David Sirota is editor-at-large at Jacobin. He edits the Lever and previously served as a senior adviser and speechwriter on Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign.
Democrats running in the upcoming midterms are rightfully pushing the need to protect abortion rights, but they are failing to tie that push to a populist economic message.
In the lead-up to the midterms, Americans’ number-one issue is the economy and the squeeze they’re feeling thanks to inflation. Republicans get this and are making that squeeze their top-line message. Why aren’t Democrats?
Major US health insurance companies are posting record profits while receiving most of their revenues from the government. But they’re still jacking up prices by double digits while leaving nearly half of the country underinsured or uninsured.
President Biden recently requested leniency for low-level marijuana offenders. The Republican governors who rejected that call are also getting big donations from private prison corporations.
Six Republican states are suing to stop Joe Biden’s student debt forgiveness plan — even though a new study shows that borrowers in most of those states would be among the biggest beneficiaries of the program.
In June, three months before Hurricane Ian battered Florida, Republican state legislators tried to halt a climate risk disclosure mandate for businesses. They also voted against investing in climate-related weatherization and flood mitigation.
A “clean power” group with ties to the fossil fuel industry is touting a new bill, backed by senators Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin, that will accelerate oil and gas pipeline construction — and claiming it as a climate victory.
The Inflation Reduction Act has been widely touted as a big step on climate. But to pass it, Democrats struck a deal with Joe Manchin to accelerate oil and gas pipeline construction — and no one is discussing how much it might increase emissions.
In June, the Biden administration announced it would reinstate a rule empowering states and tribes to protect waterways from pollution by energy development. Now it’s supporting Joe Manchin’s secret deal designed to expedite approval of those energy projects.
Days after President Joe Biden announced student debt cancellation, his administration is continuing to deny bankruptcy protections to the most beleaguered debtors.
Past congressional efforts to rein in drug pricing have been undone by Big Pharma’s lobbying of the executive branch. But Democrats seem to have written their recent drug pricing legislation to prevent this possibility.
For a group of Democratic senators, blocking an expansion of the child tax credit wasn’t enough — they also had to do a huge favor for their big-money donors in private equity.
Chuck Schumer has received more money from Big Pharma than any other Senator save one. The investment appears to be paying off, as Schumer just allowed an aide to kill a proposed cap on prescription drug prices.
To stop the worst of climate change, we have to choose: Are we going to save the planet or are we going to continue making fossil fuel companies happy? It’s impossible to do both.
The Biden administration’s climate inaction is so bad that his own agency experts have signed a letter begging him to act to roll back emissions while there’s still time.
When the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices tried to block Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, he took the court head-on — and won. There’s a lesson there today: directly attacking the court’s power is the only way to rein it in.
Chief Justice John Roberts is spearheading the Right’s judicial coup — and Democrats’ worship of norms and institutions is allowing it to continue.
Chief Justice John Roberts is portrayed as a thoughtful moderate who’s been a victim of the Supreme Court’s hard-right turn rather than a perpetrator of it. But his crusade to legalize corruption built the foundation of the court’s current extremism.
Democrats have reneged on their longtime promise to codify Roe v. Wade every time they’ve held power. Party leaders will not fulfill that promise until and unless they fear their own voters.
The Supreme Court isn’t pro-life — yesterday, it struck down a New York State law limiting who can carry concealed handguns in public, a ruling that could invalidate most gun control laws throughout the country. The court doesn’t care about mass death.