Dems strike a deal on policy, Trump rejects the C.D.C. guidelines for schools, and SCOTUS gives the green light to religious groups refusing birth-control coverage. It’s Thursday, and this is your politics tip sheet. |
- How far to the left should Joe Biden stretch to shore up support among the Democratic Party’s youthful left wing? That question lay at the heart of negotiations between Biden allies and backers of Bernie Sanders, who have been hunkered down together in six policy task forces since May, hammering out recommendations in areas including health care, criminal justice and climate policy.
- The task forces sent Biden’s campaign their recommendations yesterday, capping a series of sometimes tense negotiations. The end results are not likely to appease every progressive leader: The proposals support Biden’s longstanding goal of adding a public option to the Affordable Care Act, rather than introducing “Medicare for all.” The education task force didn’t co-sign making public colleges tuition-free for all students or canceling all student debt.
- But if adopted, the panels’ recommendations would nudge Biden’s campaign to the left on several issues. The climate task force called for an end to power-plant carbon emissions by 2035, for example. And the economy task force recommended banning federal contracts with companies that pay any of their workers less than $15 an hour, or that seek to undermine unionization efforts.
- “Though the end result is not what I or my supporters would have written alone,” Sanders said, “the task forces have created a good policy blueprint that will move this country in a much-needed progressive direction and substantially improve the lives of working families throughout our country.”
- In a new analysis of New York Times/Siena College polling data, The Upshot’s Nate Cohn points out that as President Trump turns up his appeals to the Republican base, Biden may be on track to receive strong support from the Democrats’ left wing in November.
- Voters in battleground states who named Sanders as their top choice for president said they would back Biden over Trump, 87 percent to 4 percent, according to Times/Siena polls conducted last month. Among those who preferred Elizabeth Warren, Biden beat Trump 96-0.
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- Trump has turned up his pressure campaign on school districts to plan for in-person classes in the fall, refusing to accept health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention because, he said, it was “asking schools to do very impractical things.”
- Hours after Trump tweeted yesterday that the guidelines, which the agency issued in May, were “very tough” and “expensive,” Vice President Mike Pence announced that the C.D.C. would revise the guidelines by next week. Robert Redfield, the agency’s director, said the guidelines should not be used “as a rationale to keep schools closed.”
- In a separate tweet, Trump threatened to cut off funding for schools if they didn’t reopen for in-person classes. “In Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden and many other countries, SCHOOLS ARE OPEN WITH NO PROBLEMS,” he wrote, though he did not mention that those countries currently have less than 1 percent the number of new daily cases that the United States is reporting.
- The White House appears to have an idea about how to kill multiple birds with one stone, pushing schools to reopen in person by threatening to put international students at a disadvantage. But Harvard and M.I.T. filed a lawsuit yesterday to stop it. The suit challenges new guidance issued by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that would strip most foreign college students of their visas if they take their college classes online in the fall.
- As they seek to reopen, states are finding that even freely available testing is not enough to contain the coronavirus. Tennessee’s Republican governor has sought to ensure since April that anyone in the state can get a test free of charge, but from early June to early July, daily confirmed cases in Tennessee nearly quadrupled.
- Something similar is playing out in other states across the South and the West, many of them controlled by Republican governors, who have sought to use free statewide testing to pave the way for aggressive reopening plans.
- Adm. Brett P. Giroir, the assistant secretary of health, said more preventive measures were needed. “We cannot test our way out of this,” he told reporters. “Testing alone is almost never the answer.”
- Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, a former staff member of the White House National Security Council, has had a target on his back since he testified in the House’s impeachment hearings that it was “improper for the president” to pressure a foreign government to investigate a political opponent.
- And yesterday Vindman announced that he would be retiring from the Army amid what his lawyer called a campaign of intimidation and retaliation from the White House. The move came as a surprise to top Army leaders, who had sought to promote him.
- But White House officials said that Trump had made clear to the Pentagon that he did not want Vindman promoted, and the president had asked Pentagon officials to scrounge up a justification for blocking him.
- “Today I officially requested retirement from the US Army, an organization I love,” Vindman wrote on Twitter. “My family and I look forward to the next chapter of our lives.”
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- Well over 100,000 women nationwide could lose their contraceptive coverage after the Supreme Court yesterday upheld a Trump administration regulation that lets employers limit women’s access to birth control coverage if it runs counter to the employer’s religious or moral beliefs.
- The 7-to-2 decision addresses a long-simmering debate over the so-called contraception mandate in the Affordable Care Act. In a concurring opinion not signed by the court’s five conservative members, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that different administrations had the discretion to decide which institutions can claim religious exemptions.
- Also yesterday, the court issued a separate 7-to-2 ruling that employment discrimination laws do not apply to teachers in religious schools, meaning that parochial schools can fire teachers if their race or sexual orientation is seen as preventing them from giving religious instruction.
- In both cases, the dissenting votes came from Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor.
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 | | Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times |
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How can Covid-19’s hard-earned lessons be applied to climate change? |
This year, to combat the coronavirus, companies adapted their production, governments poured money into technology, central banks permitted exceptional stimulus packages and societies mobilized to shield the most vulnerable people. Has this created the blueprint for combating climate change? How can legacy systems and businesses transform to scale solutions at this unique moment in history? |
- Alexandra Palt, the chief corporate responsibility officer at L’Oréal
- Luisa Neubauer, a climate activist
- Nigel Topping, the United Kingdom’s high-level climate action champion for COP26
- Dayna Cunningham, the executive director of CoLab at M.I.T.
- Bertrand Piccard, initiator and chairman of the Solar Impulse Foundation
- Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research
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