| | |  | BY ELANA SCHOR | With help from Michael Grunwald LEFT BEHIND — One of Joe Biden’s opponents in the 2020 Democratic primary recently scored a major victory, getting a signature policy proposal embraced by the president’s team. And it wasn’t Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.), who ended his Hail Mary of a White House bid on the night of the New Hampshire primary, has long championed the expanded child tax credit that Biden ended up including in his $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief law. While Sanders’ push for a $15 minimum wage fell to a parliamentarian’s ruling (on top of internal Democratic resistance) and Warren’s wealth tax got nixed outright by the White House, the senator whose presidential campaign was weakest ended up with the greatest success in influencing Biden’s early agenda.
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Supporters of then-Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.) hold up signs outside of the Webster Elementary School during the presidential primary on Feb. 11, 2020, in Manchester, N.H. | Getty Images | The fact that Bennet — and not better-known progressive senators with millions of Twitter followers — got such a big policy win tells us a lot about Biden’s relationship with the left. When it comes to cooperating with the GOP, the president has surprised liberals by seeming to veer closer to Sanders’ agenda than to Bennet’s quiet centrism. But Biden’s policies have yet to truly touch the sort of “big, structural change” that Warren built her presidential campaign on and that Sanders staked a claim to long before the Trump years. Medicare for All, once a rallying cry for progressives (and a policy that Biden explicitly ran against), is back to its pipe dream status. Sanders and others are pressing Biden just to back a much smaller-scale expansion of health care in the still-unreleased second half of his infrastructure plan. We’ve told you in Nightly before that progressives have yet to use their political leverage to extract concessions from Democratic leaders the way that conservatives often did during the GOP’s years in power. And to be sure, much of Sanders’ and Warren’s current version of pragmatism stems from a desire to pick their spots rather than try to willfully tank the priorities of a Democratic president. But with the exception of Bennet, not one of Biden’s 2020 challengers has used the platform they built during the campaign to coax the president on board for their most trademark agenda items. No, not even the opponent who became his vice president (hello, former Sen. Kamala Harris) or the one who became his transportation secretary (the Supreme Court reform pitch Pete Buttigieg once made is DOA with most Democrats). Sen. Cory Booker’s (D-N.J.) proposal to create “baby bonds” as a means to close the nation’s yawning racial wealth gap has support from Majority Leader Chuck Schumer but isn’t in the mix during the current infrastructure debate. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) staked her 2020 campaign on fighting sexual misconduct and pushing for paid family leave, and though the latter idea has gained traction under Biden, other lawmakers have largely laid effective claims to its success. Perhaps the biggest lesson, then, is that Biden didn’t just beat his opponents in 2020. He also has quietly sapped some of their influence over his party — with a smile, of course. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at eschor@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @eschor and @renurayasam.
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| | JOIN AN IMPORTANT CONVERSATION, SUBSCRIBE TO "THE RECAST": Power is shifting in Washington and across the country. More people are demanding a seat at the table, insisting that all politics is personal and not all policy is equitable. “The Recast” is a twice-weekly newsletter that explores the changing power dynamics in Washington and breaks down how race and identity are recasting politics and policy across America. Get fresh insights, scoops and dispatches on this crucial intersection from across the country and hear critical new voices that challenge business as usual. Don't miss out, SUBSCRIBE . Thank you to our sponsor, Intel. | | | | | | | POLITICS, PA — Democrats sighed with relief when the state of Biden’s blue-collar birthplace slid back into their column in 2020. But his party now fears those slim gains could be easily erased here ahead of a perilous midterm, with the House majority at stake, Congress reporter Sarah Ferris writes. Pennsylvania will host several of the House’s toughest races in 2022, not to mention a critical open-seat Senate contest — none of them a guarantee in a perennial swing state where the party performed worse than expected down the ballot last fall. Those highly competitive House races, from the Pittsburgh suburbs to the Lehigh Valley to Scranton with its post-industrial revival, are drawing fistfuls of cash as Democrats attempt to defy the historical odds of losing seats after winning the White House. The state’s midterm races are shrouded in uncertainty, with its congressional maps set to be redrawn as both parties scramble to predict how voters will act without Donald Trump atop the ticket. Every House Democrat in Pennsylvania, even in the toughest districts, held onto their seat alongside Biden’s victory in the state last fall. But their narrow margins in those down-ballot races tell another story: Pennsylvania’s most endangered House Democrats — Reps. Conor Lamb, Matt Cartwright and Susan Wild — each won by less than 4 percentage points. Meanwhile, one of the party’s top GOP targets, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, won by double digits. The future of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s gavel may now depend on how the party fares in a cycle when neither Biden nor Trump is on the ballot.
| | DON’T CLOSE THE GRILL JUST YET — Senior writer Michael Grunwald emails Nightly: No, Biden is not confiscating your cheeseburgers. No matter what you’re hearing from Fox News or a Twitter swarm of Republican leaders, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Donald Trump Jr., Biden’s proposal to cut U.S. carbon emissions says absolutely nothing about banning beef or rationing meat or forcing you to eat Brussels sprouts on July 4. It’s malarkey. It’s a Whopper. It’s USDA Prime bull. Still, there are lessons to learn from this fake news cycle — about the potent politics of meat, the partisan politics of climate, and the challenges Biden will face in meeting his green goals. First, a quick story. Pollsters often include a “control question” to weed out trollish respondents who might just answer randomly or say yes to everything. Data for Progress founder Sean McElwee says he considered using the tactic of another pollster, who had included a control in surveys asking whether the government should erect statues of Adolf Hitler, but he worried that could get him in trouble. He instead, in a poll conducted last year, chose the next-most-unpopular policy he could think of: whether the government should ban meat. “Banning meat was the most unpopular idea we’ve ever tested,” McElwee said to Nightly. America is a carnivorous nation, dedicated to the proposition that ballpark hotdogs and juicy steaks and fast-food burgers and bacon-wrapped everything are our inalienable rights. That’s why Republicans routinely attack Democratic climate policies as assaults on America’s grilling freedoms; they even ate burgers at their first 2019 news conference blasting the Green New Deal. Yet while Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s office did once release a memo suggesting that the Green New Dealers hoped to phase out beef someday, Biden has never said or implied anything of the sort, or even supported the Green New Deal. The ferocious GOP denunciations of his nonexistent plan to limit Americans to one burger a month are a transparent effort to tie him to a radical caricature of the green agenda. In recent years, the GOP has edged away from full-throated denial of climate science, and quite a few Washington Republicans have supported modest forms of climate action, with some even calling for market-oriented taxes on carbon. But none have expressed support for Biden’s ambitious climate policies, and the right-wing aneurysm over his fictitious meat limits is a reminder that none of them will. Climate is literally red meat for their base, a culture-war issue of identity, and they want to stand with delicious all-American beef against the imaginary hordes of unkempt eco-leftists who would banish it from their barbecues. At the same time, it’s true that meat in general and beef in particular has a heavy carbon footprint, and that eating less would help the climate. The Biden administration has denied it has any intention of adjusting U.S. diets, which may be smart self-preservational politics. But the president’s long-term goal of a carbon-neutral nation probably would require us to stop shoving so many Big Macs into our bellies. The World Resources Institute has estimated that for the world to meet its 2050 goals under the Paris climate agreement, U.S. beef consumption, currently the equivalent of about three burgers a week per American, would have to decline 50 percent over three decades. That’s far from the 90 percent reduction by 2030 that’s all over Fox News, based on a distortion of a single University of Michigan study. And Americans already eat about one-third less beef than we did in 1970, a shift that has significantly reduced emissions even though we’re eating more meat (mostly chicken) overall. So that kind of shift is not unimaginable. But it’s definitely a stretch. A carbon tax could help accelerate a change to American eating habits by making beef more expensive, but Republican support for that kind of policy has largely been purely rhetorical. Government research into plant-based and cell-based alternatives to meat and dairy could also help, and Biden’s $2.5 trillion infrastructure plan does emphasize new climate-oriented research. But diets change only when individuals change, and the administration does not seem eager to launch a national conversation about the hidden costs of meat. If every American switched just one burger to a plant-based burger every week, it could save a land area the size of Massachusetts from deforestation every year. You probably won’t hear that from Biden, though. Some evolutionary biologists believe eating meat is a big part of what made us human. Our ancestors who started hunting animals 2 million years ago developed bigger brains for tracking down prey and smaller stomachs as they began consuming less roughage. We may need to ease up a bit to avoid grilling the planet, but it’s going to take a brave politician to say so. And as long as Americans will believe their political opponents are trying to steal their meat, we’re going to keep hearing a lot of baloney.
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| — DOJ opens policing probe over Breonna Taylor’s death: The Justice Department is opening a sweeping probe into policing in Louisville, Ky., over the March 2020 death of Breonna Taylor, who was shot to death by police during a raid at her home, Attorney General Merrick Garland announced today. It’s the second such sweeping probe into a law enforcement agency by the Biden administration in a week. — Biden will share millions of AstraZeneca vaccine doses worldwide: The Biden administration is preparing to send up to 60 million AstraZeneca doses to countries in need over the next several months, once a federal safety review is conducted, according to two senior Biden administration officials. — California recall backers have enough signatures: California election officials confirmed today that recall proponents collected enough valid signatures for a special gubernatorial contest this year, making it all but certain that voters will decide Gov. Gavin Newsom’s fate this fall. — Cuomo offers blanket denial of harassment allegations: New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo fiercely denied allegations of sexual harassment leveled at him over the past several months during his first in-person Q&A with press since late last year. — Biden advances emergency Covid-19 workplace safety rules after weeks of delay: The Biden administration is advancing emergency workplace safety rules to prevent the spread of the coronavirus after weeks of delay and growing pressure from Democrats and safety advocates. The Labor Department sent the safety standards to the Office of Management and Budget for review tonight, according to a DOL spokesperson, the first step before they are released publicly and go into effect.
| | A SIDE OF CATCH-UP — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is keen to help Americans with their holiday plans — but she’s playing catch-up with EU governments who are already doing their own thing. A number of EU countries are breaking away from jointly adopted guidelines on pandemic travel, as some capitals rush to reopen for summer tourists. In a sign that the Commission chief is again on the defensive, as she was at the start of the pandemic when some countries unilaterally slammed shut their borders, von der Leyen on Sunday told the New York Times that she hoped to reopen the EU to U.S. visitors who have been inoculated with vaccines approved by the European Medicines Agency. But Croatia and Greece, two EU countries whose economies rely heavily on tourism, have already announced that they are open to U.S. travelers, as has Iceland, which is part of the EU’s border-free Schengen zone. Some U.S. airlines have raced to add flights to those destinations, anticipating a rush of post-pandemic summer travel. MORE THAN WORDS — For more than a century the U.S. had not formally recognized the killing of more than a million Armenians by the Ottoman Empire during World War I as genocide. Over the weekend, that changed. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, Charlie Mahtesian explains what it means for Armenian Americans.
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7 The number of states losing a congressional seat in reapportionment, according to today’s announcement from the Census Bureau . California, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and New York lost a seat, while Oregon, Montana, Colorado, North Carolina and Florida gained a seat. Texas gained two. |
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| DIVING INTO 117 — It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that the 117th Congress would be the most diverse ever. The past six congresses have increasingly bested the last by including more and more non-white lawmakers. And this class is not only racially and ethnically diverse, there are more women and members of the LGBTQ community, too. With about one-quarter of voting members (23 percent) in the House of Representatives and Senate now belonging to a racial or ethnic minority, and with women accounting for slightly more than a quarter of seats, Congress is getting closer to being demographically reflective of the country. POLITICO’s new video interview series Red, Fresh and Blue introduces first-term lawmakers from both sides of the aisle and looks at what makes them tick. This season, Playbook co-author Eugene Daniels sat down with five freshman members for a free-wheeling conversation on everything from the insurrection to voting rights to Bitcoin. Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here. | |
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