Monthly Archives: February 2022

ANDERSON Two Democrats have filed for the partys nomination in the 5th Congressional District to challenge incumbent Republican Victoria Spartz.

As of Friday, Spartz remained unchallenged for the Republican Party nomination as she seeks a second term.

Matthew Hall and Jeanine Lee Lake have declared their intentions to seek the Democratic Party nomination in the 5th District.

Hall, 50, has served with the U.S. Army for 28 years and did two tours of duty in Afghanistan. He remains a member of the reserves with the rank of major.

He served one year on the Lawrence Common Council after being appointed to fill a vacancy in 2018.

It was a great learning experience, Hall said during an interview with The Herald Bulletin. I got a free education in the political process.

Hall said he was considering running for a seat in the Indiana Senate or Indiana House and starting thinking about running for Congress.

Im excited about it, he said. This could really work and provide a way to serve more people.

Hall said he is not concerned about the makeup of the district, stating it has four distinct regions.

There is a rural area, union members around Kokomo, educators at Ball State and suburbs in Hamilton County, he said. I dont think Republican or Democrat is the challenging part. There is a wedge between the parties and theyre not talking to each other.

Hall said he wants to help the American people to trust their elected officials in the future.

Leadership is a way of life, he said. You can still be a leader in a lesser position.

Hall said he agrees with some of the policies of President Joe Biden.

I dont like the bundling of all these bills together, he said. There should be separate votes on each proposal.

If elected, he wants to see broadband internet service expanded to rural areas, work on economic development initiatives and invest in infrastructure in the district.

Hall said fundraising is a necessary evil and admits that incumbent Spartz has deep pockets.

There is a way to reach people without spending $5 million, he said. You can communicate with people online, and I will have a strategic plan with our spending.

Hall said too many members of Congress are getting wealthy with investments in the stock market.

Im not in it to make money. I want to help people, he said.

Hall has been in contact with the Indiana state party organization, which has indicated they will work with both candidates for the nomination.

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Hall seeking Democrat nomination for 5th Congressional District - The Herald Bulletin

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: Getty Images

This week, New Yorks Democratic Party approved a redrawn congressional map that could net it three more seats in the House of Representatives and cut the states Republican representation in half. Governor Kathy Hochul signed the new map into law the following day, along with new maps for the state Senate and Assembly districts.

Democrats currently hold a thin 222-212 majority in the House, but the tendency for parties in power to suffer midterm losses plus less than ideal approval ratings for President Joe Biden has the party on edge. Because Democrats hold a legislative supermajority in New York, it was one of the few states in which the party could take control of the redistricting process and slightly improve its overall midterm prospects. The aggressive effort to do just that has prompted accusations of hypocrisy toward Democrats, who have frequently campaigned against gerrymandering. Party officials say they are merely matching an example set by Republicans across the country.

New York Republican State Committee chairman Nick Langworthy described the newly drawn districts as textbook filthy, partisan gerrymandering and voiced the possibility of a court challenge, though it appears one is unlikely to succeed.

We are reviewing all of our legal options to protect the voices of millions of New Yorkers, he said.

Not long after Hochul signed off on the new district lines, a lawsuit was filed in the Steuben County Supreme Court alleging that the new maps are unconstitutional.

The changes are wide-ranging. Congresswoman Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican, represents the 11th Congressional District, which encompasses all of conservative Staten Island as well as Bay Ridge and Dyker Heights in Brooklyn. The new map links Staten Island with liberal neighborhoods like Park Slope and Sunset Park, drastically changing the districts demographics. This favors Democrat Max Rose, the former congressman who previously held the seat before losing to Malliotakis in 2020 (also, possibly, Bill de Blasio).

This is a blatant attempt by the Democrat leadership in Albany to steal this seat, even after New Yorkers voted twice by ballot referendum for nonpartisan maps, said Rob Ryan, a spokesman for the Malliotakis campaign, in a statement to Intelligencer.

Outside the city, the seats currently held by outgoing Republicans Lee Zeldin and John Katko were already seen as prime pickup opportunities. (Zeldin declared his candidacy for governor in early 2021, while Katko announced in January that he would be retiring from office.) But both congressmens districts have also been redrawn, with Zeldins First District on Long Island extending into Democratic areas and Katkos 24th District folded into the 22nd District, which will include the blue cities of Ithaca and Syracuse.

Another Republican congresswoman, Claudia Tenney, is opting to run in a new district entirely after a large portion of her 22nd District was redrawn into the 19th, currently represented by Democrat Antonio Delgado. Tenney will try her luck in the 23rd District, where the regions current representative, Republican Tom Reed, previously announced his plans to retire.

In 2014, New Yorkers backed a ballot proposal that would amend the state constitution and establish an independent redistricting commission responsible for redrawing state and congressional districts based on Census results. (In 2020, the state lost one seat in the House just barely.) In January, the ten-member panel submitted two maps to the state legislature after members failed to come to an agreement on a single proposal. The legislature rejected both maps and gave the panel additional time to present a new draft. But the panel reached an impasse, allowing the states legislative task force to step in and submit its own lines. State lawmakers moved quickly, citing the fact that candidates will have to begin petitioning to run for districts in March.

Steven Romalewski, director of the mapping service at the City University of New Yorks Graduate Center, said that the state legislatures actions are consistent with the law.

I think theres a big difference between what the perception is of what the voters voted on versus the reality. The constitutional amendment, for good or for ill, explicitly gives the legislature the ability to do exactly what theyre doing now, and that was part of the constitutional proposal that the voters approved, Romalewski said.

There has also been criticism that state lawmakers didnt provide enough time for public input into the creation of the new maps. The independent redistricting commission, by contrast, held public hearings and allowed members of the community to submit comments on the proposed maps.

Now you have these maps that are drafted by the legislature in the space of a week without any opportunity for the public to have any input, said Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York. She called the commission fatally flawed from the beginning.

In Lerners view, for a redistricting commission to be truly independent, it has to be citizen-led and outside the purview of legislative officials.

Its virtually irresistible for politicians to be able to benefit themselves and to lock in their position. The pencils got to be taken out of their hands, she said.

Independent commissions have the final word on redistricting in states like Michigan and California. And in some places, such as Pennsylvania, state courts have stepped in to take control after determining that legislators maps were too partisan. But it looks likely that in New York, raw politics will determine the lay of the land for the next ten years.

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New York Democrats Have Gerrymandered Their Way to a Huge Advantage - New York Magazine

A second Democratic candidate says she's running for state representative in the new 91st House District.

McLean County Board member Sharon Chung said she's excited about the opportunity to advocate for central Illinois in Springfield.

"Right now, we have a really exciting opportunity to have great representation for the Bloomington-Normal community in Springfield. It's something we were lacking for many years, the way the districts were drawn," said Chung.

Previous maps favored Republican lawmakers. The new 91st was drawn as a marginally Democratic party-leaning district, Chung said. It takes in parts of central Bloomington and Normal and stretches west toward Bartonville and East Peoria.

The new district includes parts of Bloomington-Normal previously represented by Republicans Dan Brady and Keith Sommer. Neither veteran lawmaker is running for retention to the House. Sommer is retiring and Brady is making a bid for Secretary of State.

Chung said her three-plus years of experience on the county board would help her if elected.

"I've seen how the county works as a sort of arm of the state government and I'm excited to advocate for Bloomington- Normal and McLean County down in Springfield," said Chung.

She said one focus for her, if elected, would be education.

"The funding that we have had for education in the past has affected whether students decide to stay here in Illinois. I feel like when people go out of state for school, a lot of times they don't come back. I would really like to see what we can do to fund it from Pre-K up through higher education," said Chung.

Chung also said there is something to be made from the constellation of wind and solar generating capacity and electric vehicle manufacturing in the region.

"I'm really excited about this green initiative we have here in McLean County. With things like that, we are being a really interesting green energy hub and I would really like to advocate for that," she said.

Chung, a musician and music teacher, would face Karla Bailey Smith, a painter, in the primary. Normal Town Council member Scott Preston is running as a Republican in the 91st.

The primary is in June. The general election is in November.

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Democrat Sharon Chung to run for state representative in new 91st District - WGLT

Residents wait in line to vote outside of the Tippecanoe branch library on Oct. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wis. Minimum standards for access to in-person early voting are one reform that both Republicans and Democrats have backed. Scott Olson/Getty Images hide caption

Residents wait in line to vote outside of the Tippecanoe branch library on Oct. 20, 2020, in Milwaukee, Wis. Minimum standards for access to in-person early voting are one reform that both Republicans and Democrats have backed.

Earlier this year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., called a targeted effort by some senators to reform the election certification process that former President Donald Trump attempted to hijack on Jan. 6, 2021, "unacceptably insufficient and even offensive."

Schumer wanted to go bigger.

He wanted to focus on much more expansive voting rights legislation, known as the Freedom to Vote Act, which would have overhauled essentially everything about the American election system: when and where Americans could cast a ballot, how they contribute to political campaigns and how states draw their political lines.

The proposal was trimmed down from an even larger elections bill, but it was still so massive that many election experts and even some Democrats privately say they never actually expected it to pass.

Then it failed.

Democrats in Congress haven't made it clear what they might pursue next, but experts see at least two paths toward a more piecemeal approach to putting in some guardrails around elections in the U.S.

The option gaining momentum recently is an update to the aforementioned rules around presidential election certification, known as the Electoral Count Act.

The law has been derided as poorly written and vague for decades, and its lack of clarity led to the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters falsely believed Vice President Mike Pence had more power over the certification of Electoral College votes submitted by the states than he actually did.

A bipartisan group of senators has been meeting to discuss potential revisions to the law, and there are indications that Schumer's opposition to it may be softening since the larger Democratic effort on voting rights failed.

Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California-Irvine, said that he feels the voting reforms in the Freedom to Vote Act are necessary too, but Congress would be right to prioritize the ECA and other laws meant to prevent subversion of the results of a presidential election.

"As much as one might be concerned about voter suppression and I've written two books on the subject, I'm very concerned about it I put the concern about election subversion even higher," Hasen said. "If you don't have a system where votes are fairly counted, you don't have a democracy at all."

The bipartisan group of senators looking at changing the law is working in smaller groups focused on a number of different aspects of voting reform, according to Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, who spoke to reporters Monday night after the group met on Capitol Hill.

Each of the smaller groups has a Democrat and Republican co-chair, Collins said, and they are focused on protecting election workers and potential new funding for election administration, in addition to updating the ECA. But she made it clear she thinks whatever legislation that comes from the group will not look anything like the Freedom to Vote Act.

"My goal is to have a bipartisan bill that can secure 60 or more votes in the Senate," she said. "If we re-litigate issues that have already been rejected by the Senate, then I think it would be very difficult for us to reach the 60-vote margin."

The bipartisan group of 16 senators, which includes nine Republicans, is set to meet again on Friday and could start writing text for their proposal in the coming days or weeks. The GOP support is key, since Democrats would need 10 Republicans in agreement to pass a measure in the Senate.

"This group is full of members of the Senate that have experience in getting bipartisan bills to the floor of the Senate. So maybe this group will be more successful," said Connecticut Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, a member of the group.

On Tuesday, a group of key Democratic senators also separately released their own potential draft update to the ECA. In some cases, the plan by Sens. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Angus King, I-Maine, mirrors proposals that were part of a House Administration Committee staff report released last month.

For example, it says that for an objection to a state's election results to be raised before Congress, the current threshold of only needing one member from each chamber should be raised. Rather, the Senate Democratic proposal, like the House staff report, suggests that one-third of each chamber should have to object. Both Democratic plans also say objections should be subject to a vote by a supermajority not a simple majority in both the House and Senate.

"We stand ready to share the knowledge we have accumulated with our colleagues from both parties and look forward to contributing to a strong, bipartisan effort aimed at resolving this issue and strengthening our democracy," Durbin, Klobuchar and King said in a statement on Tuesday.

King and several members of the bipartisan group agreed they see a potential to work together.

"I'm going to work with anybody who wants to work on the issue," King said.

Alaska GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, another member of bipartisan group, says the various efforts signal momentum.

"I think what that telegraphs is that this is important and it's something that we can move through on a bipartisan basis," Murkowski said.

The level of bipartisan engagement on the ECA never coalesced around the other voting rights reforms Democrats had hoped would come from this Congress, which have grown more urgent as some states across the country passed laws last year restricting voting access.

Republicans have often said they have no interest in federalizing the nuts and bolts of election infrastructure, so mandating things like automatic voter registration or no-excuse absentee voting was a nonstarter.

But Matthew Weil thinks there is another way.

Weil leads the elections project at the Bipartisan Policy Center, which recently released a report detailing what it sees as an "achievable" set of reforms for Congress to focus on.

"Both parties have prioritized elections to their voters," said Weil. "Democrats have been spending a lot of time talking about voter suppression and voters from the Republican Party are hearing that our election system is completely insecure."

BPC's proposal would address both concerns, Weil says, meaning there's a way for politicians to sell it to their voters no matter their affiliation.

Importantly, the BPC report does not argue for federal mandates, but instead argues for an incentivization structure where federal funding would be tied to whether states meet minimum accessibility and security standards such as:

Nine states that range across the political spectrum either currently already meet all of the report's minimum standards or meet all but one. Both Colorado and Georgia meet all of the proposed minimum standards for instance, even though Colorado is a vote-by-mail state and Georgia leans more heavily on in-person voting.

Because of the incentive structure, the proposal also might be an easier sell to Republicans like Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who worry about federal overreach. LaRose staunchly opposed the Freedom to Vote Act, calling it a power grab on the part of Democrats.

But in an interview with NPR recently, LaRose said he had read the BPC report and that he could see supporting similar legislation. Ohio already complies with more than 80% of the report's standards.

Weil, of the BPC, sees parallels to 2002 when Congress passed a bipartisan set of election reforms in the shadow of the 2000 presidential election, one of the closest and most contentious in modern history.

"Both parties had incentives to do something about the elections process," Weil said. "I think I see some of those same possibilities now."

NPR's Claudia Grisales contributed to this report.

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There are election reforms that both Democrats and Republicans seem to like - NPR

Labor Secretary Marty Walsh argues that payrolls in January rising by 467,000 is a 'very transparent number' even though the benchmark had been revised, which he acknowledged is 'part of' the reason why job growth blew past expectations.

Democrats are touting an unexpectedly positive jobs report Friday after the economy added 467,000 jobs last month a number that's much higher than expected after a massive surge in coronavirus cases late last year.

"The Republicans who are rooting against the economy are the ones hardest hit," a Democratic aide told FOX Business. "They've been cheering against Joe Biden and Dems while we've created a record 7 million jobs in 12 months and 1.7 million over the last three months. There's work to be done, and Democrats are gonna do it whileRepublicans sit on the sidelines and quite literally cheer against America."

"The January jobs report is proof that Democrats economic policies are working and getting our economy back on track," House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said.

"We need to sustain this momentum as we transition from the economic recovery phase to one of sustained, broadly felt growth," he continued. "It is essential that Congress not waste any time enacting further legislation to position American businesses, workers, families, and children in the best possible position to compete in the global economy and Make It In America."

President Biden addresses the 76th Session of the U.N. General Assembly on Sept. 21, 2021, at U.N. headquarters in New York City. Biden is expected to address positive jobs numbers later Friday. (Timothy A. Clary-Pool/Getty Images / Getty Images)

US JOB GROWTH SOARS PAST EXPECTATIONS WITH 467,000 ADDED, SHAKING OFF OMICRON SURGE

The 467,000 increase in payrolls during January easily topped the 150,000 jobs gain forecast by Refinitiv economists. The unemployment rate, which is calculated based on a separate survey, ticked up slightly to 4%.

Further, the December increase in payrolls was revised upward from 199,000 to 510,000.

In remarks later Friday morning, President Biden said the jobs report showed the "extraordinary resilience and grit of the American people, and American capitalism."

"Our country is taking everything that COVID has to throw at us and we've come back stronger," Biden said. "America's job machine is going stronger than ever... America is back to work."

"467,000 jobs added in January, well above expectations," Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., tweeted. "Thank you to the American people. Thank you to @POTUS and@VP. Thank you American Rescue Plan. Democrats are fighting #ForThePeople."

"Todays jobs report makes it clear: President Bidens economic plan is working. The economy is booming, and continues to exceed expectations," Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison said. "Thanks to the work of Democrats who passed the American Rescue Plan, got more than 200 million Americans vaccinated, and tackled supply chain bottlenecks, the economy has created a record over 6.6 million jobs in 12 months, and 2021 was the greatest year of job creation under any president in history."

Even amid a surge in the omicron coronavirus variant, and with many states still not as vaccinated as the Biden administration would like, jobs increased in January. | Getty Images

President Biden, in a tweet, highlighted that more than 6.6 million jobs have been created since he took office.

Republicans and conservatives are not giving the president credit for the jobs bump. Alfredo Ortiz, the CEO and president of the conservative Job Creators Network, said Friday that the positive numbers have more to do with Americans moving on from the pandemic.

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"This is a good number, and its encouraging. It certainly shows Americans are tired of government-induced lockdowns, and a new Johns Hopkins study confirms what we knew all long: Lockdowns dont help," Ortiz said. "Unfortunately, the damage has already been done. We were down 22.4 million jobs at the height of the pandemic.Many of those jobs have returned, thanks to Republican governors and their pro-freedom policies."

Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah., the ranking member of the Joint Economic Committee, said that inflation is still eating away at Americans' paychecks even if they do have jobs.

"Thanks to runaway spending in Congress, inflation is handing most Americans a pay cut, and falling real wages have discouraged many from returning to work," he said. "The threat of vaccine mandates has caused more employers to separate the unvaccinated from their livelihoods."

FOX Business' Megan Henney contributed to this report.

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Democrats tout higher-than-expected January jobs numbers - Fox Business