Opinion

The president said something stunning last night during an address that marked the one-year anniversary of the start of the covid pandemic. If the press corps had been truly paying attention, it would be headline news. What Joe Biden said reflects the sea change I've been talking about here in the Editorial Board, a fundamental shift in thinking about pretty much everything. "We need to remember the government isn't some foreign force in a distant capital," he said. "No, it's us. All of us. We, the people."

This article was originally published at The Editorial Board

Good news has been so rare for so long that it hardly seemed real to hear him say it, but sure enough, during his national presidential address Thursday night, President Joe Biden said that COVID-19 vaccination rates are speeding up so much that by May 1 states should be able to make every adult eligible for the shot.

"If we do our part, if we do this together, by July Fourth, there's a good chance you, your family and friends can gather in your backyard and have a barbecue and celebrate Independence Day," Biden said from the East Room of White House.

A new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes about Joe Biden's campaign for president is called "Lucky: How Joe Biden Barely Won the Presidency," which seems like an unnecessarily disparaging title about a man who won a decisive popular vote victory in the midst of a global pandemic. But, I guess, that's just the way politics goes these days. I haven't read the book but early reviews focus on the fact that nobody, even Biden's former boss Barack Obama and former presidential candidate Hillary Clinton (whom the authors call the "vampire in the bullpen") thought he had a chance and were, apparently, not afraid to say so. It sounds like the typical campaign book gossip, which is fine as far as it goes, but the truth is that in 2019 I don't think anyone but Biden's family and team thought he was the strongest candidate to beat Donald Trump.

This article was originally published at Salon

There's conflicting news coming out of the White House today. Some reports say the president and his team are trying to figure out ways to sell the American Rescue Act, which was passed by Congress Wednesday, to the American people. Other reports say they feel they don't need to sell it, because the covid relief package sells itself.

I'm guessing the latter is more applicable. We've been through this process five times before. Most people have received some kind of aid, in the form of unemployment benefits or cash or both, during this year of the covid. Most have gotten used to the practice of getting help from the government. Some may start expecting it. Joe Biden won't have to sell the pending law too hard, because most people are already sold.

Sen. Susan Collins is clearly not happy with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and she hasn't been for a long while.

In an interview this week with Politico, she called his recent criticisms of her "extraordinary" and said: "Why Chuck seems to be going out of his way to alienate the most bipartisan member of the Senate is a mystery to me."

Tucker Carlson is celebrating this Women's History Month by going off on one misogynistic rant after another. It should come as little surprise that as Congress was on the cusp of passing the largest economic stimulus in modern history, Carlson was busy attacking women from the House of Representatives to Hollywood to the military to the New York Times — but it's surely been a bizarre spiral to watch. Within the last two weeks, Carlson has called pregnant soldiers "a mockery," mocked Democratic Rep. Deb Haaland's Native American ancestry, dragged Meghan Markle through the mud, and antagonized New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz as being a "deeply unhappy narcissist."

This article originally appeared at Salon.

The House of Representatives just passed their final version of the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion package aimed at ending the pandemic and restoring the economy to a hopefully better condition than it was when the coronavirus first hit American shores one year ago. President Joe Biden, whose White House proposed the draft that was largely adopted by Congress, is expected to sign the bill on Thursday ahead of a primetime address marking the somber anniversary of pandemic lockdowns.

Republicans in Congress, for their part, hate this bill.

A friend sent me a new study showing that the top five executives of major corporations pocketed between 15 and 19 cents of every dollar their companies gained from two recent tax cuts. This paper, by Eric Ohrn at Grinnell College, should be a really big deal.

The basic point is one that I, and others, have been making for a long time. CEOs and other top executives rip off the companies they work for. They are not worth the $20 million or more that many of them pocket each year.

Republican lawmakers couldn't please former President Donald Trump by attempting to overturn the election results on January 6, so they decided to change the laws for the next election. State legislatures have introduced more than 250 bills intended to significantly reduce voting rights across the country. These efforts in voter suppression have historically targeted minority voters, especially Black voters.

Voter suppression has been a fundamental feature of the formerly conservative party, and whether by gerrymandering, passing restrictive voter ID laws, upholding felony disenfranchisement, promoting voter registration purges, or eviscerating the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Jim Crow era doesn't seem to be so long ago.

By now, we know that the overly loud ruckus raised by Congressional Republicans criticizing too much spending and a growing deficit is a message leveled only when that spending is aimed at those of us at the bottom and middle.

As progressives have argued endlessly, there was no Republican concern about lowering tax rates for the wealthy and corporations.

Americans and Britons alike are still processing the "what?!" heard round the world, courtesy of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex's spilt tea during Sunday's "Oprah with Meghan and Harry" special on CBS. Now let's look closely at the context in which that particular bomb dropped.

Meghan, fully open but diplomatic in what she chooses to say, tells Oprah that a member of the royal family had expressed to Harry "concerns" about how dark the couple's son Archie might be when he was born.

After delaying long enough to cause serious anxiety among prominent public health experts, on Monday the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) finally released their recommendations for people who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The delay was worrisome, especially in light of reports that there was a debate in the White House over how lenient the guidelines should be with regards to what vaccinated people can do. In the end, however, what was settled on was a little more freedom than earlier reports suggested. Not only do the guidelines say vaccinated people can socialize together, as was anticipated, they also indicate that vaccinated people can visit with unvaccinated people – so long as they are all low-risk and from the same house. Mostly described as the "you can hug your grandkids" rule in the press, the guideline also includes increased freedom for things like a vaccinated couple hosting an unvaccinated couple for dinner.

Many prominent public health experts celebrated the loosening of restrictions on vaccinated people because, as Harvard-based epidemiologist Julia Marcus explained on Twitter, "Vaccines provide a true reduction of risk, not a false sense of security." Others, such as Dr. Leana Wen, visiting professor at George Washington University's Milken Institute School of Public Health, remain critical, not because they believe the new guidelines are too generous — but because they are still too strict.

One of the first lessons attorneys involved in high-stakes litigation learn is that it sometimes pays not to say the quiet part out loud, lest your client's true intentions be revealed.

Michael A. Carvin, a highly respected partner in the powerful Jones Day law firm based in Washington, D.C., may have forgotten this lesson during the oral arguments conducted by the Supreme Court on March 2 in a pair of appeals from Arizona involving Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA). In a shocking comment made toward the end of his presentation, Carvin revealed the Republican Party's entrenched and dedicated commitment to partisan advantage and voter suppression. In the process, however, Carvin may have unwittingly opened the door to abolishing the legislative filibuster and enacting H.R. 1, the landmark omnibus voting rights bill entitled the "For the People Act of 2021" that has passed the House and is now pending before the Senate.