Crooked Media - What A Day: Full-court suppress

Republican-controlled legislatures around the country have been building a voter-suppression tsunami that will make previous efforts look like a kiddie pool, but there’s good news: Democrats in Congress can thwart them with a bill that’s already incredibly popular. 
 

• After flipping blue in November and electing two Democratic senators in January, Georgia has become the prime target of GOP attacks on democracy. Of the 253 voting-rights restriction bills (!) Republicans have introduced this year, about 20 percent of them have been in Georgia alone—all drifting along in the slipstream of Donald Trump’s Big Lie.
   
• Georgia Republicans had promoted mail-in voting for years, to ensure that their older and more rural base was able to vote. That changed abruptly after the 2020 election, when more Democrats voted by mail for the first time. On Tuesday, Republicans in Georgia’s state Senate introduced a bill that would end no-excuse absentee voting, and make the process absurdly difficult for the small percentage of voters who remain eligible. (We’re talking witness signatures AND photocopies of IDs, the soft-serve flavor twist of voter suppression.)
   
• On Wednesday in the Georgia House, another bill that would eliminate Sunday early voting—in a blatant effort to suppress Black voter turnout—passed out of committee. (Aunna Dennis, the executive director of Common Cause Georgia, has dubbed that legislation “Jim Crow with a suit and tie.”) That bill would also limit mail-ballot drop boxes, narrow the timeframe in which voters can request absentee ballots, and radically change the rules of runoff elections, all of which would likely make Georgia’s already-long voting lines even worse. The Georgia GOP: Don’t Vote By Mail, Don’t Vote In Person, You Gotta Stop Voting, We Cannot Win If You Vote.

Georgia Republicans have set a low bar, but GOP lawmakers in other states are doing their best to wriggle under it.
 

• Iowa’s legislature is poised to pass a bill that would shorten the early voting period by nine days, limit ballot drop boxes to one per county, and prevent county officials from mailing out absentee-ballot request forms. In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) has called on the legislature to “address” the use of a ballot drop boxes and “ballot harvesting” (collecting mail-in ballots at a drop-off location), to ban officials from mailing out ballots to voters who haven’t requested one, and to force voters to request mail-in ballots more frequently. The list goes on and on.
   
• Depressing stuff! Fortunately, Democrats can protect voting rights and pass sweeping election reforms through the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the For The People Act (H.R.1), and they won’t have to change public opinion to do it. A new poll by Data For Progress and Vote Save America (hi) found that 68 percent of likely voters support H.R.1, while just 16 percent oppose it. Voters across party lines also overwhelmingly support the individual reforms that H.R.1 contains, like preventing foreign interference, limiting money in politics, increasing election security, and requiring states to use non-partisan commissions for drawing congressional districts. 

The House will vote on H.R.1 next week, but for it or the new Voting Rights Act to pass in the Senate, Democrats will have to overcome the objections of Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) and abolish or reform the filibuster. If there’s one upside of Republicans wasting no time in cranking voter suppression to 11, it’s the extra pressure we can all put on our reps to get H.R.1 done now. 

This week on Rubicon, host Brian Beutler talks to writer Matthew Yglesias. They discuss President's Biden's pledge to forgive student loan debt, the debate over how much debt should be forgiven, what authority Biden has to do it—and the political and economic risks and benefits. The episode drops on Friday, subscribe to Rubicon on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts → 

The Senate parliamentarian has ruled that the $15 minimum wage provision can’t be included in Democrats’ coronavirus relief package, because it would violate the Senate’s budget-reconciliation rules. That’s a major (though not entirely unexpected) setback for the Democratic efforts to raise the minimum wage, but it will probably expedite passage of the relief bill. If the parliamentarian had given the minimum wage the green light, it would've set Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and more progressive Democrats like AOC, on a collision course over the provision. The fight to raise the wage isn’t over, but the ruling that it violates budget-reconciliation rules means that Democrats will need to either a) find 60 votes in a body where Sen. John Thune (R-SD) is walking around saying shit like “I made $6 an hour in the ‘70s and I was a boy king,” or b) nuke the filibuster. Just eyeballing it, one of those options seems a little more practical. And Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders agrees.

The Biden administration will release an intelligence report that concludes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman approved the 2018 killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. The finding itself isn’t new: A CIA assessment released one month after Kashoggi’s death contained the same conclusion. The latest report was produced by the ODNI, drawing on findings from across the U.S. intelligence community. It’s unclear exactly how its release will impact U.S.-Saudi relations, but it will mark a major break from Donald Trump’s policy of pointedly ignoring the Saudi state’s role in a gruesome murder. President Biden held his first phone call with Saudi King Salman on Thursday (in another notable break from the Trump administration’s communications with MBS), ahead of the report’s release.

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The House has passed the Equality Act, a landmark LGBTQ rights bill with sweeping discrimination protections. 

Nursing homes have seen a greater than 80 percent drop in new coronavirus cases since the vaccines became available. 

The FDA has approved more relaxed freezer requirements for the Pfizer vaccine, which  will make it much more accessible and speed up deliveries. 

Costco will raise its minimum wage for U.S. employees to $16 an hour, putting pressure on companies like Amazon, Target, and Best Buy to do the same.