboldened progressive wing has not yet come together as a consistent, effective bloc to put pressure on leadership.

Biden, who is still rejecting the idea of single-payer health care during a global pandemic, is a frontrunner leading from behind. After the Democratic establishment spent the last month of the primary coalescing around their candidate, that same candidate has suddenly disappeared during a moment of national crisis. As Biden fell off the face of the earth for nearly a week in March, he told reporters that his team was still working on figuring out the infrastructure at home to be in significant contact with the American people.

When Biden does emerge, hes reticent to go hard on Trump. As an outside advisor to Biden told Politico on Monday, As much as I dislike Trump and think what a bad job hes doing, theres a danger now that attacking him can backfire on you if you get too far out there. I dont think the public wants to hear criticism of Trump right now. In the meantime, Donald Trumps polling has managed to creep up in the initial weeks of the epidemic (though it has begun to fizzle in recent days).

Bidens strategy, it seems, is to stay on the sidelines, much to the frustration of some within the party.

They need to be drawing a sharper contrast with Trump at this point in time given his obvious failings while standing at that podium every afternoon, Jim Manley, former aide to Senators Harry Reid and Ted Kennedy, said of Biden.

Instead of more livestreams and televised spots, Biden has decided to release a podcast, Heres the Deal, in which he tells the American people what, exactly, the deal is. Going the podcast route is not just a missed political opportunity, but a missed public health opportunity. Older, at-risk people are more likely to get their news from television. And while someone like Biden may not be able to easily break through the coronavirus disinformation Fox News viewers receive, a not-insignificant number of moderate viewers who watch CNN are also confused about whats happening. According to the Pew Research Center, a quarter of CNN viewers think that the media has greatly exaggerated the risks of the pandemic and nearly one fifth think COVID-19 was developed intentionally in a lab.

The other obvious rallying point for Democrats would be in the House, which is the one chamber that they currently control. Yet even as the coronavirus stimulus bill was making its way through the Senate, Republicans were down by five votes because of members who were quarantined, meaning that Democrats in that chamber had more leverage than usual to push for priorities.

But neither Speaker Nancy Pelosi nor Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer offered any sort of robust defense or rebuke to the Republican Partys corporate robbery in the Senates most recent stimulus bill. The bill includes $500 billion in corporate bailouts, which essentially translates into a $4.5 trillion bailout in leveraged lending from the Federal Reserve. In turn, Democrats secured weak oversight of the bailout money, one-time $1200 checks for individuals, and more generous unemployment benefitswins that are far from commensurate with the much more permanent losses.

The bill was a monstrous, indefensible giveaway to greedy financiers and monopolists and arsonists, justified by the scraps it gave people out of work and the scraps it gave small businesses, Zephyr Teachout, a corruption expert and Sanders ally, told VICE. I understand that Democrats don't control the Senate, but I don't understand why they didn't stand on the rooftops and demand two separate bills, one for immediate needs and the other for bailouts, and yell at Republicans at every possible opportunity for their effort to put them together.

Pelosi is now gearing up for a fourth bill, in which she is pushing for more of the Democrats priorities. This isnt about how fast we can do it. Its how fast we must do it, she told reporters on a call earlier this week. Yet with the corporate bailouts already secured, Democrats have less leverage than they did before. Republicans have little incentive now to bend on any of their opponents policy prioritiesNo more spending. We did all the spending, one White House economic adviser told a Washington Post reporter.

Again, none of this is unexpectedRepublicans have always had a Machiavellian focus on corporate giveaways. Yet during the crisis, many of Pelosis decisions have been to seemingly stymie the priorities of her own party. Not only did she fail to pass a more progressive House relief bill, Pelosi stubbornly refused to push for remote voting before sending members home. Without remote voting, members have to either accept the stimulus bill wholesalecorporate bailouts includedvia unanimous consent, or individually object and force all their colleagues to return to Congress during a pandemic. Some progressive members saw this as a power play by Pelosi.

If you have remote voting and you actually have to whip your members rather than just being able to count on unanimous consent, it would definitely give more leverage to members, one senior aide to a progressive House member told HuffPost.

The lack of remote voting also means that House leadership can use the excuse that pushing too hard for progressive priorities would mean a Republican member would block unanimous consent and force everyone to come in and risk getting sick. David Segal, the executive director of Demand Progress, a progressive group that is pushing for emergency remote voting, told VICE that because of this, the outcomes of House negotiations have been, and will continue to be, more moderate than they otherwise could be, and it means the House can't pass strong, progressive stimulus measures and try to force the Senate's hand.

If the Democratic establishment hasnt broken out in this moment, those on the partys left wing arent doing much better. Both Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren voted for the Senate stimulus bill, which passed unanimously 96-0, despite the fact that it included a historic bailout for the shareholder class. Warren even went to the lengths of laying out a progressive litmus test for any corporate bailouts, a test that the bill did not pass. Sanders made a speech criticizing Republicans who were fighting the unemployment provisions, killing an amendment that would have made the deal even worse. But in the end, this just essentially served to move forward Schumer and Mitch McConnells package, corporate bailouts included.

To be fair, only the left-wing of the party has offered a robust policy vision proportional to the scale of coronavirus. And as a fraction of the Senate body, both Sanders and Warren had much less power over the deal than those in actual leadershipit was clear that the bill was going to pass regardless. But it was a moment when either senator could have registered dissent, in the likes of Barbara Lee and her lone vote against the war in Afghanistan. Yet neither did.

The pandemic has revealed fractures in how our country operates as a whole. As a result, the nation is opening up to the idea that broad social programs are not only viable, but necessary solutions. Support for Medicare for All is at a nine-month high, the Republican administration itself instated a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions for homeowners, and lawmakers are seriously discussing a universal basic income. Much of this is temporary, of course, until its not. Its up to Democrats seize upon this energy and change thatas Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in The New Yorker, Now is a moment to remake our society anew.

If there is one national Democratic leader who has emerged over the past month, its New Yorks Governor Andrew Cuomo. Giving measured, daily press conferences from the epicenter of the pandemic, Cuomo has won over the media class and given the public a sense of authoritative control over the situation. But this is also the bare minimum that a public official should do in the time of crisis. In reality, Cuomo is also bungling the situationhe didnt shut down the city until nearly two weeks after the states first confirmed case, is refusing to give relief to renters, and has left people to die in jails. Perhaps most egregiously, as millions of people lose their jobs and face a public health crisis, the governor is focused on cutting Medicaid. Cuomos rise says more about the vacuum in leadership from the rest of the Democratic Party than anything else.

This is an unprecedented moment. Republicans, some of whom are selling off stock to enrich themselves, understand that. But the energy on the ground for a new, better world is here. There are people organizing mutual aid groups, those calling for a massive, nation-wide rent strike, and Whole Foods and Instacart workers who are striking over their health and safety. Democrats could seize on this energy to push for massive New Deal-era public policies that would help the working-class. At the very least, they could offer a unified steady, moral vision for such policies. Yet in the moment when the working class needs them the most, the party is leaving them behind.

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This Is a Historic Crisis. Where Is Democratic Leadership? - VICE