When every Senate Republican voted against President Biden’s $1.9 trillion rescue package over the weekend, it revived a question that analysts have asked about the modern GOP for decades: Why do so many conservative Americans vote against their own economic interests?…READ MORE
H.R.1, ALSO KNOWN as the “For the People Act,” is a sweeping reform bill that aims to make voting easier, gerrymandering harder, and generally rein in the out-of-control minoritarianism that has come to characterize American democracy. Does it have a chance of becoming law? Rep. John Sarbanes, political scientist Jacob Hacker, and The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz join Ryan Grim to discuss.…READ MORE
Long, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Bernie Sanders, and Senator Elizabeth Warren were in a fierce debate over health care reform. The eventual victor, Biden, initially supported a comparatively modest plan to build on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) with a Medicare-like public option. Sanders, of course, demanded Medicare for All with no cost-sharing. And Warren ended up in between, eventually backing a generous public option as a major step toward a universal Medicare program.…READ MORE
If Joe Biden maintains his steady lead in national polls over President Donald Trump through Election Day, Democrats will win the popular vote for the seventh time in the past eight presidential elections – something no party has achieved since the formation of the modern American political system in 1828.…READ MORE
I interviewed Jacob Hacker (the Stanley Resor professor of political science in Yale), and Paul Pierson (the John Gross professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley) about their new book, “Let them Eat Tweets: How the Right Rules in an Age of Extreme Inequality.”…READ MORE
Historically, conservative political parties face the problem Harvard political scientist Daniel Ziblatt calls “the conservative dilemma.” How does a party that represents the interests of moneyed elites win elections in a democracy? The dilemma sharpens as inequality widens: The more the haves have, the more have-nots there are who will vote to tax them.…READ MORE
The 2016 election was a thrilling victory for the Republican Party, which seized the White House while maintaining majorities in both houses of Congress. Yet many of the economic and health policies the party champions in Washington have limited public support.…READ MORE
‘Let Them Eat Tweets” is not, according to authors Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson, about President Trump. As the titular play on Marie Antoinette’s famous quote suggests, the authors believe that American society is moving toward control by a selfish oligarchy, but they consider the tweeter in chief more consequence than cause.…READ MORE
This book makes its appearance in the thick of a golden age of political journalism. Each Oval Office tantrum has been recounted in graphic detail, every booking at the Trump Hotel given close scrutiny. Never have we known more about inner-sanctum happenings in the White House or about the corruption that can pervade power. Yet such a gusher of scoops makes this a good moment to counterprogram with a solid work of political science.…READ MORE
In mid-April, Bernie Sanders bowed to the inevitable and endorsed Joe Biden. By then, the Democratic left was well into its quadrennial search for culprits. The party establishment had undercut Sanders from the start; primary voters, fixated on “electability,” were excessively risk-averse; the field consolidated in unprecedented fashion after Biden took South Carolina; Elizabeth Warren, after succumbing to sexism, declined to endorse her fellow progressive.…READ MORE
As economies reopen across the United States, tens of millions of Americans who can’t work remotely have become armchair actuaries, forced to figure out for themselves just how risky clocking in to their jobs might be. Of course, for many, the calculation is largely hypothetical. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that declared virus-plagued meatpacking plants “essential infrastructure,” pressuring employees to return to work. The president also promised that his order would “solve any liability problems” plants might face.…READ MORE
Does the Republican Party have a death wish?
Its most prominent leaders — particularly President Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader — have dug themselves into positions that defy all conventional rules of electoral survival. In an election year, even ideologically extreme politicians should try to do popular things and avoid doing unpopular things — if for no other reason than so that they can resume pursuing their extreme goals after Election Day.…READ MORE
Joe Biden has made overtures to progressive Democrats by saying he’ll upgrade his campaign’s health plan. Specifically, after peace talks with Senator Bernie Sanders, he vowed to add a provision to open up Medicare to Americans aged 60 and over (the current age is 65).…READ MORE
On Thursday, March 12th, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, could have insisted that he and his colleagues work through the weekend to hammer out an emergency aid package addressing the coronavirus pandemic. Instead, he recessed the Senate for a long weekend, and returned home to Louisville, Kentucky. McConnell, a seventy-eight-year-old Republican who is about to complete his sixth term as a senator, planned to attend a celebration for a protégé, Justin Walker, a federal judge who was once his Senate intern. McConnell has helped install nearly two hundred conservatives as judges; stocking the judiciary has been his legacy project.…READ MORE
Since 2000, every election I’ve voted in has been cast as the most important of my lifetime. That this is actually true is a measure of how much the gulf between the parties has increased. That it seems far truer today is a measure of how much the Trump presidency and the coronavirus pandemic have raised the stakes.…READ MORE
The World Health Organization has declared that the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, is a pandemic. In the United States there are now more than 1,000 people infected with the virus and 31 have died as of March 11. As we see this crisis continue to unfold, one thing is becoming clear: Universal health care is not just essential to our health and economic security; it is essential to our national security as well.…READ MORE
Last week, Senator Elizabeth Warren released the much-anticipated financing details of her Medicare for All proposal. And they look good — too good, critics say. She has managed to outline a plan that could, in theory, finance generous universal care without a middle-class tax increase.…READ MORE
The pile of Medicare-for-all plans just keeps growing. A new contender is Medicare for America, put forth by Reps. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL). It was heavily informed by the work of Yale professor Jacob Hacker.…READ MORE
The tax cuts passed by Republicans late last year have received no shortage of criticism. But the case against the cuts goes much deeper than even the fiercest opponents of the legislation seem willing to take it.…READ MORE
Tax experts are in widespread agreement that the GOP tax cuts are bad policy — a giveaway to the rich paid for by the middle class and poor, with little upside for the economy. But Congress writes legislation that experts hate all the time. What’s really striking is that the people Congress is supposed to represent also hate the GOP tax cuts, with only around 30 percent of Americans expressing approval.…READ MORE
Much of the debate over the Republican House and Senate tax plans has centered on how they will shift income toward the affluent. But there is a second kind of redistribution in the plans — from Democratic blue states to Republican red states.…READ MORE
A review of Elisbeth Rosenthal’s An American Sickness: A few years back, the future of American health policy appeared to hinge on how similar medical care was to broccoli. It was March 2012, and the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) was before the Supreme Court. Justice Antonin Scalia zeroed in on its controversial requirement that all Americans purchase health insurance. Yes, everybody needs health care, Scalia conceded, but everybody needs food too. If the government could make people buy insurance, why couldn’t it “make people buy broccoli”?…READ MORE
For the first time since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, Democrats are debating the next big steps in federal health policy. What they’re beginning to see is a path toward universal health care that looks very different from that embarked on seven years ago. This path depends on Medicare rather than the expansion of private insurance. And for those most eager to take this route, it depends on achieving something that has proven impossible in the past: replacing the patchwork quilt of American health insurance, including the employment-based health plans that cover more than 150 million people, with a single government insurance program.…READ MORE
