Now that the Biden administration has settled into Washington, D.C., my daily chronicle (20 January 2017 – 20 January 2021) of news about the Trump administration, Republicans, Democrats, corporations, courts, resistance, and persistence is winding down. I will continue to post a few important articles, especially ones that reflect the differences between the Biden administration and the Trump administration and ones that address the toxic legacy of the Trump administration and Republicans.. I hope to devote more of my time to posting muckraking articles on my site and to working with my local activist group in pursuit of progressive change and a stronger democracy. Thanks for reading!
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Monday, 2 August 2021:
Daily Political Briefing: Senators finish writing bipartisan infrastructure bill in rare weekend session, The New York Times, Monday, 2 August 2021:
- Paying for the infrastructure bill: The plan relies on unused relief money to cover some of the cost.
- Roads in the infrastructure bill: Billions for repair, maintenance and safety.
- Broadband in the infrastructure bill: Taking aim at the digital divide.
- Schools in the infrastructure bill: Money for cleaner drinking water and greener buses.
- Climate in the infrastructure bill: $73 billion for the electric grid but less for electric vehicles and lead pipes.
- Amtrak in the infrastructure bill: $66 billion in new funding, and an adjusted mandate.
- Climate in the infrastructure bill: A substantial investment in resilience.
- Cryptocurrency in the infrastructure bill: The industry won last-minute concessions.
- The White House calls on states to prevent a crisis after the federal eviction moratorium expired.
- Trump plans to fight the release of his tax returns to Congress.
- Senator Lindsay Graham says he has a breakthrough Covid infection.
- State Department offers potential refugee status to Afghans who worked for U.S. news media.
The Big Money Behind the Big Lie. Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs. The New Yorker, Jane Mayer, Monday, 2 August 2021: “Although the Arizona audit may appear to be the product of local extremists, it has been fed by sophisticated, well-funded national organizations whose boards of directors include some of the country’s wealthiest and highest-profile conservatives. Dark-money organizations, sustained by undisclosed donors, have relentlessly promoted the myth that American elections are rife with fraud, and, according to leaked records of their internal deliberations, they have drafted, supported, and in some cases taken credit for state laws that make it harder to vote. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island who has tracked the flow of dark money in American politics, told me that a ‘flotilla of front groups’ once focussed on advancing such conservative causes as capturing the courts and opposing abortion have now ‘more or less shifted to work on the voter-suppression thing.’ These groups have cast their campaigns as high-minded attempts to maintain ‘election integrity,’ but Whitehouse believes that they are in fact tampering with the guardrails of democracy.”
Biden Administration to Keep Using Public Health Rule to Turn Away Migrants, The New York Times, Eileen Sullivan and Zolan Kanno-Youngs, Monday, 2 August 2021: ‘With the number of migrants crossing the southern border surging and the pandemic proving to be far from over, the Biden administration has decided to leave in place for now the public health rule that has allowed it to turn away hundreds of thousands of migrants, officials said. The decision, confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday, amounted to a shift by the administration, which had been working on plans to begin lifting the rule this summer, more than a year after it was imposed by the Trump administration. The C.D.C. said allowing noncitizens to come over the border from either Mexico or Canada ‘creates a serious danger’ of further spread of the coronavirus. President Biden has come under intense pressure for months from some Democrats and supporters of more liberal immigration policies to lift the rule, which critics say has been employed less to protect public health than as a politically defensible way to limit immigration.”
Continue reading Aftermath of the Trump Administration, August-September 2021: