As the race heats up in preparation for the August primary, polling and fundraising reports indicate that neither candidate has a clear advantage, making the opportunity to gain momentum on the debate stage essential. Early numbers show that Levin is leading with voters of color, union households, and women, while Stevens is drawing disproportionate amounts of support from white voters and men. Stevens has amassed a considerable fundraising advantage, due in large part to the hundreds of thousands of dollars she has received from political action committees affiliated with conservative foreign policy groups. She has raised over $3.5 million this cycle to Levin’s $2 million.

Stevens, a former front-liner who flipped a Republican-held seat in 2018, has benefitted from the good will and national profile she cultivated by helping to deliver Democrats’ current House majority. Levin, meanwhile, is a former union organizer and the scion of a prominent Michigan political family, leaning on his strong relationships with progressive organizations and the weight of his last name to tip the race in his favor.

The debate, which was hosted by the Pontiac Community Foundation, offered Michigan voters the clearest view yet of the differences between the two candidates. Levin went after Stevens’s record on the minimum wage, environmental justice, and prescription drug reforms, at one point asking the audience: “Do you want somebody from the New Democrat caucus, which is more of a corporate Democratic caucus … or do you want to stand with the deputy whip of the [Congressional] Progressive Caucus? Do you want to stand with somebody who’s for the Green New Deal or somebody who’s against it?”

Stevens, for her part, chose not to attack Levin’s position on particular legislation or his support for cornerstone progressive priorities like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. In an interview with The Intercept given two weeks before the debate, Stevens’s communications director, Larkin Parker, downplayed the ideological gap between the two candidates. “A lot of people are trying to frame this as a moderate versus progressive showdown,” she said. “And that’s not what this is.”

Multiple observers across publications have noted the ideological divisions in the race — like Jonathan Allen, in an article NBC published the day before the debate, who called the primary “a proxy war over Israel policy and other ideological differences.” The Stevens campaign rejects that framing and has instead sought to minimize the gap, perhaps because Michigan’s newly drawn 11th District is significantly more liberal than either candidate’s prior district.

But on Wednesday night, the differences came across anyway. On Thursday, one of the three moderators, Pontiac City Councilman Mikal Goodman, endorsed Levin. In an interview with The Intercept, Goodman said Levin’s performance and his clear answers on progressive priorities were key factors in his decision to endorse. “As a lower-income Black male who grew up in the city of Pontiac on Section 8, experiencing first-hand systemic racism and environmental racism, you need someone who is willing to fight,” he said. “There are definitely some things that Haley Stevens has said that are close to, if not on, the mark. But I need someone who is consistently on the mark as much as possible.”

After a cordial start to the debate, tensions flared during an exchange on the House of Representatives’ efforts to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Both Levin and Stevens supported the final passage of the Raise the Wage Act in 2019, following Democrats winning control of the chamber in the 2018 midterms. But Levin attacked Stevens for supporting two Republican amendments that would have weakened the legislation or nullified it altogether. Stevens, who has campaigned on her support for the popular policy, denied Levin’s characterizations, saying she doesn’t “believe in any poison pills.”

A review of the committee vote Levin referenced reveals that Stevens was the only Democrat on the Education and Labor Committee who joined Republicans in voting for two controversial amendments: one which would have exempted millions of workers employed by small businesses from the wage increase, and another which threatened to nullify the legislation altogether if a Government Accountability Office report found that the wage increases would contribute significantly to job automation.

In the following exchange, Levin pointed out that Stevens’s moderate position on prescription drug price reforms is also out of touch with the overwhelming majority of voters and the Democratic base. In an April 2019 letter to a constituent, which was first reported by Mother Jones, Stevens said she opposed reforms that would provide the government with “aggressive tools to ensure drug costs will be brought down.” In her view, she wrote, “allowing the U.S. government to sidestep patents” could have a “chilling effect on other industries and on research.”

The recipient of that letter, lauded Michigan activist Stefanie Mezigian, told The Intercept that the letter “contained a lot of pharma talking points.” According to Mezigian, who worked to elect Stevens in 2018, the letter marked a turning point in her relationship with her representative: She said she stopped receiving responses from Stevens’s office beyond the occasional form letter, and their public and private interactions took on a negative tone.

In a statement to The Intercept, the Levin campaign affirmed his support for legislation that provides the government with aggressive tools to negotiate the costs of all prescription drugs. “The government has to use its incredible market power to stop this corporate greed and put the importance of lifesaving health care above Big Pharma’s lobbyists,” it said. Stevens’s campaign did not respond to The Intercept’s request to clarify her positions.

Local media dubbed the “most tense exchange” of the night a moment when Levin, who is Jewish, asked Stevens to explain why she has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, a political organization that has endorsed dozens of Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election along with many establishment Democrats. Federal Election Commission reports reveal that AIPAC’s newly minted PAC has spent more than $300,000 in support for Stevens — far more than the fledgling PAC has directed to any other candidate. (Stevens, who is not Jewish, has also been endorsed by the Democratic Majority for Israel PAC.)

“I have been endorsed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee alongside all members of Democratic leadership, including whip Jim Clyburn, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer,” Stevens responded after an audience question, reading from a prepared statement. “In addition to these leaders of the Democratic Party, twenty members of the House Progressive Caucus also received this endorsement, representing over a third of Democrats endorsed by AIPAC. This endorsement is solely about members of Congress supporting Israel, and I am proud to unequivocally support the Jewish state.”

After further pressing from Levin, Stevens followed the pre-written justification with a dig at Levin’s decision to run against her in the newly drawn 11th District rather than in the neighboring 10th, a Republican-leaning district that contains many of his former constituents.

“It’s not up to politicians to choose their voters; it’s up to voters to choose their politicians. … I didn’t move to run in this race” Levin replied, referencing Stevens’s recent change of address. As The Intercept first reported, property records reveal that Stevens moved into the newly drawn 11th District from the newly drawn 10th District late last year, after the boundaries of the new congressional districts had become clear.

While Stevens stood firm on her support for Israel and AIPAC, she sought to minimize the difference between her record and Levin’s as the debate turned to the climate crisis. Levin promised to use his office to help shut down Line 5, a pipeline that carries millions of barrels of crude oil through Michigan each year. “At some point, you have to take a stand,” he said. “I am for a rapid transition to renewable energy, and I really hope my college will speak squarely to this straightforward question.”

Stevens instead said that the transnational pipeline is “not a federal issue.” She said she would support the eventual determination of Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is facing pressure to push forward with work to preserve the pipeline as she faces a difficult reelection campaign amid soaring gas prices. Stevens’s equivocation was a departure from her prior call to shut down Line 5 until regulators could determine with confidence that the pipeline does not pose a threat to the Great Lakes.

Goodman, the debate moderator who endorsed Levin Thursday, told The Intercept that local union politics help explain the candidates’ differing approaches to the pipeline question. While Levin has received endorsements from most national labor unions, Stevens has been endorsed by a handful of local unions with stakes in the pipeline’s continued operation. According to Goodman, unions like the Pipefitters, Steamfitters, Refrigeration & Air Conditioning Service Local 636, which has endorsed Stevens, have an understandable interest in preserving Line 5. Their membership depends on the jobs created through the servicing of the pipeline, leaving them to choose between providing for their families and supporting a rapid transition from fossil fuels.

“I think there are a decent number of [local unions] who are looking at it as ‘having Levin would be great for labor, but not in this specific area,’ because Andy is a champion when it comes to the climate crisis,” Goodman told The Intercept. “As my grandma would say, they know what side their bread’s buttered on.”

And while Levin touted his support for the Green New Deal on a half dozen occasions throughout the debate, Stevens declined to specify her current stance on the suite of policies, which would rapidly accelerate the transition to clean energy sources and provide economic support and reparations to the low-income communities and communities of color that have disproportionately borne the negative impacts of the fossil fuel economy.

“There are 27 senators and representatives who have backed all 10 Green New Deal bills — I’m one of them. My opponent hasn’t backed any of them,” Levin told the audience. When asked by moderators whether she wanted to rebut Levin’s accusation, Stevens demurred.

“Why don’t we do a time check?”

The post Michigan Reps. Haley Stevens and Andy Levin Clash Over Climate, Pharma, Israel in First Debate appeared first on The Intercept.

One such attack on her opponent, Rep. Andy Levin, had a coordinated feel to it: An article in Politico last week was built around several members of Congress questioning why Levin, who is facing Stevens in a rep-on-rep primary after Michigan redistricting, is running in the newly drawn 11th District, rather than the 10th, which contains some of his former constituents. Rep. Ann Kuster, D-N.H., who has endorsed Stevens, accused Levin of refusing to “work hard” and “roll up [his] sleeves” by declining to run in the 10th — which, after redistricting, now leans red.

Unmentioned by Politico is that while Levin has lived in what is now the 11th for decades, Stevens put in an offer on a house in the district in the fall, just weeks after draft congressional maps were released. Until November, Stevens lived in Rochester Hills, a community that now rests in the newly drawn 10th District — the same district her allies claim Levin should be running to represent.

Knocking Levin as a carpetbagger in Michigan is unlikely to land, when instead the opposite charge might hit harder: He is part of a local political dynasty in a populist era hostile to such power arrangements. His father, Sandy Levin, served in the House for nearly three decades, and his uncle, Carl Levin, long represented Michigan in the U.S. Senate.

The dynamics of the 11th District primary are rare, given how uncommon it is for incumbents of the same party to face off in a primary. While the members have similar voting records, Levin is a staunch liberal who touts national union support and endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for president in the 2020 primary. Stevens is a swing-district Democrat who endorsed Michael Bloomberg in 2020 and has aligned herself with conservative foreign policy groups who continue to attack former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal.

Levin has long supported key progressive planks like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, while Stevens has distanced herself from those policies. Stevens is a member of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, while Levin serves as deputy whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Stevens’s campaign has downplayed the ideological gap between the two candidates, but the outcome of this primary will demonstrate the power of conservative and progressive interest groups hoping to defend incumbents they support.

The map that was ultimately adopted, which was dubbed “Chestnut” by the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, was widely seen as the likely eventual map among political insiders at the time Stevens purchased her new home in late November. And the map that Levin and Stevens both advocated for, “Birch,” also put Stevens’s new home in the 11th and old home in the 10th.

In an admirably candid conversation with The Intercept, Stevens’s communications director, Larkin Parker, did not dispute that Michigan political operatives expected the Chestnut map to be adopted at the time of Stevens’s home purchase, but pointed to Stevens’s marriage in September to explain her relocation to the 11th Congressional District.

She declined to comment on whether Stevens believes that it is ethical for members of Congress to run in districts where they do not reside, saying only that it is “a personal choice.” Michigan law does not require that congressional candidates live in the districts they represent, but it is common practice for members to do so, lest they be accused of having no real stake in that district’s welfare.

“Michigan has lost at least one Congressional seat after every Census going back to the 1970s, causing members to move, retire and sometimes placing two incumbents in an unfortunate head to head primary,” Stevens’s campaign manager, Jeremy Levinson, said in a statement provided to The Intercept. “Both candidates had to make the decision they thought was best for their constituents and families. This is not the outcome of redistricting that Rep. Stevens had hoped for.” Levin declined to provide a comment to The Intercept.

Stevens and Levin announced their intentions to run for the newly drawn 11th District on December 28, within minutes of each other. In the months since, Stevens has expressed “surprise” over Levin’s decision and has claimed that he is “abandoning” his constituents. Levin has regularly touted his family’s long history in the district when commenting on the subject. In an interview for Politico’s story, Levin said, “I’m running where I live, and I’m very happy about that decision, no regrets.”

Before the maps were settled, Stevens was gearing up for a possible primary against Levin. In early November, before Stevens’s move to Waterford, Michigan, from nearby Rochester Hills, she paid for research from well-known opposition research firm Spiros Consulting, despite the district’s safe Democratic lean and the lack of an obvious GOP opponent. Levin’s campaign also paid for polling in early November, suggesting that both campaigns were actively strategizing for an 11th District run after the draft congressional maps were released.

In her interview with The Intercept, Parker, Stevens’s communications director, rejected characterizations of the race as a progressive-versus-moderate affair. She pointed to Stevens’s former status as a front-liner in a tough district to explain why her past positions have at times been more conservative than Levin’s.

Levin, who has described himself as an active member of the 11th District’s Jewish community, has been a strong supporter of President Joe Biden’s efforts to rejoin the Iran nuclear deal. Stevens, on the other hand, has repeatedly criticized Biden’s efforts and has allied herself closely with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which has continued to hammer the administration over diplomatic efforts that have drawn criticism from conservative Israelis. Stevens is also drawing support from Democratic Majority for Israel, a hawkish pro-Israel group with a history of supporting moderate candidates in their primaries against progressive Democrats.

While an internal poll by the Stevens campaign, conducted in late January, put her comfortably ahead, more recent public polling has shown a dead heat. In that public poll and in Levin’s internal numbers, which also show a tied race, Levin is over-performing among women and people of color, while Stevens draws disproportionate support from white men.

“This is not about numbers,” Parker said when asked about the role of polling in determining where Stevens would run. “This is about two members who had to make personal decisions for their families.” She emphasized how challenging it was for Stevens to search for a new home and recounted the struggles Stevens faced while house hunting last fall, given the threats and violence that members of Congress are regularly subjected to in the modern era. She contrasted Stevens’s recent move with the convenience Levin experienced in choosing to run in a district where he’s lived for years.

“Mr. Levin’s lived in the same place forever. I mean, he’s never had the experience of having to try to find a new home coming in as a member of Congress,” she said. “Now we’re facing stories like this, which is really fucking unfortunate. But here we are.”

Correction: April 8, 2022, 12:50 p.m. ET
The internal poll by the Stevens campaign was run in January, after the maps were settled, and not in December as the story previously stated.

The post Months After Rep. Haley Stevens Hopped Districts, Allies Accuse Her Opponent of Carpetbagging appeared first on The Intercept.

Schrader is facing the strongest primary challenge of his seven terms in office. In a series of unprecedented votes, four of the six Democratic county parties in his district endorsed his primary opponent, Jamie McLeod-Skinner. The votes are unusual considering the procedural hurdles required for county parties to endorse: Party bylaws dictate that a two-thirds supermajority of votes cast by participating Democrats is required within a county. No other Oregon congressional incumbent in recent memory has faced renunciation from a single county party. The four counties that bucked Schrader — Clackamas, Deschutes, Linn, and Marion — contain over 90 percent of the 5th Congressional District’s voters.

In an interview with The Intercept explaining the unorthodox decision to endorse against an incumbent, Jan Lee, chair of the Clackamas County Democratic Party (Schrader’s home county), described Schrader’s new ads as misleading. In the lead-up to its endorsement of McLeod-Skinner, the group prepared a detailed position paper that broke down Schrader’s history of voting against the interests of Oregonians and the stated values of the party.

Schrader’s conservative record has drawn increased scrutiny from local and national Democrats since Biden’s election. In 2021, Schrader ultimately voted in favor of former President Donald Trump’s impeachment for inciting the January 6 Capitol insurrection after facing backlash for calling it a “lynching.” A couple months later, Schrader voted in favor of final passage of the American Rescue Plan after receiving a blistering letter from the Democratic Party chairs of each county in his district that lambasted his vote against initial passage. And last November, Schrader voted for Biden’s Build Back Better Act only after working to delink it from the bipartisan infrastructure bill and weaken key prescription drug reforms in committee.

In the words of the Clackamas County Democrats, Schrader’s record reflects a representative who serves “the rich and powerful,” not one who works “to protect the disenfranchised, the environment, or our democracy.” With recent internal polling first reported by Politico showing Schrader and McLeod-Skinner in a dead heat, Schrader’s ad blitz indicates that he is hoping to spin his record to address the growing discontent of his constituents.

“I’ve spent my time in Congress fighting for the people of Oregon — from passing critical bills that support families, schools and small businesses through the COVID-19 crisis, to championing legislation that lowers the cost of prescription drugs, fights against dark money in politics, and cleans up corruption in Washington,” Schrader wrote in a statement provided to The Intercept. “These are the issues Oregonians tell me they need addressed, and I have delivered real results.”

One of Schrader’s highest-profile conflicts with the party came in September, when Schrader was one of three House Democrats who voted to block a measure allowing Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices in favor of a much narrower reform that would allow Medicare to negotiate only a few drugs and therefore result in only a fraction of the cost savings. The move played a key role in weakening the Build Back Better Act. Though Schrader has long insisted that the federal deficit and Medicare spending need to be reined in, the larger reform would have saved the federal government hundreds of billions more each year and offset spending in other parts of the Build Back Better bill.

Schrader — who used a family fortune largely composed of pharmaceutical profits to fund his first congressional race — was heavily criticized following the vote, which he explained by pointing to dissent in the Senate. Schrader is also one of the top recipients of pharmaceutical money in Congress, taking over $100,000 from affiliated PACs in each of the last three election cycles. He has received almost $90,000 from these political action committees in the 2022 cycle so far.

Schrader’s ads this cycle have that criticism front of mind, touting the Oregon representative having supported Medicare drug pricing reform in the previous congressional session — when it was unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled Senate.

“Don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have,” Schrader said.

Schrader also worked with eight other House Democrats to decouple the bipartisan infrastructure bill from the Build Back Better Act, which contained once-in-a-generation investments in items like housing, health care affordability, childhood poverty reduction, and college affordability. After the group’s initial victory, Schrader made the subtext of their actions into text when he told the dark-money corporate front group No Labels — which celebrated Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin’s eventual destruction of the Build Back Better Act — that after the two bills were successfully severed, his message to Democrats would be: “Don’t get your hopes up that we’re going to spend trillions more of our kids’ and grandkids’ money that we don’t really have.”

“At some point,” he told the group, “we’ve got to stop spending money. … Some of my colleagues have lost complete perspective.” When asked to explain his work to derail Biden’s agenda by decoupling the bills, he told local media that “every president comes in with an idea of how they’d like to have their agenda proceed. And the Congress is deferential. We take up many of their priorities. But I remind everybody, it is Congress that decides how the money is spent.”

Schrader’s statements about “working to rebuild the social safety net” are also difficult to reconcile with his record. Schrader has long supported extreme austerity measures like balanced budget amendments, again pointing to concerns about the deficit, and he has made consistent calls to limit the amount of funding the federal government provides to cornerstone programs like Medicare and Social Security.

Schrader voted against initial passage of the American Rescue Plan, the largest boost to the social safety net in recent memory, and reversed his position only after facing severe backlash from constituents and national media. In an act that is revealing of his true thoughts on Biden’s signature legislation, Schrader went on to co-sponsor a bill introduced a few months later by Rep. Ed Case, D-Hawaii, that would foreclose legislation like the American Rescue Plan from being implemented by future Congresses dealing with crises like the coronavirus pandemic.

In one recent ad, Schrader cites a 2011 amendment he introduced as evidence that he is “leading the fight to get big money out of politics.” Much more recently, however, Schrader received a massive spike in fundraising after further work with No Labels to hinder passage of the Build Back Better Act, as The Intercept previously reported. Schrader announced Monday that he will stop accepting donations from Koch Industries amid criticism that the corporate giant is continuing to do business in Russia amid its war of aggression in Ukraine, though he has yet to return any of the tens of thousands of dollars he has already received.

Clackamas County Democrats took specific issue with Schrader’s extensive receipt of campaign funds from business interests that oppose the reforms Schrader has worked to defeat. By contrast, McLeod-Skinner, whom the county party endorsed, has pledged not to accept any donations from corporate PACs to her campaign. That differing approach has left McLeod-Skinner with considerably fewer campaign resources leading up to the May 17 primary. Figures from the end of 2021 indicate that McLeod-Skinner had $200,000 on hand. After years of collecting disproportionately large amounts of corporate PAC money in uncompetitive election cycles, Schrader’s campaign chest has swelled to over $3 million dollars. McLeod-Skinner, meanwhile, has relied almost exclusively on individual contributions, substantially out-raising Schrader among small-dollar donors in the district.

According to Lee, the Clackamas County party chair, Schrader is fundamentally out of touch with his district. When asked whether Schrader makes efforts to maintain relationships and consult local Democrats on his votes, Lee told The Intercept that Schrader simply “stopped coming to the [5th Congressional District] quarterly meetings that included the various counties in our area,” instead opting to occasionally speak with county chairs and vice chairs one-on-one. When the county party sent its position paper to Schrader in hopes of getting clarity on his voting record, Lee said he “referred to other legislation he has voted for” but would not explain “any of the instances we pointed out as problematic.”

Lee says Schrader’s work to defeat Biden’s agenda and the substantial evidence that he may live outside the district were key reasons local Democrats have gone to unprecedented lengths to disavow him. “He came out here recently and turned right around after bringing his horses and just left,” she said.

The post With Local Oregon Democrats Endorsing His Challenger, Rep. Kurt Schrader Starts Campaigning Against Himself appeared first on The Intercept.

In Texas’s 28th Congressional District, Jessica Cisneros’s strong showing forced the troubled South Texas incumbent, Rep. Henry Cuellar, into a runoff. And progressives scored another win in the South Dallas-based 30th District, where state Rep. Jasmine Crockett held a commanding 31-point lead over her closest rival in a crowded field, though she fell just shy of the 50-percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

Sen. Bernie Sanders-endorsed attorney general candidate Lee Merritt received only around 19 percent of the vote in the Democratic primary, though he may still advance. Still-ongoing vote counting puts him less than a tenth of a percentage point away from securing a place in the runoff election against former American Civil Liberties Union attorney Rochelle Garza.

Activist groups like Justice Democrats, which supported Cisneros and Casar, have been touting the races as potential indicators that the Democratic base is hungry for liberals who will fight harder for Biden’s agenda. The hope was that Democrats could make up losses with working-class voters and Republican-trending Latino voters by doubling down on populist economics and leaning into support for immigration and policing reforms.

It’s still unclear who Casar — an outspoken progressive with a tumultuous tenure on the Austin City Council — will face in the general election. Republicans Dan McQueen and Michael Rodriguez advanced to a May 24 runoff for their party’s nomination. But the newly drawn district is one of the most Democratic-leaning in the nation.

“Greg Casar shows up for working people, and they showed up for him,” said Texas Working Families Party co-Director Pedro Lira in a statement. “This victory is a result of the work he put in as a public servant. We were with Greg from day one, and look forward to working with him to make America work for all of us.”

Casar, now 32, became the youngest person ever elected to the Austin City Council in 2014, representing a working-class section of the city. The son of Mexican immigrants, he is a longtime activist since college who has worked closely with the city’s immigrant rights movement. Derided by conservatives as a radical and celebrated by many of his supporters as the same, he was a controversial figure on the council, having successfully championed the reallocation of some of the police budget to social services — in other words, defunding the police — and clashing with the police union and police chief. (The local GOP and police union’s effort to overturn the funding move failed at the ballot.)

Voters ultimately rejected another high-profile effort of Casar’s, a new law lifting Austin’s ban on the use of tents by homeless people in the city. As soon as it went into effect, backlash ensued and voters overturned the law, banning tents again. Casar’s more moderate opponents have painted him as the poster child for Democratic excess, coming at a time of extreme self-doubt and finger-pointing among Democratic leaders.

During the campaign, Casar also drew controversy over his refusal to support a boycott of Israel or the withholding of U.S. military funding to the country. He withdrew his request for an endorsement from the Democratic Socialists of America, of which he is a member, over the issue. At the same time, Democratic Majority for Israel, a moderate pro-Israel group, did not endorse in Cisneros or Casar’s races. It has, however, thrown its weight behind Jane Hope Hamilton in the open-seat race for the 30th District, where Hamilton hoped to keep Crockett from securing an outright win in a crowded field. Hamilton will face Crockett, who fell just short of winning the nomination outright in initial tallies, in a runoff after securing a second-place finish with 17 percent of the vote.

Casar’s closest competitors, Rodriguez and former San Antonio city council member Rebecca Viagran, each received less than 16 percent of the vote. Rodriguez raised roughly half as much money as Casar.

In the Laredo-based 28th District, Cisneros sought a rematch with longtime incumbent Cuellar after coming under 3,000 votes shy of unseating him in 2020. The border district went heavily for Sanders in 2020, but Cuellar’s long tenure and deep family ties proved insurmountable for Cisneros in their first match-up.

Cisneros, an attorney and former Cuellar intern whose background includes work in immigrant rights advocacy, has built her name recognition in preparation for another run, and a December poll of the race from the liberal group U.S. Term Limits showed her neck and neck with Cuellar. But in January, the race was upended by an FBI raid on Cuellar’s home as part of an investigation into his ties to Azerbaijani business interests. No independent polling of the race has been released since the raid, but the Cisneros campaign has hammered Cuellar over the ongoing investigation, saying it proves the campaign’s claims that Cuellar is corrupt and out of touch.

Cuellar has kept a low profile since the raid, and his campaign has suffered. Reports say his campaign is hoping to coast to victory off name recognition, given his family’s deep ties to the district. Cuellar has represented the area in Congress since 2005. His brother, Martin Cuellar, has served as Webb County sheriff since 2008, and his sister, Rosie Cuellar, is the Laredo municipal judge. While enthusiasm for Cuellar on the ground has been relatively muted since the FBI raid in January, a suspicious surge in online support emerged in recent weeks on Twitter and Facebook.

Henry Cuellar’s bot army appears to be highly active on Facebook too. On the one hand this is all pretty funny, but his home was recently raided as part of an investigation into Azerbaijani corruption and that country is particularly known for deploying these bot armies. pic.twitter.com/K6wDDAbSkq

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) March 1, 2022

Update: March 2, 2022, 10:57 a.m. ET
This story has been updated with fresh tallies.

Update: March 4, 2022
This story has been updated with ongoing results.

The post In Texas Primary, Democratic Socialist Greg Casar Prevails With Wide Margin appeared first on The Intercept.

“The future lies in the Palestinians being cordoned off into these tiny little ghettos.”

In the 13 months since Biden took office, over 1,300 Palestinians, a majority of whom are children, have been displaced by the demolitions tallied by the U.N., which counts each permanent closure or destruction of a residential or commercial property or key piece of infrastructure. At a similar point in President Donald Trump’s tenure, under former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli officials had carried out the demolition of 379 structures that displaced nearly 600 Palestinians — less than half the toll overseen by Biden and Bennett so far.

According to Diana Buttu, a Palestinian Canadian lawyer and scholar at the Institute for Middle East Understanding, Bennett is ramping up these demolitions as a display of strength in hopes of stamping out any remaining hope that Palestinians might one day achieve self-determination. “Bennett’s making it clear that this is where the future [of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship] lies,” she told The Intercept. “The future lies in the Palestinians being cordoned off into these tiny little ghettos. And all the land surrounding these ghettos will slowly be taken — be stolen — for Israeli settlements.”

Experts say the accelerating pace of Israel’s demolitions is a direct result of Biden’s refusal to pressure Bennett over Palestinian rights. The United States has considerable leverage over Israel, they point out, and Biden could wield it to end Israel’s aggressive expansionism — potentially within the course of a single conversation.

“I don’t think it takes more than for him to pick up the phone and actually threaten [Bennett],” Buttu said. But the well-being of Palestinians has clearly been “put on the back burner” in favor of Biden’s desire to secure a new Iran nuclear deal and to project the sense that tensions in the region have calmed since the violence of last summer, when Israeli attacks killed nearly 200 Palestinian civilians. Buttu and other Palestinian rights activists say Biden’s reluctance to push Bennett undermines his purported support for a two-state solution and amounts to tacit acceptance of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.

In the 2021 calendar year, Israeli-enforced demolitions of Palestinian-owned structures surged to 907 — the second-highest level on record, surpassed only by the 1,094 demolitions that were carried out under President Barack Obama in 2016 while Americans were distracted by an acrimonious presidential election. Over 145 demolitions have already occurred in 2022, putting Biden and Bennett on track for another record. And experts say these figures are likely an undercount, given that some events take time to be reported or are never reported at all.

The increase joins the resurgence of brazen assassinations in marking a rapid escalation in Israeli expansionism and ethnic cleansing in the occupied West Bank, and they both add texture to the ongoing backlash to decisions by leading international human rights organizations to explicitly label Israel’s ongoing subjugation of Palestinians as apartheid. While proponents of Palestinian rights have been using the term to describe Israeli oppression for decades, its adoption last year by two influential international organizations — Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International — has renewed attention on the atrocities committed by the regime.

Israeli authorities often use discriminatory local permitting rules to justify the demolitions of Palestinian structures. Among other inequities, these rules foreclose thousands of buildings erected by Palestinians who were unable to acquire a permit from ever securing proper licensing, with few exceptions. Meanwhile, Israeli structures regularly receive retroactive permits. The disparate application of permit laws has long been a key tool of the Israeli government in the enforcement of its multi-tiered system of political rights, as Amnesty International’s recent report recounts at length.

While the Biden administration made public calls for the demolitions to cease in the last year, activists say the president’s refusal to apply meaningful pressure to the Israeli regime undermines his public opposition to its actions. During the 2020 presidential primary, Biden distanced himself from competitors like Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., by pointedly refusing to support conditioning military aid to Israel as a means to apply pressure on Palestinian rights.

Beth Miller, senior government affairs manager for Jewish Voice for Peace Action, said that Biden’s decision to forsake the use of this potential source of leverage amounts to de facto acceptance of ongoing ethnic cleansing in the West Bank. In a statement provided to The Intercept, IfNotNow national spokesperson Morriah Kaplan echoed that sentiment, saying “it is time for Biden to do what five Presidents from both parties have done — leverage US aid and weapons sales to pressure the Israeli government.” Presidents Eisenhower, Ford, Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. each threatened to modify or withhold economic or military aid to Israel at some point during their tenure.

The administration’s inaction puts it increasingly at odds with the Democratic base, as well as Americans as a whole. Polling from May 2021 by Data for Progress shows a clear majority of Americans and an overwhelming majority of Democrats support policies that would stop Israel’s use of U.S. aid to fund the seizure and destruction of Palestinian properties and to continue their annexation of Palestinian territory. Americans’ growing reluctance to pay for Israeli apartheid likely explains why pro-Israel groups like Democratic Majority for Israel and American Israel Public Affairs Committee have ramped up their involvement in electoral politics, especially in Democratic primaries. (Neither organization responded to a request from The Intercept to comment on this story.)

Buttu, who spoke with The Intercept from Palestine, is not shocked by Biden’s refusal to push Bennett to halt demolitions and settlement expansion. But she expressed a feeling of ongoing disbelief at the refusal of most Democratic politicians, including some progressives, to stand up for the Palestinian people.

“When it comes to demolitions, this is the part that I have never understood,” she told The Intercept. “I have worked with many of these families who have lived with the fear of demolition over their head. This is their life. These are their homes. This inflicts real trauma on kids. The fact that Israel’s never confronted about this policy is really sick. Instead, we have candidates that come forward and just behave as though this is normal.”

The post Israel Surpasses 1,000 Demolitions in the Occupied West Bank Since Joe Biden Took Office appeared first on The Intercept.

The proceedings are currently under an injunction while more 9/11 families argue they should also have access to the funds, but legal experts say Biden’s broad emergency powers allow him to release the seized funds any time. In fact, Biden was initially forced by a court order in the Taliban lawsuit to make a decision about the assets — which were frozen when the U.S. withdrew from Kabul, despite belonging to the Afghan people and not the Taliban — by February 11.

When news of the split funds first broke last week, it was reported that the half not reserved for ongoing litigation would be channeled through humanitarian groups. That appears not to be settled: The corresponding executive order doesn’t specify, and officials seem undecided on what exactly they want to do with the billions of dollars held in the New York Federal Reserve Bank. For now, the funds are said to be in the process of being diverted to a trust fund “for the benefit of the Afghan people.”

In an interview at the United States Institute for Peace on Tuesday, Thomas West, the State Department’s special representative and deputy assistant secretary for Afghanistan, tacitly confirmed that the administration is still weighing whether to use these funds to provide the Afghan economy with liquidity. He conceded that the consensus opinion he hears from Afghans and experts on the best use of these funds is to channel them toward the “potential recapitalization of a future central bank,” but told moderator Stephen Hadley that officials are “early in [their] discussions” about how to release the funds. A source with knowledge of internal discussions, who was granted anonymity in order to speak freely, confirmed that the administration is considering releasing some of the funds to the Afghan central bank.

But how committed Biden is to using the funds for macroeconomic stability — the lack of which is the driver of the economic collapse — remains an open question. In a separate exchange on Tuesday, the administration again pointed to the court case, this time to justify their slow decision-making. In response to a question about how the administration justifies seizing money from Afghanistan’s federal reserve in the first place, press secretary Jen Psaki claimed the administration was taking a “proactive step” in splitting the assets of the Afghan central bank, which were frozen six months ago.

When prodded by The Intercept to explain how this step was proactive given the remaining uncertainty over when and how these assets will be released, Psaki pointed to the ongoing litigation, telling reporters that “no funds can be transferred until the courts make a ruling” on whether the money should go to the families of some of the victims of 9/11 and other terrorist attacks. She then reiterated that the move was “proactive” because it signals the administration’s intent to eventually get some of the money to the Afghan people “for humanitarian purposes.” (None of the participants in the 9/11 attacks were from Afghanistan; only a small number of victims’ families are participating in the lawsuit.)

This line of reasoning was picked up by the lawyers representing the most prominent group of 9/11 plaintiffs, who used it to press the judge to lift the stay on their purported share of the Afghans’ money. In a filing on Wednesday, a team of lawyers including Lee Wolosky, a recent member of the White House team on Afghanistan, accused the administration of dragging its feet, telling the court that “the sooner [the] proceedings move forward, the sooner [the Afghan central bank] funds may be applied in service of urgent humanitarian needs.”

Afghans are in the throes of a harsh winter, and the administration’s indecision ensures that the liquidity the economy needs to restart is still months away. In a call explaining the decision to split the assets on February 11, a senior administration official explained that it would be “months and months” before any of the assets would be doled out.

The economic crisis has been the topic of increasingly alarming warnings from international human rights organizations. Multiple reports from these organizations have described devastating conditions: individuals selling their organs, families burning their furniture for warmth, and children dying of malnourishment or being sold by parents desperate for basic commodities like food and fuel.

Several international human rights and economics experts within these organizations told The Intercept this week that the administration’s messaging has been inconsistent and their movement toward releasing the assets of the central bank has been slow. According to Graeme Smith, a consultant for the International Crisis Group who testified about the plight of the Afghan people in a Senate hearing last week, the devastation Afghans are experiencing as a result of the delay is difficult to quantify, but the reality, he told The Intercept, is that “people are starving to death — dying quiet, miserable deaths behind mud walls.”

The Congressional Progressive Caucus has continued to push the Biden administration to release Afghanistan’s reserves. In a statement released on Tuesday, they lambasted Biden’s decision to split the Afghan central bank’s assets, saying that “by removing and breaking up Afghanistan’s already frozen funds, the United States is continuing to contribute to a crumbling economy and devastating impacts on the Afghan people.” They dismissed the idea of waiting until litigation over the funds concluded.

Multiple legal experts have also dismissed the idea that the Biden administration needs to wait until the conclusion of litigation to release another country’s foreign reserves. Even Biden’s relatively few defenders in the international human rights community concede that the politics of ongoing litigation are a factor in the administration’s refusal to engage in prompt action to recapitalize Afghanistan’s central bank. In a recent post for the think tank Atlantic Council, Brian O’Toole defended what he described as the administration’s “kabuki theater” on the grounds that a swift release of the bank’s assets, which experts say is well within the administration’s broad authority, would leave the administration “bogged down in years of legal action.”

The longer the United States delays the release of the central bank’s funds, the longer starving Afghans will have to wait for relief. John Sifton, the Asia advocacy director at Human Rights Watch, told The Intercept that the next few months will see critical spikes in acute malnutrition. By the end of March, over half of Afghans are expected to face crisis or emergency levels of food insecurity. Both Smith and Sifton pointed to an injection of liquidity into the Afghan economy as the critical move needed to prevent widespread humanitarian disaster. While recapitalizing the existing central bank is not the only option for providing liquidity, experts say it is the quickest route to get money flowing through the economy.

“It’s good that U.S. policymakers are talking about reviving the [Afghan] central bank,” Smith told The Intercept, “but they can’t do it quickly enough.”

The post White House Shifts Blame to Courts as Afghans Endure Winter Famine, Says It’s Being “Proactive” appeared first on The Intercept.

For months, the administration has been debating how the future of economic relations with a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan will look. The assets, which were initially frozen when the Taliban seized control of the country in August, are essential for the liquidity and basic functionality of the economy. With the administration’s lack of firm commitment to return the assets to the central bank — which American economists who helped design, and still help to run, say is still independent from the Taliban — the Afghan people will be reliant on humanitarian aid for the foreseeable future. Already, reports say that aid is not enough to prevent the precipitous decline in living conditions the Afghan people are facing.

The problem is one of basic economics: Seizing the central bank funds has brought economic activity to a standstill. People have lost access to money held in banks. Government workers and teachers are going without paychecks. Importers have no access to capital to front the imports. Exporters similarly can’t access capital to keep their businesses operating. The currency, the afghani, has collapsed in value, and inflation is much steeper in Afghanistan than the rest of the world as a result.

“All of the foreign exchange reserves that are in the U.S. and Europe belong to the Afghan people,” said Shah Mehrabi, an economics professor at Montgomery College who serves on the central bank’s supreme council. “The decision to release only part of the funds will continue to hurt the millions of Afghan children, women, and families who are suffering one of the worst humanitarian and economic crises around the world.” Mehrabi said that despite press reports that the central bank money would be sent to humanitarian aid groups, he was hopeful it would be released to the bank, which still includes two American board members.

A White House spokesperson said the administration would create a trust fund to benefit the Afghan people in a variety of ways.

In the last few months, as House Democrats squabbled over the wording of letters and senators balked at questions about America’s responsibility for the crisis, the situation on the ground in Afghanistan has rapidly devolved. Multiple international organizations have warned that these conditions have pushed nearly 10 million Afghans to the brink of starvation. To survive, people are burning their furniture and other possessions to stay warm, or selling them for food. While those 20 years of war, an irregularly long drought, and an especially severe winter have set the stage for the crisis, the proximate cause of the Afghan people’s suffering is the seizure of Afghan assets, coupled with sanctions imposed by the United States government.

While the Biden administration has offered $308 million in humanitarian assistance and implemented policies to streamline the delivery of that assistance, this seizure of billions of dollars in assets rightfully owned by the Afghan people — who are readjusting to life under the harsh rule of the Taliban — has left them with no avenue toward building a sustainable economy capable of importing the food and fuel necessary for survival in the country’s inhospitable landscape.

Members of Congress have been slow in coming to grips with the effects of the Biden administration’s policy in the region. In December, Reps. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash.; Chuy García, D-Ill.; and Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., led over 40 of their colleagues in a letter to the administration that stressed the need for “conscientiously but urgently modifying current U.S. policy regarding the freeze of Afghanistan’s foreign reserves and ongoing sanctions.”

Last week, Jayapal, the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, sponsored an amendment to the America COMPETES Act on the sanctions. While it did not call for an end to the U.S. sanctions regime, it would have set up the groundwork for Congress to formally study the disastrous effects of our economic policies. While House Democrats could have muscled the amendment through with their own votes, 44 of them joined every House Republican to block its passage. The Intercept contacted each of those 44 Democrats, and not one of them would provide an on-record explanation for why they opposed studying the devastation Afghans are facing as a result of U.S. policies.

With the amendment’s failure, legislative action to address the crisis appears stalled for the time being, though Jayapal expressed optimism that the vote could be a precursor to an easing of U.S. restrictions. In an interview with The Intercept on Wednesday, she said the caucus felt it was a victory to win the vast majority of Democrats in a vote that “for the first time, really took on the humanitarian effects of these sanctions.” Her office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Biden administration’s announcement.

A senior Democratic foreign policy aide, who was granted anonymity to openly share his thoughts on the Biden administration’s actions, said the policy “effectively amounts to mass murder.” According to the aide, Biden “has had warnings from the UN Secretary General, the International Rescue Committee, and the Red Cross, with a unanimous consensus that the liquidity of the central bank is of paramount importance, and no amount of aid can compensate for the destruction of Afghanistan’s financial system and the whole macro economy.”

Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, agreed with the characterizations of Biden’s decision as mass starvation. Most people “don’t understand the economics,” of Biden’s devastating decision, he told The Intercept. “If a country doesn’t have reserves, and it doesn’t have a functioning central bank, then there’s no amount of aid that’s going to come anywhere close to making up for that.”

This week, after months of insistence from human rights activists and international nongovernmental organizations, Congress finally began to debate the United States’s role in the rapidly escalating humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. On Wednesday, in a long overdue hearing in the Senate Foreign Affairs subcommittee that governs the Middle East, Subcommittee Chair Chris Murphy, D-Conn., acknowledged that humanitarian aid alone would not be enough to prevent the rapidly approaching death of thousands of Afghans.

Murphy did not directly call for a shift in U.S. policy during the hearing, but he said in an interview with The Intercept that the administration will need to ease sanctions and unfreeze some Afghan assets to mitigate the crisis. “I believe that it’s time for us to release the money,” he said, though he reiterated concerns over whether the Afghan central bank can remain truly independent for long under Taliban rule.

The only other senator to publicly call for these actions is Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who tweeted his position on the matter last month. Neither senators’ office responded immediately to a request for comment on Biden’s decision.

Afghanistan is facing a humanitarian catastrophe. I urge the Biden administration to immediately release billions in frozen Afghan government funds to help avert this crisis, and prevent the death of millions of people.

— Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) January 18, 2022

Other senators have mostly dismissed questions about America’s complicity in a potential Afghan genocide. In interviews with The Intercept over the last week, several typically outspoken liberal senators have demurred or rejected the premise of questions about our sanctions regime. Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., a veteran of America’s war in Iraq, denied hearing about the many reports indicating that humanitarian assistance alone will prove insufficient in aiding Afghans. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, D-Wis., pointed to the Taliban’s prior refusal to allow women and girls to attend school and work to justify Biden’s policies, but said she would further study reports confirming that, since assuming power in August, the Taliban has continued to allow women to maintain a role in public life.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky. — a steadfast opponent of sanctions who gave a fiery speech opposing Sen. Ted Cruz’s proposal to sanction Russia a few weeks ago — equivocated on the plight of the Afghan people, telling The Intercept that the Biden administration’s withdrawal prompted the crisis, and that he does not support easing sanctions or releasing frozen assets at this time. And vocal progressive Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, responded to a question about the devastation wrought by sanctions and frozen assets with a question of her own: “We’re still talking about Afghanistan?”

In the subcommittee hearing this week, International Rescue Committee President and CEO David Miliband and International Crisis Group consultant Graeme Smith both gave full-throated condemnations of the international community’s financial policies in Afghanistan. Together, the two dispelled the arguments that humanitarian aid could compensate for normalizing economic relations with Afghanistan and rebutted those who point to the cruelties of the Taliban to justify the cruelties inflicted by the West.

Their testimony stood in stark contrast to the equivocation by the senators who attended. Democratic Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey focused on the discriminatory policies of the Taliban rather than the destruction Western democracies have inflicted on the Afghan people. (Markey declined to respond to multiple requests from The Intercept to clarify his position.) New Jersey Democratic Sens. Cory Booker and Bob Menendez did not attend. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., limited his interactions to basic informational questions. Ranking member Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., the only Republican member to attend, acknowledged that the U.S. has to “identify a path forward for engaging an Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban.” But he declined to explicitly open the door to normalizing economic relations and unfreezing Afghan assets.

In a particularly revealing exchange, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., pointed to the Taliban’s historic marginalization of women to justify maintaining America’s destructive economic policies. Miliband replied that the Taliban is making considerable concessions on gender equality and is currently allowing Afghan women — whose salaries remain unpaid amid the ongoing asset freeze — to work and attend school.

Miliband then presented what he described as the prevailing question among Afghan women in his organization: “How on earth does the West think they are helping our prospects when we can’t feed our families?”

Alex Weatherhead and Ryan Grim contributed reporting.

Correction: February 11, 2022, 6:54 p.m. ET
This story previously stated that the Biden administration would direct half of frozen Afghan foreign reserves to humanitarian groups. Though news outlets have reported the funds would be diverted to aid groups, the executive order does not specify how the money will be released, and it remains unclear. 

A previous version of the video misidentified a member of Congress as Chrissy Houlahan.

The post Biden’s Decision on Frozen Afghanistan Money Is Tantamount to Mass Murder appeared first on The Intercept.

In a blistering letter signed by the party chairs from the five counties that make up Schrader’s current district, local leaders lambasted their representative for not “consulting with communities in this district” before his vote. They labeled Schrader’s actions a “betrayal of [his] duty to best serve [his] constituents” and claimed that the episode was an indication of “how out of touch with [his] constituents” Schrader has become.

Schrader ultimately bowed to pressure and voted in favor of the final version of the American Rescue Plan, but his out-of-touch reputation has stuck. He now faces a primary challenge from Jamie McLeod-Skinner, a board member of the Jefferson County Education Service District, who reiterated the sentiment that Schrader is disconnected from his district in a recent interview, pointing to his key role in blocking prescription drug reform amid large campaign contributions from corporate interests.

But Schrader’s controversial votes and words may not be the only reason he has failed to connect with local Democrats. A review of Kurt and Suzanna Schrader’s public disclosures, travel records, and statements further illuminates the representative’s tenuous relationship with local officials and constituents. Schrader does not refer to an Oregon address in several years’ worth of filings with the Oregon Secretary of State, opting to list his home in Washington, D.C., as his primary address instead. His adult sons appear to manage and live on a local farm that he contends is his residence in the district, and his current wife, whom he met and married in Maryland, still refers to her property there as home. Despite owning property in his district, Schrader does not appear to spend much time in Oregon.

“I have been proud to call Oregon’s 5th Congressional District my home for over 40 years,” Schrader said in a statement to The Intercept. “My farm in Canby is where I raised my family and grew organic crops as I built up my veterinary practice. Representing the values and priorities of my neighbors in our nation’s capital is my greatest honor, and I am proud of my work for the district and the close local relationships I have formed over the years. While I am deeply disappointed by the politically motivated attacks against me, they will not stop me from doing my job and delivering for Oregonians.”

While Schrader’s relationships with his district’s local leaders have chilled, his family’s roots in the area run deep. He founded a veterinary practice in Oregon City in the 1970s and purchased the farm he now claims as his residence in the 1980s. Schrader originally ascended to public office as a member of the Canby Planning Commission before being elected to the Oregon House of Representatives in 1996 and the State Senate in 2002. When he successfully ran for Congress in 2008, his former wife, Martha Schrader, was appointed to replace him. (She served the remainder of Schrader’s term but failed to win reelection.)

After their divorce in 2011, Kurt Schrader kept possession of the farm, currently his voting address. While Schrader’s financial disclosures list him as the property’s owner, the farm’s now-defunct website listed Schrader’s son, RJ Schrader, as the owner and operator. RJ and his brother Steven both claim the four-bedroom home as their voting residence.

In addition to the Canby farm, Schrader owns a home in Washington, D.C., which he purchased shortly before his divorce from his first wife in 2011. He also owns property in New York. While owning multiple homes is commonplace for members of Congress, in multiple filings to the Oregon Secretary of State, Schrader has listed his D.C. and New York properties as his primary residence rather than his purported home in Canby, Oregon.

Schrader’s own financial disclosures cast doubt on whether the Canby farm is his personal residence. Since beginning his tenure in Congress in 2008, Schrader has claimed rental income from the property ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 each year. It is unclear whether these rental payments are from Schrader’s sons or whether the property is rented in any other capacity. Neither son responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

Schrader’s travel spending also calls his relationship with the farm and the district as a whole into question. Representatives are allotted an annual travel budget to visit their districts each year, but disbursement statements from the last 12 years reveal that Schrader has used significantly less of these funds than the average House member or members representing nearby exurban and rural Oregon districts.

While Schrader has utilized relatively little of the money dedicated to regular travel home to see his constituents, he recently made waves in right-wing media for his questionable decision to eschew the typical summer work period in favor of a cross-country road trip with his wife, Suzanna Mora-Schrader, and their horses. Suzanna, whom Schrader married in a New Year’s Eve ceremony in Maryland in 2016, is a former executive and lobbyist for D.C. energy company Pepco. She maintains a horse farm in Clarksburg, Maryland, and continues to report the property as her primary residence.

The trip, which started at the Maryland property on August 1 and ended at Schrader’s claimed residence in Canby on August 22, spanned the majority of the district work period, when members are expected to return to their district to catch up on issues affecting their constituents. In her blog recounting the cross-country trip, Suzanna indicated that the representative declined to spend the remainder of the district work period in Oregon after their arrival. Instead, he returned to D.C. the next day for a showdown over a budget resolution meant to enable passage of the indefinitely stalled Build Back Better Act, which, with the help of corporate interest group No Labels, he played a key role in delinking from the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

Suzanna returned to her property in Maryland — which she still calls home — days later. The horses, for their part, remained in Oregon for another few weeks before being shipped commercially back to Maryland. All told, they spent substantially more time in Oregon’s 5th Congressional District than its representative or his wife did.

Correction: February 8, 2022
This article previously stated that Jamie McLeod-Skinner was a member of the Jefferson County School Board. She is a board member of the Jefferson County Education Service District.

The post Kurt Schrader Represents Oregon in Congress. But Does He Live There? appeared first on The Intercept.

Among a number of eye-catching findings, the poll’s 610 respondents — who were weighted to match the demographics of likely voters in the district — supported the bipartisan American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which is picking up momentum on Capitol Hill, by a 46-point margin, 58 percent to 12 percent, after being presented with arguments for and against the bill. Pollsters also found that two-thirds of respondents agreed with the argument that the economic power of companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google is a problem for the U.S. economy.

The findings call Lofgren’s continued opposition to measures that would increase competition in the technology sector into question. With liberals and conservatives both becoming increasingly focused on addressing the power large technology companies hold, a rare bipartisan effort to increase competition in the sector has been gaining traction in both chambers of Congress. Last month, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted to advance the American Innovation and Choice Online Act, which seeks to prevent tech companies from using their platforms to give preferential treatment to their own products, with a vote of a 16-6. (Five Republicans voted with the 11 Democratic members of the committee.)

A similar bill advanced through the House Judiciary Committee last year as part of a package of antitrust bills, but neither chamber has brought the legislation to the floor for a final vote. In June, Lofgren voted against passage of the House version alongside her colleagues in California’s Democratic caucus, Reps. Eric Swalwell and Lou Correa, and Democratic Rep. Greg Stanton of Arizona. Had Republican Reps. Ken Buck of Colorado, Matt Gaetz of Florida, and Burgess Owens of Utah not bucked the rest of their party to vote in favor, the House bill would have likely died in committee.

“Some of the ‘tech antitrust’ bills in Congress are poorly-drafted, extreme, and go beyond legitimate, real-world concerns,” Lofgren wrote in a statement to The Intercept. “They target four tech companies, but don’t actually prevent the disinformation, privacy violations, and abusive consumer manipulation by algorithms that so many of my constituents and I decry.”

As an alternative, Lofgren pointed to the Online Privacy Act, a bill she introduced with California Democratic Rep. Anna Eshoo, which “would actually be effective in dealing with problems in the tech sector by preventing the abusive collection and retention of personal information,” according to Lofgren. “If companies can’t collect data, they can’t use that data to manipulate Americans for profit.” While the Online Privacy Act would restrict data brokering, it would play no role in antitrust regulation of tech.

The poll’s findings affirm that Lofgren’s constituents disproportionately favor the reforms she voted against. Data for Progress also found that Lofgren’s constituents feel uneasy about members of Congress who have such substantial links to the industry opposing reform. A staggering 89 percent of respondents told Data for Progress that they are somewhat or very concerned about members of Congress with personal or financial ties to technology corporations undermining reform efforts. Furthermore, 73 percent of constituents surveyed said that they would be more likely to support the reelection of their member of Congress should they support efforts to hold large technology companies accountable. While Lofgren holds a deep blue Congressional seat and is not at risk of losing it in a general election, her stance opens avenues of criticism for a potential primary challenger who is more aligned with her constituents on antitrust issues.

Lofgren tends to frame her opposition to measures that threaten America’s technology titans as protecting consumers, but as a number of other outlets have reported, her personal and financial ties to the industry run deep. Her office has served as a revolving door for operatives in the Big Tech space: Lofgren alumni have gone on to work at Apple, technology trade associations, and tech-friendly think tanks. Her daughter serves as corporate counsel to Google, one of the companies that stands to face the most scrutiny should the bill pass.

“I am proud of my adult daughter’s professional accomplishments,” Lofgren told The Intercept. “Over the years, my daughter has worked as a lawyer in private practice as well as for tech firms in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties. Hers is not an executive position.”

In total, Lofgren has received nearly $1 million dollars in campaign contributions from tech-affiliated individuals and PACs.

The post Poll Shows Silicon Valley Rep. Zoe Lofgren At Odds With Her District Over Big Tech Reforms appeared first on The Intercept.

But U.S. Rep. James Langevin’s announcement this month that he plans to retire has set off a scramble to determine his successor and called into question the wisdom of the maps currently slated for passage. The open-seat race for Langevin’s former district may give the GOP an opening in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to Congress in over two decades.

Local Republican officials have expressed hope that the combination of an open-seat race, the potential for a Republican wave in 2022, and the expected entrance of a strong candidate — former Cranston Mayor Allan Fung — could be enough to tip the race in their favor. Rhode Island GOP Chair Sue Cienki told the Providence Journal that the seat as currently drawn represents “a winnable race with the right candidate.”

Democrats, for their part, appear to have been caught flat-footed by Langevin’s announcement. With no obvious successor, a laundry list of potential candidates have been floated for the seat. The wide open nature of the race has stoked fears that a messy, drawn-out primary could ensue, weakening the eventual winner before the general election.

The Rhode Island General Assembly, which is run by Democratic supermajorities in both chambers, could neutralize the problem by making modest changes to the proposed congressional maps. But changes that would shore up the Democratic-leaning 2nd Congressional District infringe on the territory of David Cicilline, a senior U.S. representative and junior member of House leadership who holds the dark-blue district containing the majority of the Providence metropolitan area and the liberal eastern parts of the state.

#NEW: The RI Special Commission on Reapportionment has voted 15-2 to recommend "Congress Plan B" to the Rhode Island legislature.

Advocates and the public can view the map here: https://t.co/tmXVf7cm7R pic.twitter.com/Z10b9RT1Ni

— The Redistrict Network (@RedistrictNet) January 12, 2022

Langevin, who first won election in 2000, has not faced a competitive race during his 20-plus years in office. While the 2nd District has long been viewed as safe Democratic territory, it moved right during the Trump era, with Langevine facing the closest reelection battle of his career in 2020. Langevine ultimately won the race with a comfortable 17-point margin, but the district’s steady rightward shift could move the race into competitive territory as soon as the next election cycle. The 110,000 votes Langevin’s most recent opponent, Robert Lancia, won in 2020 would have been enough to capture the district during the last GOP wave election in 2014, when Langevin won the seat with only 106,000 votes.

Even before the shifts of the Trump era, the district maintained an independent streak that is common among Northeastern electorates. Rhode Island’s second-largest city, Cranston, anchors the 2nd District and hasn’t elected a Democratic mayor in over a decade, despite breaking heavily for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden on the presidential level. Fung, the city’s popular former mayor — whose third and final term ended at the beginning of 2021 — is widely seen as the front-runner for the Republican nomination should he choose to enter the race. During Fung’s ill-fated race for governor in 2014, he managed to eke out a win in the parts of the state that constitute the 2nd Congressional District.

Despite the building potential for a competitive race, there is no sign that the Rhode Island legislature intends to use its authority to adjust the boundaries on the proposed redistricting maps. The advisory commission’s suggested map hews closely to the current district boundaries, leaving Cicilline with the lion’s share of the state’s Democratic voters. (The commission, whose recommendations are nonbinding, is composed of appointments by state legislative leaders.)

Through any number of modest changes to the current map, the legislature could make the 2nd District substantially more favorable for Democrats.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s redistricting tracker, the currently proposed 2nd District, which contains the western half of Providence County and Kent and Washington counties, maintains a notable Democratic lean. Meanwhile, the 1st District retains its hold on much bluer territory around the northern and eastern Providence metropolitan area and in the liberal counties of Bristol and Newport to the southeast. This split leaves the 1st District substantially more Democratic — at D+32 (FiveThirtyEight’s competitiveness metric), its lean is nearly double that of Rhode Island’s D+17 2nd District. Only a handful of districts nationwide are safer for Democrats.

Through any number of modest changes to the current map, which already messily bisects the city of Providence and the state as a whole from north to south, the legislature could make the 2nd District substantially more favorable for Democrats. Cranston’s 80,000 residents — Fung’s base of support — could easily be offset by drawing other parts of Providence and its northern and western suburbs into the 2nd District, or some of Cranston could be moved into the 1st District. Democrats could also reverse the changes they made in the last redistricting cycle, when they moved the southern parts of Providence, where many of the state’s voters of color reside, into Cicilline’s district and exchanged them for large portions of the northwestern part of the state.

Keeping a clear majority of the state’s Democrats in his district gives Cicilline an advantage in future statewide races. As one of the state’s two members of the House of Representatives, Cicilline would be heir apparent should either of the state’s sitting senators, Jack Reed and Sheldon Whitehouse, choose to forgo reelection in the next decade. And if Rhode Island were to lose a representative because of population decline in the next census, Cicilline would be more likely to keep the seat.

In statehouses across the nation, redistricting battles are going better for Democrats than many analysts had previously expected. The 2022 midterms will likely play out on maps that are comparable or even slightly more favorable to Democrats than current maps, though experts anticipate that Republicans will retain a moderate advantage overall. With just five seats separating the GOP from control of Congress’s lower chamber, the smallest of factors could tip the balance of power in Washington next year.

The post Rhode Island Democrats Are On Track to Hand GOP a Midterm Advantage appeared first on The Intercept.

The leading opponents of the provision, which mandates that insurers and health care providers settle billing disputes based primarily on the median in-network rate for a procedure, are organizations representing the private health care industry, like the American Hospital Association and the American Medical Association. Along with a number of health care providers, the groups have filed lawsuits that federal courts are expected to decide in the coming months, before the first round of disputes under the new law reaches the arbitration stage.

The No Surprises Act has the potential to drive down the high prices U.S. providers charge, stoking fears in the health care industry that it would lead to standardized rates.

The legal arguments rely on murky case law about congressional intent, but nonpartisan experts familiar with the No Surprises Act told The Intercept that the rule is consistent with the law’s text. Instead, they point to the law’s possible consequences to explain why providers are fighting so hard to undermine its implementation. The move has the potential to drive down the high prices U.S. providers charge compared to other countries, stoking fears in the health care industry that it would lead to standardized rates. The drop in prices would at least partially be returned to Americans in the form of lower health insurance premiums.

A series of letters and statements by members of Congress from both parties, including Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La.; Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H.; and Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., has nonetheless sought to support filers’ claims. Their apparent aim is to bolster providers’ legal arguments that the Biden administration went beyond Congress’s intent in crafting the rule that governs the resolution of unpaid medical bills. But the law’s author, Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., has decried attempts to undermine its implementation. On Twitter last month, he called one of the lawsuits “an outrageous attempt to block the most significant patient protection enacted since the Affordable Care Act.”

This lawsuit is an outrageous attempt to block the most significant patient protection enacted since the Affordable Care Act.

As the author of the #NoSurprises Act, I strongly support the Biden Admin’s implementation of the ban on surprise billing. https://t.co/GzyqQQgJdz

— Rep. Frank Pallone (@FrankPallone) December 10, 2021

Prior to implementation of the No Surprises Act, providers regularly billed patients covered by out-of-network insurers directly for the difference between their rate for a treatment and the insurer’s allowed amount. These bills were often substantially higher than the true cost of the procedure or the price a provider would charge an in-network patient. That practice, known as “balance billing,” will remain banned regardless of the outcome of litigation.

Instead, providers and insurers will enter forced baseball-style arbitration if they cannot agree on the price for treatment. Each side will send the arbiter a payment offer, and the arbiter will pick the offer they think is most fair. At issue in the lawsuits is the administration’s interpretation of this process. Under the Biden administration’s proposed rules, arbiters must prioritize the median in-network rate when deciding disputes, forcing providers to justify any departure from their typical rates. The rule effectively stops them from price-gouging consumers who are out-of-network.

Providers claim the text of the No Surprises Act requires the administration to weigh a number of other potentially extenuating factors, such as the physician’s level of experience, equally to the median in-network rate. But nonpartisan experts like Jack Hoadley, a professor emeritus at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy who has followed the act’s implementation closely, told The Intercept that the administration’s rule matched up with his expectations and his own read of the statute. Analysts for the Brookings Institution wrote last year, before the law’s implementation, that while median rates are “only one of several factors that arbitrators are supposed to consider, so there remains some risk that arbitrators will ultimately place substantial weight on other factors,” it is “reassuring that median in-network rates are the first, and most concrete, point of guidance to arbitrators.”

In other countries, price controls for medical treatments are common. And in the United States, Medicaid and Medicare have been able to negotiate prices for some time. But U.S. legislators have historically been averse to regulations aimed at standardizing the rates private insurers pay. As a result, the majority of the excessive cost Americans pay for health care can be attributed to the steep, unregulated prices charged by providers.

The providers’ investors in particular stand to lose if the new rule is enacted.

Any move toward standardizing these rates poses a threat to providers that rely on inflating patients’ bills and forcing them to cover massive surcharges far above the actual cost of the procedure. The providers’ investors in particular stand to lose if the new rule is enacted. According to Karen Pollitz of the Kaiser Family Foundation, there is substantial evidence that “venture capital investors were strategically investing in practices that are prone to surprise, out-of-network billing,” because “they knew they could charge whatever they want.”

Democrats have led investigations in the House of Representatives focused on the role that private equity and venture capital firms have played in incentivizing practices like balance billing. Pollitz told The Intercept this particular practice will be curtailed, even if the lawsuits disputing the new rule succeed. Should the administration prevail in court, though, providers will be pushed much harder to fix the root problem of surprise medical bills: unregulated and wildly varying treatment prices.

Despite plaintiffs’ questionable legal reasoning, members of Congress from both parties have joined the fray on behalf of providers in hopes of bolstering the argument that the Biden administration snubbed congressional intent with its aggressive new rules.

In a May letter addressed to Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, and Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, Sens. Hassan and Cassidy — two legislators who played major roles in crafting the No Surprises Act —  warned the administration against implementing the act’s dispute resolution process in a way that favored the median in-network rate. The letter makes an explicit argument for the provider’s preferred interpretation of the text, claiming that legislators “wrote this law with the intent that arbiters give each arbitration factor equal weight and consideration.” Cassidy released a similar follow-up letter in late December, but Hassan, whose office did not respond to a request from The Intercept to clarify her position on the administration’s interpretation of the rule, did not sign.

After the Biden administration issued the arbitration rule at the end of September, House Ways and Means Committee Chair Neal and ranking member Kevin Brady, R-Texas, sent the administration another letter mirroring the language used by Hassan and Cassidy. Their letter argues that “Congress deliberately crafted the law to avoid any one factor” — like the median in-network rate — “tipping the scales” during arbitration. As leaders of the Ways and Means Committee, which played a substantial role in crafting the bill, they carry increased authority in litigation over congressional intent.

Neal, who has taken hundreds of thousands of dollars from the American Hospital Association over his more than three decades in Congress, played a uniquely critical role in the act’s passage as part of coronavirus relief legislation in December 2020. At the time, he threatened to sink the bill if it did not contain a provision forcing insurers and providers to go straight to arbitration in disputed cases. The chair, whose office did not respond to a request for comment, is now siding with providers who say the process he demanded does not adequately favor them.

In November 2021, a large, bipartisan group of House members also sided with providers in the dispute. Reps. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y.; Brad Wenstrup, R-Ohio; Raul Ruiz, D-Calif.; and Larry Bucshon, R-Ind., led 150 of their colleagues in a letter that claimed to lay out, in starkly legalistic terms, the congressional intent behind the No Surprises Act. While the letter’s signatories — 79 Republicans and 73 Democrats — were disproportionately conservative, a few committed progressives, like Barbara Lee, D-Calif., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., also signed.

“Congresswoman Tlaib has been a strong leader in fighting for comprehensive health care coverage, Medicare for All, lowering prescription drug costs, and eliminating medical debt. She supports completely ending surprise medical billing, and supports the efforts of Congress and the Biden Administration to work together to stop surprise billing that hurts so many residents,” a spokesperson for Tlaib wrote to The Intercept. “She had no intention of undermining meaningful action to bring relief to families across the country, and will continue to fight for bold action on this issue.” Lee’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s request to clarify her position.

But the bill’s author, House Energy and Commerce Chair Pallone, and Senate Health Education, Labor, and Pensions Chair Patty Murray, D-Wash., have pushed back. In an October letter of their own, the two applaud the administration in similarly legalistic writing. They write that the arbitration rule “is consistent with our intent and our determination that the QPA,” or payment amount, “represents a reasonable rate for services in a vast majority of cases.”

In the past, courts have typically deferred to executive agencies when faced with ambiguous statutes, but the Trump-stacked federal courts and the conservative Supreme Court are likely to be hostile to any regulation that appears to open the door for federal rate-setting.

For their part, health care analysts have largely been dismissive of the providers’ reasoning. Pollitz, who authored a thorough guide on how the No Surprises Act will be rolled out this year, suggested that industry experts expected the administration to enact the dispute resolution resolution provisions similarly to how they ultimately implemented the rule. In her view, the administration’s guidance is consistent with the statute.

“I guess courts will hear arguments otherwise and decide, but the administration did not just pull this out of thin air by any means,” she told The Intercept.

The post Congressional Democrats Join Republicans to Undermine Biden Administration’s Surprise Medical Billing Rule appeared first on The Intercept.

The proposal, which included hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, federal pensions, and a host of other components of the social safety net, called for gutting federal spending by $2 to $3 for every $1 raised by tax increases on wealthy Americans and large corporations.

For many right-wing economists, Obama’s vision of austerity was not enough. One economist in particular, Phillip Swagel of the American Enterprise Institute, panned Obama’s plan. Swagel dismissed the lopsided mix of spending cuts and tax increases — a mix that would likely be seen as draconian by today’s standards — as “politics, not economics” and argued that the tax provisions in the president’s plan were a ploy to enable more federal spending in the future.

Asked by Gwen Ifill on PBS NewsHour in September 2011 if the proposal amounted to “class warfare” against wealthy Americans, Swagel responded simply: “Yeah.” Ultimately, the talks fell apart when conservative House Republicans refused to accept any tax hikes on the rich, sparing Social Security and Medicare from Obama’s scalpel.

Swagel, a prolific academic and policy analyst who’s spent his career in and out of Republican administrations and right-wing think tanks, is now set to play a pivotal role in the fate of President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better Act. As the director of the Congressional Budget Office, Swagel has broad authority over the agency, which has become increasingly influential because of its key role in the reconciliation process — a complex and arcane legislative pathway that bypasses the Senate filibuster but mandates that proposed legislation be deficit-neutral or deficit-reducing after a 10-year window, as determined by a CBO analysis.

Before the bill can reach the Senate, however, it must first clear the House, where a group of conservative House Democrats have said they will vote for the legislation after seeing the CBO score, parts of which have already been released. They have promised to vote on the bill by the end of this week. The CBO has announced that it expects to have all provisions within the legislation scored by Friday, and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer has said the House vote could happen as early as Thursday, assuming that conservative Democrats go along.

In a letter explaining their position, the group seemed to invoke the CBO as a neutral authority. But budget scoring is a highly subjective practice that, in the past, has tended to produce estimates that vary wildly from the actual budgetary effects of a policy once enacted. And Swagel, whose history indicates a deep antipathy for investments in social programs and climate resilience, has the power to help steel the spine of conservative Democrats looking to weaken the boldest climate action and largest expansion of the social safety net in a generation.

It has been more than 10 years since Swagel called Obama’s deficit-slashing proposals class warfare, and the moral panic that deficit hawks induced in the early 2010s has largely faded, though concern over inflation remains. The United States has spent trillions of dollars containing the fallout of the coronavirus pandemic, and after passing the largest boost to infrastructure spending in a generation, Congress is now turning to a nearly $2 trillion package that contains the remainder of Biden’s agenda. The consensus among mainstream economists has shifted so much that the prevailing view these days is that Obama’s primary mistake in his first term was spending too little on economic recovery and that proposed cuts to Medicare and other essential programs became so toxic that Republicans failed to generate the momentum to seriously consider lower funding levels when they controlled all of the levers of government in 2017 and 2018.

What has been slow to change, however, is the outsize influence that deficit hawks wield at the key choke points of policymaking.

Swagel — a longtime fixture in the world of conservative economics who served as assistant secretary of the treasury for economic policy under President George W. Bush in the years leading up to the global financial crisis — was appointed to his four-year term as CBO director in June 2019. His selection was led by then-Senate Budget Committee Chair Mike Enzi and approved by House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth before being sent to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate President Pro Tempore Chuck Grassley for official nomination. Swagel’s appointment, which Democrats were technically free to oppose but did not, followed a tradition in which the House and Senate Budget Committee chairs alternate between making the selection and allowing the other wide latitude when it comes their turn to choose.

A review of Swagel’s writings and public comments during his last 20 years in public life reveals a conservative intellectual who has struggled to adjust to the changing economic consensus, and it calls into question the wisdom of the Democrats who enabled his appointment without any meaningful resistance.

During his time as a researcher and visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank known for its fierce opposition to government programs and financial regulation, Swagel authored articles decrying the modest expansions to the welfare state and financial regulatory system that Obama achieved. Those writings included numerous calls for aggressive cuts to Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

In his last article as a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, which was written a few months before his appointment as CBO director, Swagel criticized the very concept of a legislative package that connects action on climate change to further investment in the social safety net — one thesis of the Build Back Better agenda. The piece, titled “Action on climate change should not include creation of new entitlements,” was published in the conservative-leaning Washington Examiner.

The CBO is no stranger to controversy. It has caused headaches for the majority party since its inception in 1974, including for Republicans in their ill-fated quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. Originally conceived by a Democratic Congress to wrest power away from President Richard Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, the agency and its headline-prompting scores have become a thorn in the side of liberal policymakers hoping to reorient federal policy to benefit lower- and middle-class Americans. As a number of economic analysts and commentators have recently pointed out, nearly all of the core elements of the American welfare state (like Medicare and Social Security) were adopted before legislation was required to undergo the thorough fiscal scoring process that’s mandated today.

Since assuming his position as the agency’s head, Swagel has been careful to highlight the nominally nonpartisan nature of the CBO. In multiple media appearances and paid speeches, including an address to the Foreign Policy Association on November 5, he has gone to great lengths to frame the agency as “a nonpartisan body created by Congress with the mission of being the honest broker when it comes to measuring and assessing the impact of fiscal policy and budget decisions.” He has also refrained from making public comments that could be construed as critical of Biden’s fiscal policies or those of his predecessor.

But the actions of the agency itself challenge the public relations effort that Swagel has spearheaded. The scores that the CBO has produced under Swagel’s direction have given Democrats good reason to fear that the agency will deal a calculated blow to their odds of passing the president’s agenda.

In the last few years, the agency has repeatedly had to adjust its baseline debt forecasts to account for more robust economic growth and tax revenues than it had previously predicted. And earlier this year, the CBO came under intense fire from congressional Democrats and labor activists for its scoring of a proposal to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. That score, which found that an increase in the minimum wage would increase the federal deficit and result in the loss of over 1 million jobs, contradicted the analyses of a number of nonpartisan institutions as well as the results seen by numerous municipalities and states that have enacted higher minimum wage policies in recent years.

According to Ari Rabin-Havt, a longtime aide to Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who spoke at length about the CBO’s role on a recent episode of Deconstructed, not only was that score flawed based on real-world data, but it also came after the CBO spent a considerable amount of time suggesting to lawmakers that its forthcoming score of the wage hike would be relatively noncontroversial.

Backlash to the score was so intense that some congressional Democrats questioned whether they should replace Swagel, lest he become the second unelected bureaucrat with conservative ties to effectively wield veto power over the party’s legislative agenda. When asked to comment on the agency’s work on the minimum wage score and Swagel’s history of comments criticizing federal investments in climate and social programs, the agency referred The Intercept to sections of its website explaining the CBO’s processes.

As of Wednesday, many of the provisions within the Build Back Better Act remain unscored. But a CBO assessment released Monday of the title containing provisions to enhance the IRS’s enforcement power significantly undershot a Treasury analysis that found the provision would raise nearly $300 billion to $400 billion in revenue in the next 10 years. By comparison, the CBO found that the measure would raise only $120 billion, creating an opening for deficit hawks eager to claim that the package will grow the national debt and worsen inflationary pressure on the economy. The drastic difference was a warning shot for Democrats who hoped that the CBO’s analysis of the package would be broadly in line with the numerous analyses conducted by other federal agencies. On Tuesday, key holdout Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., indicated that he will move forward despite the agency’s scoring of this particular provision.

Its explanation for the shortfall in the tally for increased IRS funding — that the benefits of increased enforcement will wane significantly over time as the wealthy find new ways to circumvent tax policy — is plausible but should not be seen as politically neutral, as conservative Democrats will no doubt try to claim.

As Rabin-Havt put it, “All of these processes are based on the idea that these institutions are not political: the parliamentarian’s office, the CBO, the courts. … That’s not the world we exist in. Everything is political. There is no institution above politics.”

The post CBO Director Called Mild Tax Hikes Proposed by Obama “Class Warfare” appeared first on The Intercept.