Joe Biden draws ire from opponents in recalling ‘civility’ with segregationists
Joe Biden is under fire from rival Democratic presidential hopefuls for saying the Senate “got things done” with “civility” even when the body included segregationists. Speaking at a New York fundraiser Tuesday evening, he pointed to long-dead segregationist senators James Eastland of Mississippi and Herman Talmadge of Georgia to argue that Washington functioned more smoothly a generation ago than under today’s “broken” hyperpartisanship. “We didn’t agree on much of anything,” Biden said of the two men, who were prominent senators when Biden was elected in 1972. Biden described Talmadge as “one of the meanest guys I ever knew” and said Eastland called him “son,” though not “boy,” a reference to the racist way many whites addressed black men at the time. Yet even in that Senate, Biden said, “At least there was some civility. We got things done.” The comments quickly sparked one of the most intense disputes of the Democratic presidential primary, underscoring the risk to Biden as he tries to turn his decades of Washington experience into an advantage. Instead, he’s infuriating Democrats who say he’s out of step with the diverse party of the 21st century. Sen. Cory Booker, one of two major black candidates seeking the Democratic nomination, said Biden’s “relationships with proud segregationists are not the model for how we make America a safer and more inclusive place for black people and for everyone,” and he called for the Biden to apologize. “I have to tell Vice President Biden, as someone I respect, that he is wrong for using his relationships with Eastland and Talmadge as examples of how to bring our country together,” the New Jersey Democrat said in a statement that was especially notable coming from a candidate who entered the 2020 primary with a sunny message, vowing to highlight “the best of who we are and not the worst.” New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, a fellow Democratic presidential candidate and a white man who is married to a black woman, also offered a sharp retort. “It’s 2019 & @JoeBiden is longing for the good old days of ‘civility’ typified by James Eastland,” de Blasio tweeted Wednesday, along with a picture of his family. “Eastland thought my multiracial family should be illegal.” The mayor added that “it’s past time for apologies or evolution” from Biden, whom de Blasio cast as “out of step with the values of the modern Democratic Party.” Cedric Richmond, Biden’s campaign co-chairman and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, pushed back, saying Biden’s opponents are deliberately ignoring the full context of his argument for a more functional government. “Maybe there’s a better way to say it, but we have to work with people, and that’s a fact,” Richmond said, noting he recently dealt with President Donald Trump to pass a long-sought criminal justice overhaul. “I question his racial sensitivity, a whole bunch of things about his character … but we worked together.” Likewise, Richmond said, Biden highlighted Jim Crow-era senators to emphasize the depths of disagreements elected officials sometimes navigate. “If he gets elected president, we don’t have 60 votes in the Senate” to overcome filibusters, Richmond noted. “He could be less genuine and say, ‘We’re just going to do all these things.’ But we already have a president like that. (Biden) knows we have to build consensus.” Bakari Sellers, a prominent black South Carolina Democrat who backs California Sen. Kamala Harris for president, countered that Biden’s remarks are nonetheless part of a pattern that calls into question the notion that he’s the most electable Democrat. “It’s death by a thousand cuts,” Sellers said, noting that Biden’s status as a 76-year-old white man from the political establishment may help him with some white voters who backed Trump but could cost him with black voters, women and younger voters necessary for any Democrat to win the White House. “You aren’t going to build the winning coalition like this,” Sellers said. “The argument should be, ‘Joe Biden is the most electable if he will get out of his own way.’” The flare-up came on Juneteenth, the commemoration of the end of slavery in the United States, and on the same day that a congressional panel held an initial hearing on the idea of reparations to compensate Americans who suffer from the legacy of slavery and racism. For his part, Biden has shown some self-awareness of the political peril of talking about the upside of working with those who hold opposing views. He sometimes notes he will “get in trouble” before making his standard pitch that the “other side” is “the opposition” but not “the enemy.” His riffs are sometimes as innocuous as calling Bob Dole, the 95-year-old former Senate majority leader and 1996 Republican presidential nominee, a “decent guy” or paying homage to “my friend John McCain,” the former Arizona senator and 2008 GOP presidential nominee who died in 2018.But other times he ventures into more controversial territory. In the months before he announced his bid, Biden clarified remarks in which he called Vice President Mike Pence a “decent guy” after activists noted the Republican vice president’s opposition to LGBTQ civil rights protections. Biden said he offered his remarks in a “foreign policy context” and added, “There is nothing decent about being anti-LGBTQ civil rights.”Some Democrats hammered Biden for arguing that Republicans on Capitol Hill will have an “epiphany” and start working with Democrats again once Trump has left office, noting the GOP congressional blockade of President Barack Obama, whom Biden served for eight years as vice president.Biden has written and spoken for years of his relationships across a spectrum of politicians. Earlier this year, he eulogized former Sen. Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, who was once a segregationist state legislator and governor. In 2003, Biden gave the same honor to Republican Strom Thurmond, another former South Carolina politician who was among the first “Southern Democrats” to leave the party over its civil rights stances. At a May fundraiser in New Hampshire, Biden recalled as a young
Terri Sewell successful in securing critical HBCU funding
Congresswoman Terri Sewell has been a consistent champion for Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) throughout her time in congress. Today, she announced that the efforts she led to provide valuable funding for HBCUs was included in the “Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education and Related Agencies Appropriations, Act 2020” (H.R. 2740) that passed the House. There are a total of 107 HBCUs in the U.S. Sewell has seven out of fourteen of Alabama’s qualified schools in her district. In a statement Sewell said, “The seven HBCUs in Alabama’s 7th Congressional District are built upon rich legacies that continue to leave a lasting impact on the world around us, preparing graduates for competitive jobs in our 21st century economy. The bill passed today provides over $50 million to our nation’s HBCUs for the repair and renovation of facilities and $20 million to ease the financial burdens of our most vulnerable institutions, like Stillman College, by allowing these historic institutions to continue providing students with high-quality educational opportunities.” In March, Sewell led a group of her colleagues in a letter urging House appropriators to provide robust funding in Fiscal Year 2020 for the HBCU Capital Financing Loan Program deferment authority. The Department of Education outlines the types of expenditures allowed under the Capital Financing Loan Program. Specifically according to their website, “the program provides HBCUs with access to capital financing or refinancing for the repair, renovation, and construction of classrooms, libraries, laboratories, dormitories, instructional equipment, and research instrumentation.” Sewell’s office said in a statement that “Loan deferment is invaluable to HBCUs that have demonstrated significant financial constraints as a result of the 2008 economic recession.” Sewell’s office noted that “The funding bill passed today includes $50,484,000 for the HBCU Capital Financing program – $10 million more than fiscal year 2019 funding – and $20 million for the deferment of loans made under the HBCU Capital Loan Financing Program for certain private and public HBCUs, including Stillman College, that struggle financially.” They pointed out that, “Sewell has led the effort in successfully securing deferment language and funding for the past three fiscal years on behalf of HBCUs.” According to the Department of Education, “The Higher Education Act of 1965, as amended, said “…any historically black college or university that was established prior to 1964, whose principal mission was, and is, the education of black Americans, and that is accredited by a nationally recognized accrediting agency or association determined by the Secretary [of Education] to be a reliable authority as to the quality of training offered or is, according to such an agency or association, making reasonable progress toward accreditation.”
Majority worry about 2020 meddling
A majority of Americans are concerned that a foreign government might interfere in some way in the 2020 presidential election, whether by tampering with election results, stealing information or by influencing candidates or voter opinion, a new poll shows. The poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research finds Democrats far more likely to express the highest level of concern, but Democrats and Republicans alike have at least some concerns about interference. Overall, half of Americans say they’re extremely or very concerned about foreign interference in the form of altered election results or voting systems, even though hackers bent on causing widespread havoc at polling places face challenges in doing so. An additional quarter is somewhat concerned. Similarly, about half are very concerned by the prospect of foreign governments influencing political candidates or affecting voters’ perceptions of the candidates, along with hacking candidate computer systems to steal information. In total, the poll, conducted Thursday through Monday, shows 63 percent of Americans have major concerns about at least one of those types of foreign election interference, including 80 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of Republicans. The results make clear that despite the efforts of U.S. officials to ward off election interference and to urge public awareness and calm, Americans remain anxious that some of the same tactics Russia used to meddle in the 2016 presidential election could surface again in the next race. Those include the spread of disinformation online to sow divisions among American voters, and the hacking by military intelligence officers of Democratic emails that were then published by WikiLeaks in the run-up to the election. The efforts were aimed at helping Republican Donald Trump over Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, according to special counsel Robert Mueller’s report. “I think that it’s been pretty well-documented that people have been influenced in the past by social media,” said Luci Dvorak, 32, an Illinois teacher. She said she found it concerning that Trump has been “very casual” about getting foreign help and even seemed to invite it. Trump said in a television interview last week that he would be open to receiving a foreign government’s help in the next election. He slightly walked back those comments in a follow-up interview, saying that though he would want to look at foreign dirt on an opponent to assess if it was correct, he would “of course” also report it to the FBI or the attorney general. U.S. officials are on high alert to protect against interference like what occurred in 2016. FBI Director Chris Wray has said the bureau regards last November’s midterm elections as a “dress rehearsal for the big show in 2020.” He has said efforts to undermine democracy and influence public opinion through social media, propaganda and false personas have continued unabated and are “not just an election-cycle threat.” “We saw that, therefore, continue full speed in 2018, in the midterms,” Wray said in April at a Council on Foreign Relations event. “What we did not see in 2018 was any material impact or interference with election infrastructure or, you know, campaign infrastructure.” The decentralized nature of the country’s elections, which are run on a local level and rely on different and varied voting systems, would make it hard for hackers to cause widespread problems. But concerns remain: Russian hackers gained access to voter databases in two Florida counties ahead of the 2016 election. Federal officials are also conducting a forensic analysis of electronic poll books to see if Russian military hackers who targeted a software provider may have tampered with registration information to disrupt voting in a North Carolina county. The poll was conducted roughly two months after the release of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his investigation into potential coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia. That report did not establish a criminal conspiracy between Trump associates and the Kremlin to sway the outcome of the election. It did not reach a conclusion on whether the president had criminally obstructed justice, citing a Justice Department legal opinion that says sitting presidents cannot be indicted. Trump has repeatedly said the report found “no collusion” and claimed vindication in Attorney General William Barr’s announcement that he found Mueller’s evidence insufficient to establish an obstruction charge. The poll shows about half of Americans think the Mueller report did not completely clear Trump of obstruction, while many also think it didn’t clear him of coordinating with Russia. Overall, 48 percent said they think the report didn’t clear Trump of obstruction, while just 20 percent think it did. Another 30 percent say they don’t know enough to say. Many Americans — 44 percent — also think the report did not clear Trump of coordination with Russia, while 24 percent think it did and 31 percent aren’t sure. “It’s the twisting of the opposition party that’s given him all this static, where he’s not able to move or do what he’d like to do,” said 88-year-old Dennis Halaszynski, who is retired and lives in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. “They said at the beginning that he’s going to go to jail, and they’re doing their best to put him in jail,” he added. “He’s just not having the time, the proper time, to do what he’d like to do.” The AP-NORC poll of 1,116 adults was conducted June 13-17 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 4.0 percentage points. Respondents were first selected randomly using address-based sampling methods, and later interviewed online or by phone. By Eric Tucker and Emily Swanson Associated Press. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
Donald Trump, launches reelection, calls Democrats ‘radical’
President Donald Trump jabbed at the press and poked the political establishment he ran against in 2016 as he kicked off his reelection campaign with a grievance-filled rally focused more on settling scores than laying out his agenda for a possible second term. Addressing a crowd of thousands at Orlando’s Amway Center on Tuesday night, Trump complained he was “under assault from the very first day” of his presidency by a “fake news media” and an “illegal witch hunt” that had tried to keep him and his supporters down. He painted a disturbing picture of what life would look like if he loses in 2020, accusing his critics of “un-American conduct” and saying Democrats “want to destroy you and they want to destroy our country as we know it.”“A vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism and the destruction of the American dream,” he said. Trump made only passing mention of any of the Democrats running to replace him even as he tossed out “radical” and “unhinged” to describe the rival party. Trump has long railed against the special counsel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and the ongoing probes by House Democrats in the aftermath of Robert Mueller‘s report. The apocalyptic language and finger-pointing made clear that Trump’s 2020 campaign will probably look a whole lot like his run three years ago. Even after two-and-a-half years in the Oval Office, Trump remains focused on energizing his base and offering himself as a political outsider running against Washington. Republican Party Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel tweeted Wednesday morning that Trump had raised $24.8 million in less than 24 hours for his reelection. In his speech, Trump spent considerably more time focused on former Democratic rival Hillary Clinton than on his current 2020 challengers, even though she is not on the ballot. Thousands of Trump supporters began gathering outside the arena on Monday. “Trump has been the best president we’ve ever had,” said Ron Freitas, a retired Merchant Marine and registered Democrat from Orlando. Hundreds of anti-Trump protesters clapped and took photos when a 20-foot (6-meter) blimp of a snarling Trump baby in a diaper was inflated. Some members of the far-right group Proud Boys were also spotted marching outside the rally. Trump aides scheduled the kickoff near the four-year anniversary of the day when the former reality television star and New York tabloid fixture launched his longshot campaign for president with a famous escalator ride in front of a crowd that included paid actors. Trump spoke fondly of his 2016 race, calling it “a defining moment in American history.” He said that in the years since, he had upended Washington, staring down “a corrupt and broken political establishment” and restoring a government “of, for and by the people.” He never has really stopped running. He filed for reelection on Jan. 20, 2017, the day of his inauguration, and held his first 2020 rally in February, 2017, in nearby Melbourne. He has continued holding his signature “Make America Great Again” rallies in the months since. Trump asked the crowd whether he should stick with “Make America Great Again” or upgrade his slogan. His new one — “Keep America Great” — was greeted with boisterous cheers. Trump is hoping to replicate the dynamics that allowed him to take charge of the Republican Party and then the presidency as an insurgent intent on disrupting the status quo. In 2016, he successfully appealed to disaffected voters who felt left behind by economic dislocation and demographic shifts. He has no intention of abandoning that mantle, even if he is the face of the institutions he looks to disrupt. The president underscored that on the eve of the rally in must-win Florida, returning to the hardline immigration themes of his first campaign by tweeting that next week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement “will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States.” That promise, which came with no details and sparked Democratic condemnation, seemed to offer a peek into a campaign that will largely be fought along the same lines as his first bid, with very few new policy proposals for a second term. Early Democratic front-runner Joe Biden said Trump’s politics are “all about dividing us” in ways that are “dangerous — truly, truly dangerous.”Another leading Democratic contender, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, said Trump had delivered “an hour-and-a-half speech of lies, distortions and total, absolute nonsense.” But those involved in the president’s reelection effort believe his version of populism, combined with his mantra to “Drain the Swamp,” still resonates, despite his administration’s ties with lobbyists and corporations and the Trump family’s apparent efforts to profit off the presidency. Critics have pointed out his constant promotion for his golf courses, both at home and abroad, and note that this daughter, White House senior aide Ivanka Trump, made $4 million last year from her stake in the president’s Washington hotel, which has become a favored destination for foreign nationals looking to curry favor with the administration. Advisers believe that, in an age of extreme polarization, many Trump backers view their support for the president as part of their identity, one not easily shaken. They point to his seemingly unmovable support with his base supporters as evidence that he is still viewed the same way he was as a candidate: a political rebel. Trump tried to make the case that he had made good on his 2016 promises, including cracking down on illegal immigration and boosting jobs.Near the rally’s end, Trump ran through a list of promises for a second term, pledging a new immigration system, new trade deals, a health care overhaul and a cure for cancer and “many diseases,” including eradicating AIDS in America.
Dan Sutter: The high cost of zoning
The state legislature gave Alabama’s public school teachers a 4 percent raise this year. Relaxing zoning and land use laws in America’s most productive cities could give us all a similar raise. Zoning illustrates the costs of a permission-based economy. How do land use regulations in New York or San Francisco affect America? Businesses with new products or new technology can create value for our economy but need to hire workers. While virtual offices are now a possibility, workers still generally need to be on the premises. A growing economy needs people to move to new jobs. The auto industry’s growth in the 20thCentury illustrates this. Thousands of families moved to Michigan from states as far away as Alabama and Mississippi. The good paying jobs lifted these families into the middle class, and the workers helped the industry reach its full potential. The families that moved to the jobs were better off, while affordable cars improved life for Americans. The migration also benefitted those who stayed behind. The departure of some workers to Michigan increased wages for the people remaining in Alabama or Kentucky. Yet people can move to jobs only if housing is available where industry is thriving. Michigan built homes and apartments to accommodate new workers. Over the past forty years, zoning and land use regulations have largely choked off building in East and West coast cities with thriving industries like finance and high tech. As Harvard University economist Edward Glaeser puts it, the “most productive parts of America [have] stopped adding population” due to regulatory barriers. Productive industries will pay high salaries to attract people to their jobs. Economic theory tells us that with residential construction limited, house prices and rents will rise to offset high salaries. People choose not to move to the high paying jobs because of high housing costs. Thriving businesses cannot hire all the needed workers, making our economy poorer. How much poorer? Economists Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti offer an estimate. To do so they use estimates of available land and the stringency of regulatory barriers on construction in 220 U.S. metro areas. They particularly focus on New York, San Francisco, and San Jose. Between 1964 and 2009, productivity increased dramatically in these cities, indicating the potential to add high paying jobs, and salaries rose. Employment, however, did not increase relative to the economy, and housing prices spiked. Hsieh and Moretti estimate that restrictions on building reduced growth nationally by 36 percent between 1964 and 2009, leading GDP to be 4 percent lower today than otherwise. News reports put a human face on the housing shortage. Since 1990, California’s average household size has increased while declining nationally. High rents – median rent is $2,500 a month in Los Angeles – force people to share space. Adults rent rooms, sleep in bunk beds, and use dividing walls or curtains to break up rooms. One fortunate company, RoomDividersNow, is riding the crest of this “boom.” Unfortunately many Californians now want government rent control. Legally limiting the maximum rent landlords can charge does nothing to increase the supply of apartments, but that is a topic for another day. The effects of restricting housing in America’s cities are enormous. Thousands of young people have not moved to highly productive cities, arguably reducing opportunities for upward mobility. The inability of people to move to the coasts has depressed salaries in Southern cities like Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston which have built housing to accommodate new residents. The young professionals priced out of New York or San Francisco must compete for jobs in these cities. How did America arrive at this situation? It is a complicated tale involving largely unintended consequences. Zoning regulates land uses that might cause conflict and nuisance but effectively requires permission from current residents for new construction. Further details will have to wait until next time. Daniel Sutter is the Charles G. Koch Professor of Economics with the Manuel H. Johnson Center for Political Economy at Troy University and host of Econversations on TrojanVision. The opinions expressed in this column are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the views of Troy University.
