Wednesday on The Hustings
JUNE 2, 2021 -- – CONGRESS ENACTS THE INDIAN CITIZENSHIP (NATIVE AMERICANS) ACT, 1924
The White House has set a deadline of Monday, June 7, to reach an agreement with Republicans over an infrastructure bill. The two sides are far apart. The Biden Administration’s proposal is for $1.7 trillion, paid for by corporate tax hikes and other increases on individuals earning at least $400,000/year. The GOP leadership has a $928 billion counteroffer, much of it financed with unspent funds from the president’s COVID-19 relief program. Biden meets with point-person Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-WV, in the White House today.
Biden Warns of Attack on Democracy – President Biden promised to “fight like heck” and called on his vice president, Kamala Harris, to lead efforts to push back against Republican-led state bills to constrict voting availability in the name of security, The Washington Post reports.
“This sacred right is under assault with incredible intensity like I’ve never seen,” Biden said in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Tuesday, where he became the first U.S. president to commemorate the 1921 massacre on “Black Wall Street,” where about 300 Black residents were killed and more than 1,250 homes were destroyed by the city’s white leadership.
“We can’t choose what we want to know,” Biden said about the massacre of May 31-June 1, 1921. “We should know the good, the bad – everything. That’s what great nations do. They come to terms with their dark sides.”
Note: Biden giving notice he will fight back Republican Party efforts to clamp down on mail-in ballots and absentee voting in the name of “security” comes as Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbot plans to reconvene his state’s legislature after Democrats there walked out on a quorum and prevented a vote on a particularly draconian bill. Democrats hope the Biden Administration can shine a spotlight on such states’ efforts and rally its voters in the face of such restrictions, much as it rallied Georgia voters in the January runoffs that resulted in the Democrats thin Senate majority. The question now, as before, is whether the GOP has enough MAGA voters left in its ranks to overturn the Senate and House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms, as widely expected, in the face of a president with much better approval polls than former President Trump.
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Democrats Retain Haaland’s House Seat – Democrats held on to a Congressional seat from New Mexico when state senator Melanie Stansbury beat Republican Mark Moore, 63-33%, in a special election Tuesday to replace the Biden Administration’s interior secretary, Deb Haaland. Stansbury’s margin is expected to tighten a bit when all absentee ballots are counted, Politicosays, for a district that includes “deep blue” Albuquerque, but even considering Stansbury raised far more money than Moore and ran far more advertising, Democrats consider the 30-point margin a good sign leading up to next year’s midterms – Biden won the district by just 23 points last November, and Haaland won it by 16 points. Meanwhile, in near-purple Texas, two Republicans shut out a Democratic candidate last month for a runoff for a House seat. Democrats had hoped for a spot in the runoff for the seat, which entails the suburbs of Fort Worth, Politico says.
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Biden Suspends Oil and Gas Leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – Speaking of Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, she announced Tuesday the Biden administration is reversing another of former President Trump’s initiatives, to allow long-contentious gas and oil leases in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is home to polar bears and other wildlife.
Note: The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge long has been the scene of a political and philosophical fight between Big Oil and Republicans who want to tap its monumental oil and gas potential, but environmentalists and Democrats want it to remain untouched. But the U.S. has been energy independent for years, and environmentalists are pushing hard for a wholesale shift away from oil and gas toward “sustainable” energy alternatives, making this ongoing struggle seem a fight by two sides that simply want to defeat each other.
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Did Meatpacker Pay Cyber-Ransom? – Brazilian-based meatpacker JBS, the largest globally in the business, plans to be up and running today after a cyber-attack Saturday shut down its operations in the U.S. and Australia, The Wall Street Journalreports, and there will be no shortage of meat, unlike the cyber-attack against Colonial Pipeline that briefly choked the petroleum supply to the Southeast and Mid-Atlantic regions last month. It was not immediately known whether JBS paid any ransom to cyber-attackers, who are believed to be based in Russia. Colonial reportedly paid about $4.5 million to have its digital operations restored.
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Is Netanyahu Out? – Israel’s governing power is poised to take power from Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu Wednesday, the AP reports. A mix of factions is working on the coalition, and could strip Netanyahu, a hardliner on the issue of a Palestinian homeland, of his leadership. Netanyahu has led Israel since 2008, despite four elections in two years and the prime minister’s 2019 indictments for bribery, fraud, and breach of trust.
Note: Check back tomorrow. Netanyahu has faced this sort of thing before, and an unusual structure in which leaders from the left and right would share power after the last election early this year was scuttled when Israel engaged in intense fighting last month with Hamas. Deadline for a new coalition is set for midnight Israeli time, which is 5 p.m. Eastern time.
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So That’s $337,500 for Trump’s Sake – American Media Inc. – owner of the National Enquirer, which was renamed A360 Media LLC – has agreed to pay the Federal Election Commission $187,500 for its illegal payments to spike a story ahead of the November 2016 presidential election about an affair with Donald J. Trump, Politico reports. American Media paid Karen McDougal $150,000 to give up exclusive rights to a story in which she said she had had a sexual affair with the then-future president. –Edited by Todd Lassa and Nic Woods
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