Abbreviated pundit roundup: The Biden-Harris administration, Roe v. Wade, and more

[Brexiter]

We begin today’s roundup with Peter Slevin at The New Yorker, who interviews progressive Representative Pramila Jayapal on the successes of the Biden-Harris administration so far:

As Joe Biden laid out a grand vision for his Presidency, in a speech before Congress late last month, cameras caught Representative Pramila Jayapal standing and applauding. Behind her face mask, she later told an aide, she was smiling. This was not the Joe Biden whom progressives like Jayapal expected to see when he meandered out of the Democratic pack and vanquished their champions, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, in last year’s primaries. That was the avuncular centrist who persuaded enough voters that he was the safe choice to beat Donald Trump in November. But this Joe Biden is going much, much bigger. As Jayapal said, “President Biden has risen to the moment, and I really do give him an ‘A’ in what he’s done so far. It’s been bold, it’s been progressive, it’s been what the country needs.”

Edward-Isaac Dovere at The Atlantic analyzes the vice-presidency of Kamala Harris:

Biden and Harris are both more interested in how regular people will feel about their decisions than how they will play among political junkies on Twitter. Biden often asks what people in Scranton will think of the administration’s choices. But Harris pushes him to consider how people in places he didn’t grow up in might think about those choices too. She’s careful to defer to him, yet conscious that someone needs to speak up. How do you define rural America? she’ll ask. Who are we not thinking about? “Coming from the Bay Area, her roots are in movements through her parents, in the civil-rights movement,” Barbara Lee, the representative from Oakland, told me as we stood in the kitchen of a Black-woman-owned catering business there, waiting for Harris to visit. “She sees public policy and her work from a lens of equity and justice and racial justice and gender equality.” Harris’s focus on Americans who have been left out of the government’s considerations has produced results: She helped push for the administration’s COVID-equity task force, mobile units to bring vaccines into neighborhoods that don’t have easy access to health care, and broader education efforts to reach vaccine-hesitant minority populations.

In the Senate, she was a lead sponsor of a bill expanding community development financial institutions, which provided billions in relief to businesses hit by the effects of COVID-19; as vice president, she has touted the inclusion of CDFIs in Biden’s American Rescue Plan. In meetings, she often weed-whacks her way through political-speak to emphasize what’s really at stake. At the end of March, for example, she paused a conversation with women leaders at the White House to point out that the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour isn’t just an abstraction. People who work 40 hours a week at that rate make only $15,000 a year, she said, in the kind of moment that tends to happen behind the scenes but was caught by a pool reporter. “Let’s deal with that,” she said. “Let’s deal with the fact that one in three of those are women of color.”

Meanwhile, law professors Leah Litman and Melissa Murray sound the alarm on the right to choice, which may be threatened by a new case before the Supreme Court:

The Supreme Court, with its newly constituted 6-to-3 conservative supermajority, is about to show the country its true colors. On Monday morning, the court agreed to hear a challenge to a Mississippi law that would ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — a case that poses a direct attack on the constitutional right to abortion.

The decision to take the case was unsurprising. President Donald Trump vowed to appoint justices who would overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision holding that women have a constitutional right to obtain abortions. With Trump’s three historic appointments to the high court, all that opponents of Roe needed was the right vehicle. The Mississippi case gives them just that. It will be heard in the court’s term beginning in October. [...]

It would not be unthinkable for this Supreme Court to use the Mississippi case to jettison Roe and Casey. Although stare decisis and its principle of respect for settled precedents has long been a hallmark of U.S. law, this court has in recent years refused to be bound by established precedents.

On a final note, Dana Milbank at The Washington Post highlights how civics education is under attack by the Republican Party:

Pretty much everything the Trump-occupied Republican Party has been doing these days violates the basic tenets of democracy that American schoolchildren are taught.


But the Trumpy right has come up with an elegant remedy to relieve the cognitive dissonance: They want to cancel civics education. If the voters don’t know how the government is supposed to function, they’ll be none the wiser when it malfunctions — which has been pretty much all the time. [...]


A bipartisan bill in Congress sponsored by Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas and Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma (Disclosure: My wife’s stepmother, Rep. Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, is one of the bill’s Democratic sponsors), would authorize $1 billion a year in grants to pay for more civics and history programs that teach children “to understand American Government and engage in American democratic practices as citizens and residents of the United States.” It’s as American — and as anodyne — as apple pie.


But, as The Post’s Laura Meckler reported over the weekend, “Conservative media and activists are pelting the Republicans who support the bill to abandon it. They call the grant program a ‘Trojan horse’ that would allow the Biden administration to push a liberal agenda.”