Finding the best ways to do good.
The Biden administration and its allies in Congress are pushing for a new round of $1,400 checks to all but the richest Americans. If you’ve been following the ins and outs of Covid-19 relief politics in recent weeks, this isn’t surprising news.
But consider what a dramatic transformation of American politics this represents. The first $1,200 checks that were sent out as part of a massive relief package in early 2020 were genuinely unprecedented in American history. The US has issued refunds for taxes paid in the past, and those refunds sometimes looked a bit like unconditional checks, as in 2001.
Analysis by Ronald Brownstein Donald Trump ends his tumultuous presidency with the nation confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.
Auditing U.S. Democracy
The presidency of Donald Trump catapulted the topic of democracy to the forefront of political thought and discussion. This is for good reason: Throughout the past four years, we witnessed the creation of an immigration policy that is tantamount to ethnic cleansing; a president who used twitter and campaign rallies to stoke white nationalist hostility; the emergence of an authoritarian love triangle between the president, cops, and far-right vigilantes; displays of symbolic and literal violence against the press; and most recently a president who, with the support of GOP elites and much of the party’s electorate, doubled down on claims of election fraud rather than concede, paving the way for a Biden presidency to be treated as illegitimate by an entire political party. The topic of American democracy deserves our attention today. However, the Trump years do not mark some abandonment of previously rich democratic politics. To the contrary, American democrac