President Joe Biden isn’t going anywhere. In a speech in Madison, Wisconsin this afternoon he made clear he will not be pushed aside and is not only in the race for reelection, he will beat Donald Trump. That is that. He has the skills and experience to win this election and build on the legacy he started during his first term. Here is his speech affirming his commitment to win in November.
The sense of presidential déjà vu is palpable. With the Democratic National Convention scheduled to begin on August 19 in Chicago, we have a president who must address a loss of confidence less than, yet similar to that Lyndon Johnson faced in 1968. I suggested on July 1, “Biden has not changed during the last week. He needs space to see where his campaign is heading after the debate, one in which he admits he did not do well.” He has been given space by many of us, yet the time for a decision is upon us. At most, he has the next week to address the nation and clear the air. No, his July 3 fundraising email titled, “I’m running,” was not persuasive. Nor was his July 3 “vow” to his political supporters to stay in the race.
The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago did not turn out well. Hubert Humphrey was nominated from smoke-filled rooms of the Conrad Hilton Hotel in Chicago while protesters chanted “The whole world is watching.” Humphrey lost the general election to Richard Nixon with third party candidate George Wallace peeling off 46 electoral votes. It was an election I felt at the time Humphrey should have handily won. It broke my teenage belief that Democrats has brought the country together after John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Nixon? Would history have been different if he had the immunity granted to a president by the U.S. Supreme Court this week?
Joe Biden is a decent man, one who can’t make everyone happy. Biden and Johnson stand apart from their peers in the amount of legislation passed during their first full term. Biden’s legislative accomplishments are highlighted by bringing the country out of the coronavirus pandemic, yet much more than that. At the same time, the Israel-Hamas War and Biden’s response to it broke faith with generations of American people born after 1980. The race to defeat Trumpism in November will be hard-fought no matter who Democrats pick as their nominee. Biden is the presumptive nominee as he has the delegates. So was LBJ. An air of uncertainty hangs over July, and is something Biden must address and soon.
Whatever Joe Biden does to clear the air will be welcome. It doesn’t change how hard we must work to elect Democrats in November. Everyone I know is willing to do the work.
There has been a coordinated effort on the part of billionaires to dismantle the American public school system. Iowa has been a part of this effort. Senator Bernie Sanders, chair of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP), released a new report last week. Here is the press release:
WASHINGTON, June 25 – Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) today released a new report detailing the coordinated and growing effort to undermine, dismantle, and privatize the American public education system. This report comes after Sanders led the committee in a hearing last week titled, “The Immediate and Long-Term Challenges Facing Public School Teachers: Low, Pay, Teacher Shortages, and Underfunded Public Schools.”
Written by the HELP Committee’s Majority Staff, the report focuses on the impact of school privatization policies in the form of private school vouchers, which harm public schools, fuel education segregation, largely benefit wealthy families, and provide tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations.
According to the report’s new analysis, over the past decade, state funding for the nation’s public elementary and secondary schools has barely increased, by an average of just 1 percent a year after adjusting for inflation. During this same time, state spending on tax breaks and subsidies for private schools has skyrocketed by 408 percent, or $7 billion. These costs do not include 9 states that recently enacted, but have not fully implemented, their universal private school voucher policies – which will likely cause costs to further spike in coming years.
“Over the past decade, there has been a coordinated effort on the part of right-wing billionaires to undermine, dismantle and sabotage our nation’s public schools and to privatize our education system,” said Chairman Sanders. “That is absolutely unacceptable. We can no longer tolerate billionaires and multi-national corporations receiving massive tax breaks and subsidies while children in America are forced to go to under-staffed, under-resourced, and under-funded public schools. On this 70th anniversary year of Brown v. Board of Education, let us recommit to creating an education system that works for all of our people, not just the wealthy few.”
The American public K-12 school system serves about 91 percent of students across the country and employs 3.5 million teachers. Funded through taxpayer dollars, the system relies on 44 percent local funding, 46 percent state funding, and only 10 percent in federal funding. However, in the last three years, an unprecedented number of states with Republican-led legislatures have expanded their private school voucher programs, draining hundreds of millions of dollars from state budgets and public education systems to fund private schools.
One example the report examines is Arizona. In 2022, Arizona passed the nation’s first universal-eligibility private school voucher program. Originally forecast to cost $65 million in Fiscal Year 2024, the state later warned that the program could cost $944 million annually, subsidizing many students who never attended public schools to begin with. This could result in a $320 million gap in the overall state budget. While 92 percent of Arizona’s students are enrolled in public school, less than half of new K-12 education spending in the state’s FY24 budget would go towards public education. With the money it spends on private school vouchers, Arizona could hire 15,730 more public school teachers and pay them at least $60,000 a year.
Some additional findings from the report include:
As Chairman of the HELP Committee, Sanders has introduced legislation that would address the teacher shortage across the U.S. and substantially increase funding for public schools in high-poverty districts. The Pay Teachers Act ensures all public school teachers earn at least $60,000 a year with increases over the course of their career, and would triple funding for Title I – the major federal program that provides resources to low-income school districts. Sanders has also introduced legislation to make public colleges and universities tuition-free and debt free and to cancel all student debt.
Read the full report, here.
Iowa has begun an experiment in private school vouchers. What Sanders is saying is it is not an experiment at all, just a manifestation of the wants and desires of billionaires. What should we do about this. Support Democratic state house candidates in the Nov. 5 election.
In Trump vs. United States, the U.S. Supreme Court decided 6-3 the president has some immunity from prosecution for breaking the law. This ruptures the notion that no one is above the law in this country. I plan to take my time to understand the high court decision. I went outside for a shift in the garden.
After watching a bee covered in pollen (so much it couldn’t fly until after shaking some off), planting eggplant and lettuce in the covered row, and harvesting greens for vegetable broth and enough zucchini to choke a neighborhood, here is how it will roll. I will lurk to let pundits, analysts, content creators, & social media weirdos weigh in on the immunity decision before opening my mouth. Couple weeks, maybe. Also, I ask the question, “What else does this Roberts Court have in store for us next year?”
We survived the announcement. From here on I advise having a listen to Marilyn Sellars rendition of One Day at a Time then work to elect Democrats.
The final week of June must have come directly from hell. There was substantial action at the state and federal level — none of it good — and despite that, the presidential debate pushed everything aside leaving a landscape littered with the broken dreams of sensible people. It is difficult to comprehend just what happened. What did happen? What should be our focus going forward?
First things first. The Iowa Supreme Court decision to lift the injunction against the so-called heartbeat bill turned out to be anti-climactic. The law bans abortions once fetal cardiac activity is detected, typically at six weeks of pregnancy before many women know they are pregnant. Despite a thoughtful dissenting opinion by Chief Justice Susan Christensen, scattered protests by political activists around the state, and 60 percent of Iowans supporting access to an abortion, this decision was a sleeper. Can reproductive freedom impact the 2024 and 2026 elections? Yes it can, as I previously wrote. The event of Friday’s Iowa Supreme Court decision release neither helped nor hindered that possibility.
Let’s discuss the presidential debate on Thursday, June 27. I had no interest in watching it live, or afterward, nor did I. I see what you people are saying in your posts. Give it a rest. If it’s time for Joe Biden to withdraw from the race for president and retire, he will. As Biden said on Friday, “When you get knocked down, you get back up.” I sense there will soon be a speech about his campaign.
On Friday, Julie Gammack of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative quoted former Senator Tom Harkin as saying, “Last night was a disaster from which Biden cannot recover.” I love the senator, yet not so fast!
Biden has not changed during the last week. He needs space to see where his campaign is heading after the debate, one in which he admits he did not do well. I see polls taken since the debate flipped from slightly favoring Trump to slightly favoring Biden. Polls are brief snapshots in time and we shouldn’t make much of them. I land the same place Bill McKibben does regarding the post-debate environment.
…the tectonic plates shifted. And in ways that open up the possibility not just of decisively defeating Trumpism, but of pulling the country out of the polarized death spiral we’ve fallen into. But it’s going to take a while to play out, I think—time that we should grant Joe Biden, who’s at one of those hard, interesting, decisive points that come in the course of a life and of a nation. (Bill McKibben from The Crucial Years, June 29, 2024).
Recommend reading McKibben’s entire post here.
I would like to have been a fly on the wall at Camp David over the weekend when three generations of Bidens informally gathered. Those who know Biden recognize any change in course on the path to a nomination (for which he already has the pledged delegates) will be decided by Joe and Jill Biden. If he is considering retirement now, there is no public indication of it.
Overshadowing the presidential debate and parochial issues in Iowa was the decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Loper Bright Enterprises, et.al. vs.Raimondo and Relentless, Inc., Department of Commerce, et.al. which overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council.
U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had something to say about this in the following excerpt from her press release after the decision was announced.
June 28, 2024
WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) released the statement below following the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless, Inc. v. Department of Commerce, which overturned Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the long-standing precedent that courts provide deference to an agency’s interpretation of ambiguous federal statutes.
“This is a seismic shift. Congress passes laws and then federal agencies use their deep knowledge and expertise to implement them. In overturning decades of settled law, this extreme Court has given itself the power to second guess even the most complex regulatory decisions. This decision will result in chaos and undermine our ability to protect the health and safety of all Americans.”
As a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Klobuchar has emphasized the importance of the Chevron doctrine, and specifically asked each of Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominees, all of whom joined today’s decision to overturn the landmark decision, if they would respect Chevron as precedent.
In 2017, during Justice Neil Gorsuch’s Senate confirmation hearing, Klobuchar pressed Gorsuch on his view, articulated as a lower court judge, that Chevron should be overturned. His views on Chevron were part of the reason Klobuchar did not vote to confirm Gorsuch.
In 2018, during Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate confirmation hearing, Klobuchar questioned Kavanaugh on his views, wherein he stated that “Chevron serves good purposes… [AND] courts should not be unduly second-guessing agencies.”
In 2020, during Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation process, in response to written questions submitted by Klobuchar, Barrett affirmed that Chevron was “a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis.”
Obviously, stare decisis has flown out the window with this and other laws decided by a radical Supreme Court. It is a big deal. For more details, read Senator Klobuchar’s entire statement here.
Like many Iowa Democrats, I was not enthusiastic about Joe Biden during any of the three times he sought support in the Iowa caucuses. The fact is, his administration has performed reasonably well on issues that matter to progressives… and to everyone. He’s not perfect. What president has been? If he continues to run, and he said he will, we must do everything possible to elect him. Our work doesn’t change no matter who is the nominee.
We are all aware of the ticking clock to the November election. After a week from hell, we need to take a moment to collect ourselves, and then get back to work electing Democrats. The consequences of doing otherwise could be worse than hell.
How does one cope with the fact Republicans hold all four Iowa congressional seats? Figure out a connection to some other Democrat. For me, that’s Jan Schakowsky who represents Illinois’ 9th Congressional District, including Skokie, where our child lives. Her periodic newsletters keep me up to speed without all the high drama of following Democratic leadership, and avoids the complaint-filled disinformation of my Republican member.
The passage of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act) is always a dogfight. Rep. Schakowsy tells it like it is as a Democrat. The good thing about following her is it gives me a starting point in discussing politics with our child. She is also in the thick of what’s happening. Here is her June 19 newsletter about the NDAA passing the U.S. House:
Last week, I joined nearly all Democrats in voting against passage of the shortsighted and harmful National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for Fiscal Year 2025. The original NDAA that passed out of committee 57-1 included numerous provisions that would make life better for service members and their families, including a 19.5% pay raise for junior enlisted troops, a 4.5% increase for all other service members, increased investments in childcare, and a restoration of the full Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH). These policies would go a long way towards helping ensure our military personnel and their families have what they need and deserve to thrive.
Unfortunately, the version of the NDAA that made it to the House floor included poison pill provisions that would make it impossible for women in uniform to get access to the reproductive health care they need, eliminate the office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Department of Defense, and attack the rights of LGBTQI+ service members and their families. This bill would do active harm to our national security and military readiness, and I could not vote for a bill that assaults our fundamental freedoms and attacks countless Americans.
In closing, I would like to take time to recognize Juneteenth National Independence Day. It was on this day, 159 years ago, that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas with word of President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. At long last, the remaining slaves were freed.
Black history is American history, and it should not be ignored, morphed, nor hidden. Juneteenth is a day for us all to come together to talk about our past and look towards our future. We cannot allow those who peddle fear and prejudice to take our country backwards. I will continue to use my platform to fight for a more equitable nation for all.Have a great rest of the week, Jan.
If you seek to follow your children’s congressperson, or anything happening in the U.S. House, here is a link to the House master alert page. Follow this link to find a specific congressperson.
A breaker boy was a coal-mining worker in the United States whose job was to separate impurities from coal by hand in a coal breaker. The use of breaker boys began in the mid-1860s, according to Wikipedia. Although public disapproval of the employment of children as breaker boys existed by the mid-1880s, the practice did not end until the early 1920s, after the Keating-Owen Child Labor Act was signed into federal law in 1916. Later, along came Governor Reynolds, the Iowa Legislature, and a group of lobbyists like the Iowa Restaurant Association to change things around regarding child labor.
Governor Reynolds signed Senate File 542, an act relating to youth employment, into law on May 26, 2023. Legislators, the governor, and lobbyists had every reason to know the new law conflicted with standing federal law. The U.S. Department of Labor weighed in almost immediately, saying outright that Iowa’s new child labor law conflicted with federal law. Republicans and their crew did not care.
After the Iowa child labor law passed, restaurants and other covered workplaces began to enact its provisions. NOT SO FAST! said the feds, who fined improper users of child labor tens of thousands of dollars in accordance with federal regulations. The governor decried the penalties as EXCESSIVE! and scheduled a press conference in North Liberty on June 24 to air grievances.
Unaware as she appeared to be at the time to what is actually going on in Iowa — namely severe flooding in Northwest Iowa — she did cancel the labor press conference to spend time where she should have been all along, touring the flooded areas, asking President Joe Biden and FEMA for help, and doing what is right for Iowans in time of natural disasters. The latest news is Governor Reynolds plans to reschedule the child labor press conference on how mean the federal government is for enforcing the law.
What in the Sam Hill is going on? They knew the new law conflicted with federal law. I don’t believe it is about that. All roads lead to abortion in Iowa politics and here’s a connection.
Historian, raconteur, and chronicler of our daily lives in the United States Heather Cox Richardson wrote the following on the second anniversary of Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization:
In the decision, written by Alito, the court said that the right to determine abortion rights must be returned “to the people’s elected representatives” at the state level. This construction of American law is central to the right-wing project of dismantling the federal government which, under the Fourteenth Amendment, is charged with protecting equal rights in the states. Centering the states, which determine who can vote within them, enables a minority to dominate the majority. (Letters to an American, June 24, 2024).
Does the federal government have primacy through the Fourteenth Amendment in protecting the rights of children who work outside the home? Despite being wrong in Senate File 542, Reynolds and her Republican crew make the assertion that children should be allowed to work under less restrictive rules and employers should be held harmless. Iowa, and other similar Republican states, attempt to drive the train of what is permissible within state boundaries. The ultimate goal of bad laws, and ensuing lawsuits and conflicts, is the distraction from a coarsening of Iowa life which includes restrictions on abortion, defunding public education, and in this case a permissive child labor law. A majority of Iowans support protecting children (and all workers) in the workplace. Republicans in our government simply don’t care because they have an agenda of dismantling the federal government and cementing themselves in power.
Groups like the one who quickly scheduled a counter-press conference in North Liberty on June 24, headed by State Senator Zach Wahls, County Supervisor Rod Sullivan, and others, are important to hold the line against the governor’s aggressive approach to implementing bad labor policy.
At our most human level, we know abusing children in the workplace is wrong. What is worse is when our government favors the desires of business to keep their costs low and permits such abuses. Even if it means breaking federal law. Everyone knows it is wrong for children to work in coal mines. Our government should know that by now. Thank goodness the coal fields in Iowa have diminished or Republicans would be revisiting using breaker boys again.
Iowa House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst said the message for Democratic candidates is clear in 2024. There are two issues: reproductive freedom and public education. Both are equally important. Where the rubber meets the road, during local political canvassing, many voters equate a discussion about “reproductive freedom” with one about “abortion.” In fact, Konfrst used both terms in her speech to delegates at the June 15 state convention. My question is will “reproductive freedom” do the work?
In my latest iteration as a political canvasser, beginning during the 2004 election cycle, I’ve been meeting with voters where they are. No one keeps track of how many voters they contact, yet certain themes stand out. One of them is abortion.
There is a hard line for people who oppose abortion. It’s the first question they ask of a canvasser, and the first one to shut down any dialogue if the answer is wrong. “Your candidate wants abortion to be legal? This conversation is over.” The main purpose of the canvass was accomplished: This voter is in the no column. It’s time to move on.
Polling done by the Des Moines Register is clear: “61 percent of Iowans say abortion should be legal in most or all cases and 33 percent said it should be illegal in most or all cases.” Establishing the ability for women and their physician to choose to have an abortion as part of women’s health care has broad support. The key question is will that matter in a hyper-partisan election? The Magic 8 ball returned “Reply hazy, try again.”
At one of my workplaces, my supervisor was an anti-abortion activist. That made for interesting conversations while traversing the countryside together in a rental car, listening to Rush Limbaugh, and making sales calls. I can’t count how many times I heard statistics on abortions from him. Some facts: before Dobbs, in 2021, there were 3,761 recorded abortions in Iowa. 625,978 were reported to the Centers for Disease Control that year. Literally millions of children were being killed by abortionists, my supervisor said. This was the same person who enabled me to meet John McCain, allowed me to register people to vote in the workplace, and let me lobby for the company with Dave Loebsack while we were in D.C. It was a weird work experience.
My point in telling this story is I learned the anti-abortion crowd is well financed, highly organized, and well connected. Groups like Heritage Action, part of the dark money Koch network, plan to keep awareness of how to restrict abortion rights front and center. They are in it for the long haul and are willing to spend resources and time accomplishing their objectives.
It is important to remember anti-abortion activists worked continuously for five decades to overturn Roe vs. Wade. They will not walk away from an electorate because polling shows voters favor the ability to have an abortion. We recently saw debates about abortion pills, in vitro fertilization, military policy toward abortion, and more. Women’s health care will be a constant presence in the election, creating a haze of what-aboutism, misinformation, disinformation, and outright deception. The intent is to obfuscate and by doing so, prevent Democrats from getting elected. Konfrst is right: we need to address this head on through our campaign messaging.
Will voters who support restricting abortion rights crossover and vote for Joe Biden and down ballot Democrats? I wouldn’t think so. We must know who they are and formally identify them in our database. Talking to them may be a lost cause, yet it is part of the canvassing work.
Democrats can bridge the gap where people live. There may be people, regardless of party registration for whom right to choose is valued. According to the Register poll, there are a lot of them. Once we find those people we must give them support, and if needed, some cover in return for a vote. That’s a lot different from asking whether they will vote for a specific candidate. It requires a longer term commitment to community that goes beyond elections. It would be good for Democrats to learn how to do that, and fast.
When it comes to messaging for the November election, we should follow the lead of our political leaders. To the extent Democrats do that, and frame the discussion as one of “reproductive freedom,” winning is possible. In the end, though, we will be talking about abortion because that is the vernacular voters use. There is no escaping it. We should embrace it.
The metaphor Iowa Democratic Party Chair Rita Hart used at the June 15 state convention was apt. After saying Democratic candidates had a tough road ahead, she likened the work leading to the November election to clearing rocks from a farm field. Hart talked about her experience farming in Iowa, having to pick rocks from fields with her siblings, reported the Iowa Capitol Dispatch.
“Sometimes, I think we’re in a rocky place right now, right?” Hart said. “And we’ve got to pick up that rock that makes the most sense for us. … Find the thing that you can do, that you can contribute to this effort, and do it in spades. That’s what we’ve got to do from now until November.”
Democratic political operatives are more used to having a specific plan, falling in line, and then working the plan. “Find the thing that you can do…” is counterintuitive. People scratch their head and ask, what does that even mean. I believe Hart is getting at the idea that Democrats must take more ownership of our politics now that the coordinated campaign is in the rear view mirror. There is no presidential campaign to filter down directives on what should be happening on the ground. As individual Democrats, we own this campaign. If we do the work, we have a chance of winning. There will be no more bitching about the coordinated campaign because it’s permanently gone. Simply the work remains.
It will also be challenging for Iowa Democrats to stay on message during the upcoming fall campaign. That’s mostly because the Republican Party is such an unruly, authoritarian mess. Legislation passed in recent sessions obfuscates the legislative terrain and serves as chaff clogging the radar of Democrats getting their bearings.
A case in point is the law passed last session related to immigration. Democrats and everyone with half a brain knew from jump street the law would not pass judicial muster. Republicans didn’t care if they would be sued over it. When U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Locher issued a preliminary injunction, everyone knew the argument that federal immigration law preempted the state law would prevail. As reported by the Cedar Rapids Gazette, “As a matter of politics, the new legislation might be defensible,” Locher wrote in his decision. “As a matter of constitutional law, it is not.”
Whether it be abortion, education, immigration, or whatever, poorly written, Republican-backed legislation is expected to raise a number of political issues this year. Attorney General Brenna Bird will be busy. It will serve as a distraction from Democratic work to focus messaging on women’s health care, abortion policy, and education.
At the convention, Iowa House Democratic Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst had a message for all Iowa Democratic candidates for this fall’s elections: When talking to voters, stay on message, and that message should be about reproductive freedom and education policies.
“Message discipline is critically important this year, every year,” Konfrst said as reported in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. “But this year especially because Iowans are voting on two issues this year: What’s on their mind is public education and abortion and reproductive freedom. And guess what. They’re with us. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. … “(Republicans) are wrong on public education and reproductive freedom. They’re wrong, and Iowans aren’t with them. Iowans are with us. So we’re going to talk about the issues that matter to Iowans, not just to us.”
Democrats own a clear goal for concise messaging. Republicans are all over the map with bad laws, lawsuits, negative reactions to the federal government, and generalized hubris cluttering the campaign battlefields. I don’t know if that creates an electoral environment where Democrats win. It clears the field for a new kind of politics. What do Democrats have to lose?
On Thursday, the U.S. Supreme Court decided Food and Drug Administration, et. al., vs. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, et.al., a case about use of the drug mifepristone in terminating pregnancies up to seven weeks. The high court found unanimously the plaintiffs lacked standing. They did have other things to say.
Is the Supreme Court calling balls and strikes in this decision? No, they are not.
Politico journalist Alice Miranda Ollstein identified four anti-abortion wins buried in the Supreme Court’s unanimous ruling against them. Read Ollstein’s entire article on Politico’s free website here and give her a follow. My short summary of the pitfalls she identified is as follows:
What may seem like a clean win for proponents of use of the drug mifepristone for ending pregnancies is not clean at all. I recommend reading Ollstein’s entire article here. It seems easy to predict this issue will return to the Supreme Court soon.
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