2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races

storyteller

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This interview (just hit play it starts right at the interview) is great and focused on how a president can pass a large number of agenda items using current laws and precedents even if Congress is obstructing. David Dayen surveyed the primary candidates for his results and in this interview spotlights some of the goals for different candidates. Of course Sanders and Warren gave him a lot but there's reference to Klobuchar and Harris ideas as well (Biden didn't get back to him btw). Anyway, this is important stuff to note given that the Senate is still an uphill battle to win. This could position the next president to push compromises that really limit policy impact; but a bold presidential agenda could make big changes even with Mcconnell blocking everything he can...and again, of course Warren and Sanders are leading the pack with plans on how to use this. Here's a link to the actual article also and a couple of excerpts giving more detail to the ideas.

The Day One Agenda

The Prospect has identified 30 meaningful executive actions, all derived from authority in specific statutes, which could be implemented on Day One by a new president. These would not be executive orders, much less abuses of authority, but strategic exercise of legitimate presidential power.

Without signing a single new law, the next president can lower prescription drug prices, cancel student debt, break up the big banks, give everybody who wants one a bank account, counteract the dominance of monopoly power, protect farmers from price discrimination and unfair dealing, force divestment from fossil fuel projects, close a slew of tax loopholes, hold crooked CEOs accountable, mandate reductions of greenhouse gas emissions, allow the effective legalization of marijuana, make it easier for 800,000 workers to join a union, and much, much more. We have compiled a series of essays to explain precisely how, and under what authority, the next president can accomplish all this.

The need for a Day One agenda is particularly acute as we head into 2020. I keep sensing an undercurrent of despair when talking to liberal partisans about the election, a sigh that beating Trump is not enough but all that can be done. Yes, Democrats are only an even-money shot, at best, to flip the Senate. And yes, even if they succeed, Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell can obstruct the majority with the filibuster, and it would not be up to the next president, but the 50th senator ideologically, someone like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, to agree to change the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for legislation. (There’s always budget reconciliation, but that limited path goes through the same conservaDems.)

But this reality does not have to inspire progressive anguish. Anyone telling you that a Democratic victory next November would merely signal four years of endless gridlock hasn’t thought about the possibilities laid out in this issue. And if you doubt the opportunity for strong executive action, let me direct your attention to Donald Trump.
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THE U.S. GOVERNMENT is one of the world’s largest purchasers of goods and services. This alone gives presidents widespread power to influence the economy by setting benchmarks for federal contractors to deliver high minimum wages, pay equity, safe workplaces, and shared prosperity. The government can even stop doing business with distasteful companies that rely on federal contracts, like the private-prison industry.


The government also manages giant swaths of public land, and can choose to open it up to development and fossil fuel production, or shut that down. And there are all sorts of statutory programs where presidents get to set the rules. When President Kennedy in 1962, after much prodding and delay, fulfilled a campaign promise to prohibit discrimination in federally aided housing, all it took was the proverbial “stroke of a pen.”


As Trump has repeatedly shown, in entire issue areas like foreign policy and immigration and global trade, the next president would have expansive authority, all granted by a plain reading of the Constitution, specific congressional statute, or the legislative branch’s studied deference. Who the next president chooses for the Federal Reserve Board will define the course of economic policy.

Presidents can make regulatory decisions like who qualifies for overtime pay. They can decide who serves as a worker’s employer, a critical determination for collective bargaining. They can choose whether corporations should still enjoy a “safe harbor” to facilitate stock buybacks that enrich investors at the expense of workers. They can’t bring forth Medicare for All, but they can use Section 1332 waivers from the Affordable Care Act to enable single-payer programs at the state level, and potentially use nearly $1 billion from the ACA’s Prevention and Public Health Fund to defray startup costs.

Once you start thinking about the possibilities, it’s hard to stop. Statutory language is sometimes clear and sometimes muddled, but regulatory discretion is almost always broad. What a president chooses to emphasize, and how much the letter of the law can be bent to their preferences, makes a huge difference.

Executive orders are a poor substitute for the authorities already existing in statutory language. It’s nice that Democratic primary candidates have been talking about executive orders, such as Kamala Harris’s proposed actions to mitigate gun violence, or Beto O’Rourke’s ideas on immigration. Some executive orders will make a huge difference in people’s lives, like Harris’s, Amy Klobuchar’s, and Cory Booker’s plans for clemency boards and mass commutations for low-level federal drug offenders. (Joe Biden’s plan along these lines, predictably, is far narrower.)

But there’s no substitute for authority from Congress. And in a surprising number of cases, presidents already have it. They don’t have to rummage for a few votes for financial reform; the architecture of existing law allows them to reform already. They don’t have to muster courage from swing-seat representatives to fight big corporations and tax the rich; the Federal Trade Commission and the IRS can get us there.
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King Kreole

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"She's unelectable! Trump would kill her! :bryan:"

Yeah, aight.

giphy.gif


Polls this early don't really mean shyt
 
King Kreole

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storyteller said:


This interview (just hit play it starts right at the interview) is great and focused on how a president can pass a large number of agenda items using current laws and precedents even if Congress is obstructing. David Dayen surveyed the primary candidates for his results and in this interview spotlights some of the goals for different candidates. Of course Sanders and Warren gave him a lot but there's reference to Klobuchar and Harris ideas as well (Biden didn't get back to him btw). Anyway, this is important stuff to note given that the Senate is still an uphill battle to win. This could position the next president to push compromises that really limit policy impact; but a bold presidential agenda could make big changes even with Mcconnell blocking everything he can...and again, of course Warren and Sanders are leading the pack with plans on how to use this. Here's a link to the actual article also and a couple of excerpts giving more detail to the ideas.

The Day One Agenda
Click to expand...

Yep! I've been saying this from the jump, we're living in the era of the Imperial Presidency, there is a lot of fukking power in the executive branch right now! Dayen and the Prospect are doing the lord's work highlighting all of this and forcing the campaigns to acknowledge that we know they know. :wow:
 
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King Kreole said:
Yep! I've been saying this from the jump, we're living in the era of the Imperial Presidency, there is a lot of fukking power in the executive branch right now! Dayen and the Prospect are doing the lord's work highlighting all of this and forcing the campaigns to acknowledge that we know they know. :wow:
Click to expand...
Theres about to be a GANG of corruption laws passed when Warren takes that inaugural oath
 
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