If I were advising Ms Pelosi, I would suggest having her congressional researchers go through the statute book and find every example where the President is given “emergency powers” or the power to pull the US out of an international treaty without Congressional oversight, and introduce a bill to revoke or reign in those presidential powers. I’d also suggest revising all statutes which give the Prez the power to re-direct funding that the Congress has appropriated to something else.
None of that is constitutional amendment territory. It’s the Congress re-claiming powers that it has improvidently granted over the years to the Prez, on the assumption that the Prez can be trusted not to mis-use them.
I hadn’t thought much about this until the last few days, but in hindsight it should have been obvious. One of the biggest challenges Biden will face is keeping the coalition together. I believe he needs to do so, but how to do it is a different question and one I don’t have even a suggestion for. With supporters ranging from AOC and Bernie Sanders on the left to John Kasich, Jeff Flake, and now former RNC chairman Michael Steele on the right, and all those in between, Biden has a monumental task ahead of him. There are already grumblings from the left that the Biden team has been vetting Kasich and Flake for potential cabinet positions.
That’s what’s going to be interesting over the next several years. If the Democrats welcome the Never-Trumpers into the tent, does that poison the party the same way the Republican Party was poisoned by opening its tent to racist Democrats in the 1960s?
They should start out by assuming that the never Trumper’s are going to disavowal the overt racism of the Trump supporters since that is a key aspect of the Trump movement. If the never Trumper’s can’t do that then screw them politically at every opportunity.
And the Dems themselves had better get their damn house in order and start pulling together like the republicans have been doing. They got a lot of knots to untie from this present administration and more than likely a few more over the next three months.
Frankly, Biden doesn’t owe the Never Trumpers anything and most of them have been up front that they’re going to go right back to supporting Republicans and bashing Democrats once Trump is out of office.
True he doesn’t owe them a damn thing, but But Biden is Biden, he is going to reach out to them and he may in fact need a few to push his agenda forward. But just a few, he has reached across the aisle before but now he needs to be extra careful about trusting any of them to keep a deal,
I’m not sure why he’d need them. The Lincoln Project may produce some clever videos, but there are no Never Trumpers in Congress. They have no influence with the Republicans that are in Congress. They have no ability to help Biden advance an agenda, at all.
And as I said, the figures commonly identified as “Never Trumpers” — politicians like Flake and Kasich, operatives like Rick Wilson and John Weaver — are dyed-in-the-wool conservatives. They have no interest in helping Biden be successful. He’s a means to the end of getting Trump out of office. The day after he’s sworn in, he’s the enemy.
Oddly there are legitimate criticisms of the WHO (and even UNICEF) but those aren’t what trump talks about.
The authors point to a shift at the end of the 1980s, when the agency increasingly came under widespread criticism from many sides—health policy experts, international entities such as the World Bank, and specific countries—for its inefficiency, lack of transparency, politicization, and ultimately irrelevance.
University of Rochester professor emeritus of history, Theodore Brown, was invited to this year’s World Health Assembly meeting in Geneva to give a presentation about his new co-authored book at the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Health Summit in May.
A largely fair criticism—agrees Brown. He argues that the WHO’s both Geneva-based headquarters and regional structure—“often a bureaucratic nightmare” that the US had insisted on at outset of the organization as a “string-pulling control mechanism”—impeded quick and decisive decision-making in crisis situations. That’s one of the reasons for the delayed response to the Ebola epidemic, says Brown.
Moreover, large donor countries, especially the United States, drastically cut contributions to the WHO amid squabbles over the agency’s direction and policy priorities. As a result, it suffered a loss of financial capability and stature, increasingly competing with public and private organizations such as the World Bank and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Ultimately, one of the agency’s largest failures, says Brown, was that it “allowed itself to become so politicized. I expected there to be political contamination or intrusion, but I didn’t expect it to be so pervasive,” he admits. Part of the reason was that the United States contributed an outsized portion of the agency’s budget in its early years. That meant that US policymakers believed they were entitled to set policy, says Brown, pitting the US often directly against the Soviet Union.
Of course one reason the WHO has had problems is the USA.
I agree with other posters that controlling COVID is going to be job one. But my fear is, with numbers already spiking and cold weather on the way, it will be so out of control by January that draconian, economy-crushing measures will be necessary. And that gut punch may cripple efforts to get anything else done – not to mention giving the GOP all the ammunition they need to make a comeback in 2022.
Set minimum required early-voting schedules, covering at least a couple days per week for at least the three or four weeks before Election Day.
Guarantee the availability of vote-by-mail, including a requirement of prompt voter notification and opportunity to correct any technical errors in returned ballots.
Set minimum required ratios of voting facilities to precinct population and geographic size.
Reduce (I don’t think total elimination is possible, given that judgment calls are involved) gerrymandering via objective standards (e.g. set a minimum ratio of land area within a district to land area of a circle containing the district).
There’s nothing wrong with these suggestions, but they’re unnecessary. Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and others, have it figured out with no problems whatsoever. Every registered voter gets a ballot by mail. They have two weeks or so to return it. There is a paper ballot in case a recount is necessary. You can check the status of your ballot easily on line. It’s safe, cheaper than the old way, and easy. You can study the options at leisure in the comfort of your own home. We have a pretty vocal Republican party here in Washington. I listen to them on their conservative talk radio. They have lots of complaints about how things are, but I’ve never heard them (or anyone else here) complain about universal mail-in voting.
You forget how simple-minded so many voters are. If the economy sucks, they’ll blame whoever’s in power without considering what the alternative might have been. And since there’s no easily observable alternate universe, the GOP can always claim they could have controlled the virus without crippling the economy.
