Biden administration

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lit a fire under some of his colleagues today, stating in a letter to colleagues his ongoing expectation that the Senate will pass the Biden administration’s sweeping Build Back Better package via reconciliation “before Christmas.”

Conservatives are trying to get ahead of the impending bad optics that will come with obstructing their way into a government shutdown. And, it appears, they have a plan: Placing the blame squarely on the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.

The DOJ announced in October that it would launch a task force aimed at helping local law enforcement track and investigate threats against teachers and school staff. We knew this.

But this week House Republicans released information about a new FBI tracking program reportedly designed to help the DOJ field these threats. The GOP campaign was, seemingly, part of a broader attempt to push a bad faith narrative: that the Biden administration is seeking to intimidate and silence parents and community members who disagree with local school policies.

That framing is, of course, not true or fair.

It’s a predictable move for the red state governor with 2024 aspirations and one who has built his national profile on, essentially, pretending that COVID is just Not A Thing in Florida, despite the state’s staggering death rates from the virus.

Just hours after the White House’s new vaccine mandate officially went into effect – formalizing the Biden administration’s earlier promises to require that employers with 100 or more workers must mandate vaccines or ensure their workers undergo weekly COVID testing – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his intention to sue over the new rule. The vaccination and weekly negative testing rules for 100-plus employee workplaces will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and will impact about 84 million employees around the U.S., according to the White House.

It’s a tale as old as time for Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI).

The Republican senator is reportedly using his leverage as a senator to, at least temporarily, block the confirmation of Matt Graves, whom President Biden named as his pick to lead the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. Since January of this year that office has overseen more than 600 prosecutions related to the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. So far, more than 100 insurrectionists have pleaded guilty to charges related to the attack.

The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court today to temporarily block the enforcement of the unprecedentedly dangerous and restrictive abortion ban in Texas, filing an emergency appeal with the high court on Monday to protect the rights of women, and people who can become pregnant, in the red state.

It’s the second attempt by the DOJ to legally challenge the abortion law, which not only bans abortions post six-weeks in Texas, but also was crafted to be uniquely difficult to challenge in court. It enlists private citizens, instead of state officials, to deal with its enforcement. It’s a Wild West law that offers a $10,000 bounty to members of the public who successfully bring lawsuits against abortion providers and/or anyone who might “aid or abet” in the process of getting an abortion post-six weeks, including someone as far in the periphery of the act as a cab driver who might drive a woman to a clinic.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is spending her Senate recess in Europe, fundraising for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, her office confirmed to the New York Times this week.

It’s curious that Sinema has taken it upon herself to be a shining visage for the Democratic Party overseas when her mere existence as a senator is holding up the entire party agenda. But that, we are coming to learn, is par for the course for the Arizona senator.

If confirmed, Lucy Koh, one of President Biden’s judicial nominees, would become the first Korean American to serve as a U.S. appeals court judge.

During the start of her confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee today, ranking Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) — an 88-year-old who just announced he’s running for another six-year term — made a remark that could only be interpreted as wildly inappropriate, at best, and pretty racist, at worst.