This Saturday, America will get to see whether the police responsible for the security of the United States Capitol have learned their lesson or not. After their abject failure to prepare adequately for the insurrectionist mob which took over the Capitol on January 6th (in an attempt to forcibly halt the final step in a presidential election), the police are going to face a crowd of sympathizers of the insurrectionist riot's participants. In other words, the insurrectionists' fellow travellers. One would like to assume that the police presence will be a lot bigger and a lot more proactive on Saturday than they were eight months ago.

We still haven't had a full accounting of all the things that went wrong with the security planning on January 6th, of course. There is a congressional select committee looking into it, but they've only held a few hearings so far. More of the story will undoubtedly be revealed over time, in much greater detail. One storyline that has emerged is that the people with the overall responsibility for security were worried because they had overreacted earlier to the Black Lives Matter street protests. Back then, there were photographs of officers in full body armor and military gear lined up in front of monuments in a very threatening posture, and then the whole thing culminated with Donald Trump ordering the park across the street from the White House forcibly cleared so he could stage a photo op (with the top Pentagon general standing next to him). Not to mention the helicopters chasing people on city streets and attacking them (there's no other word for it) with the downblast from their rotors. The cops (and the Pentagon) had heard the criticisms from these episodes and the higher-ups were concerned that there be no such "bad optics" on January 6th.

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California Governor Gavin Newsom emerged victorious from his recall election last night, chalking up a rather stunning margin: with 71 percent of the vote counted, "No" on the recall was beating "Yes" by a whopping 28 points (64 percent to 36 percent). Not quite 2-to-1, but close. Since it was a special recall election held at an odd time, it garnered more than the normal amount of media and political interest nationwide -- especially after a poll a few months ago seemed to suggest that the race was somehow neck-and-neck. Obviously, it wasn't. Newsom may in fact beat the margin of victory he managed in his last election. Whatever the final numbers turn out to be, though, it's hard not to use the word "landslide" to describe the outcome.

There are a few lessons Democrats should be drawing from this victory, however at this point nobody really knows which could most accurately be called the "deciding factor" in the election. It was likely a mix of things, but the first two should be fully embraced by Democrats in anticipation of the 2022 midterm campaign anyway (the last item is more of a caveat).

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It is Recall Election Day out here in California today, so I thought I'd write today in support of a rather simple change that really needs to be made in California recall elections law. This one change could solve the nightmare scenario the nation's pundits were all a-twitter (and a-Twitter) over during the slow news days of August. Not only would this one fundamental change avoid having a candidate win the governor's seat with only a tiny fraction of the overall vote, but it would significantly lessen the appeal of recall elections in the first place, for the party who lost the last regular gubernatorial election. The change? Instead of simultaneously voting on: (1) whether to recall the sitting governor, and: (2) who should replace him (if a majority votes to recall); Californians would only be presented with the first question -- the recall question. If a majority did vote to oust the sitting governor, then the lieutenant governor would immediately be sworn in.

This makes all kinds of sense. What else is a lieutenant governor for, after all? To step into office should the governor not be able to carry out his or her duties. The office is equivalent to the vice president, in the national government (note: in some states the office of lieutenant governor doesn't even exist, but in California it does). He or she is, essentially, a spare part. "Plan B." Insurance against unforeseen events.

If the California governor quits or dies in office or is impeached and convicted by the state legislature, then he or she is replaced by the lieutenant governor. So why should this process be any different if the people, as a whole, decide to give him or her the boot?

It really shouldn't. A recall election is nothing short of a populist impeachment. Instead of the lower chamber of the state legislature bringing charges and the upper chamber adjudicating those charges, the people (a fraction of them, who have to sign their support) make the case for removal, and then the question is put to the entire electorate to judge. But if the decision is made to remove the sitting governor, then why not have the lieutenant governor step in?

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Republicans, as they are wont to do, have been falsely framing President Joe Biden's order to medium-to-large businesses last week as a "vaccine mandate" or "vaccination mandate." House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy even tweeted it out in all caps yesterday: "NO VACCINE MANDATES." On the Sunday morning political chat shows, this framing was presented by other Republicans with little or no pushback from either the hosts or even the Democratic guests. But it is false. It is highly misleading. What Biden ordered for the private sector was not a vaccine mandate. It was a testing mandate. Nobody's going to get fired for not getting vaccinated -- but people could get fired for refusing to submit to weekly testing. That's a big difference. Republicans are trying to obscure this reality by framing it as a "getting fired for refusing a vaccine" issue. And so far, at least on television, this seems to be working for them.

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This week, President Joe Biden picked a political fight. Or, more accurately, he got up off the sidelines and engaged in a political fight that had already begun, by strongly opposing Republican politicians fighting against basic public health safety measures under the fake guise of "freedom." Biden stood squarely for science and safety, while Republicans are left to fight for recklessness and death. That is precisely how the matter should be framed politically, and so far it looks like Biden is doing a fairly good job of presenting this dichotomy to the public. He's even taking the fight directly to all the GOP governors who are sounding increasingly unhinged about the basic concepts of public health and safety.

Biden gave a speech yesterday where he laid down some new rules (which have yet to take effect). The ones with the biggest impact are vaccine mandates for all federal employees and contractors, all workers at healthcare facilities that take Medicare and Medicaid money (most of them, in other words), and all federally-paid schoolteachers (think: Head Start). Furthermore, private businesses which have 100 employees or more must require either vaccinations or weekly testing for all workers -- or face a $14,000 fine for each individual violation.

To some of those frustrated by the intransigence of the unvaccinated among us, this didn't go nearly far enough. The new workplace-safety rule is not an actual mandate -- the weekly testing option will still be there for those who refuse to get their shots. This rule will, however, cover 80 million workers, or two-thirds of America's workforce. The one thing Biden didn't do, however, was to mandate vaccinations for passengers on airplanes, trains, and buses. Perhaps if this phase of ramping up the pressure on the unvaccinated goes down well politically, Biden might take this step later. It would be significant indeed if he did decide to do this right before both the Thanksgiving and winter holidays.

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President Joe Biden today gave a speech outlining the next steps the federal government will be taking to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. While some of these steps do not go as far as some had been hoping, there were several which will be significant in upping the pressure on unvaccinated people to get their shots. Although Biden didn't explicitly say so, at this point the best way to convince more people to get vaccinated is to make life harder and harder for the unvaccinated. And Biden took several large steps which will do so.

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As I write this, there is less than a week to go before the votes in California's gubernatorial recall election will be counted. But, just as I predicted a few weeks ago, it now seems like a sure bet that Governor Gavin Newsom is going to beat the recall pretty handily. As I wrote back then, a few odd outlier polls had caused somewhat of a frenzy in the chattering classes of the inside-the-Beltway punditocracy, who all concluded that Newsom was in trouble and a Republican could win the recall. I didn't buy it. Not for a minute.

I didn't buy into this nervousness for two big reasons. The first is that it is impossible to predict "likely voters" (what the one poll that freaked everyone out was attempting to measure) in a one-time special recall election, with nothing else on the ballot, held in an odd month rather than on the normal election schedule. Nobody knew how many people were going to actually vote, so any predictive model was little better than throwing a dart at a dartboard of numbers.

But the second reason was much more convincing, at least to me:

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The next month in Congress might be the most momentous period for the institution in a very long time. We are almost down to the wire on President Joe Biden's entire economic agenda. Success seems elusive, but at the same time still achievable. If everything falls perfectly into place, Congress could pass legislation that children will learn about in history class right along with L.B.J.'s Great Society and F.D.R.'s New Deal. That's how momentous the next few weeks might be.

Might be. Being Democrats, there's always a good chance they'll find a way to screw it up. Already a few of them seem almost eager to destroy the carefully-constructed plan to get everything onto Biden's desk at the same time. So there is definitely not any sort of guarantee of success.

The schedule is beyond aggressive, for such enormously complex legislation. Two days from now, the House will begin churning through the business of putting together all the disparate pieces of legislation into one final bill. The House and Senate are working hand-in-hand (at least, they're supposed to be) so that both houses will come up with a bill that will pass both houses without changes. If this works as designed, it will save a huge amount of time -- on the order of months, actually. This is good, because Democrats don't have months to waste.

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Happy Labor Day, everyone!

As usual, I've decided to play hooky today, so please enjoy this Labor Day column from four years ago. This was the first year of Donald Trump being in office and the Democrats were a pretty despondent bunch. This was written to hopefully show they could improve their standing with the public (especially those who had voted for Trump) by actually standing for something.

This is worth looking back upon, because when Congress returns from their lengthy mid-summer break, they're actually going to have a chance to vote on some incredibly ambitious programs that will improve life for tens of millions of working-class American families. The list of what they are planning to do is different than the list in the article below (the $15-an-hour minimum wage having been rejected by the Senate parliamentarian for budget reconciliation bills), but it is certainly in the same spirit. Back then, of course, Bernie Sanders wasn't head of the Senate Budget Committee.

If the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill passes with at least the lion's share of President Joe Biden's economic agenda intact, it will be a historic once-in-a-generation leap forward, not only for specific Labor issues but for all kinds of beneficial programs. In any case, here were my suggestions from four years ago about what just such a historic Democratic bill should really contain. Have a happy holiday everyone, and new columns will resume tomorrow.

Originally published September 4, 2017

Since today is Labor Day, I thought it was time to point out something that seems incredibly obvious to me. If you listen to the inside-the-Beltway chatter, Democrats are currently seen as floundering around, searching for an agenda. This is less true than the cocktail-party-circuit crowd believes, but whatever. Simultaneously, Democrats are urged to try to win back the working-class vote, because Donald Trump supposedly seduced them all away with his empty promises. Again, the answer to this perceived problem is pretty obvious. The Democratic Party needs to rededicate itself to the Labor agenda -- thus giving it a solid agenda to fight for, and also a perfect way to woo back white working-class voters.

There are plenty of items on the Labor agenda to choose from, because workers' rights have atrophied so much in the past few decades. Democrats need to select a limited number of these, and then promise immediate action on all of them should they win back control of either house of Congress. Here are six quick suggestions for changes that Democrats could easily champion:

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This week began with conservatives and liberals upset because the women of Afghanistan will now lose their freedoms under a tyrannical extremist government. It ended with liberals upset that the women of Texas have now lost freedoms under a tyrannical extremist government. Conservatives were notably silent, which is understandable since they were the ones instituting this unconstitutional denial of rights from the women of the Lone Star State.

Women everywhere in America used to have the right to terminate their pregnancies up to the point when the fetus was viable outside their bodies -- anywhere from about 22 to 26 weeks after they get pregnant. Now, only women outside Texas have this right, since by a Machiavellian scheme it is now functionally illegal for Texas women to get an abortion beyond six weeks of pregnancy -- a time when most women aren't even aware they are pregnant. Laws like this (although decidedly less Draconian and Machiavellian) have passed state legislatures before, but they have always been struck down by the federal courts. This time, however, the Supreme Court refused to issue an emergency stay which would have barred the law from taking effect. So until further legal rulings happen, if you are a woman in Texas and want to exercise your constitutional rights, you will have to leave the state to do so.

Roe v. Wade isn't completely dead yet, but as we wrote earlier in the week, it is surely on life support. Now that the Supreme Court has given their imprimatur, there will be quick movement in other Republican-controlled state legislatures to pass identical laws. Within a very short period, abortion could be effectively outlawed in over 20 states. No, Roe isn't quite dead yet -- as long as you live in a blue state, that is. But the era of universally-legal abortion in America may be at an end.

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