On the day of his inauguration for a second term, Donald Trump issued a flurry of Executive Orders targeting the LGBTQ community, civil rights protections, and immigrant communities. Meanwhile, Congress is echoing the new administration’s attacks on immigrant communities with a proposal to punish whole cities or states if they choose not to join in the attack.
The No Bailout for Sanctuary Cities Act would force cities and state governments across the country to participate in mass deportation actions or potentially risk losing money for programs such as:
Cutting funding for these programs would take away critical care for tens of thousands of people. This would disproportionately impact low-income and marginalized Black and Brown communities, further deepening poverty and widening inequality.
This overreach by the federal government would be devastating to community programs and set a dangerous precedent on how cities and states are allowed to operate autonomously. We must stop this overreach before it can be implemented.
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The omnipotent omicron edition. Omicron is exploding and testing is falling woefully short. The U.S. is now averaging 610,989 cases a day – a record during the pandemic – and a 227 percent increase from two weeks ago. Hospitalizations in some areas are rising sharply. When one digs deeply into the omicron numbers, there is both bad and good news to be mined.
Omicron is surging and the Build Back Better Act is stalled. Yet there is some really good news to report this holiday season: a record 13.6 million Americans have signed up for individual coverage under the Affordable Care Act, and that number is only going to increase over the next three weeks.
How wonderful it would be if this could be a letter of pure celebration – that we as a nation had progressed from urgently needed protections to investments to build our future. We are not there yet. But your unflagging commitment will get us there. We have to get there because so many of our neighbors are behind in their rent, struggling with low pay, still threatened by the pandemic, still fearful of losing family members to deportation or illness.
I work hard to make ends meet for my family. But as an educator in West Virginia, that’s hard sometimes — especially with child care to pay for. Fortunately, the expanded Child Tax Credit that Democrats passed this spring has been a lifeline. Those monthly payments mean that my child has food, a roof, electricity, and heat. It means I have less stress and can be a better mother. And it means I can stay employed because I can afford child care. Unfortunately, unless Congress passes the Build Back Better Act now, those payments will expire before the year is out.
After the U.S. House passed the Build Back Better Act, Ady Barkan knew the bill’s future likely would come down to the vote of one Senator: Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Barkan, a lawyer and progressive activist with a particular interest in home health care, decided to reach out to West Virginians and find out what they thought of the legislation. He then created a video of the responses and posted it on twitter. It has received more than 100,000 views. These are Barkan’s words and the responses he received.
The Coalition on Human Needs sent a letter to Sen. Joe Manchin this week urging him not to close the door on Build Back Better Act negotiations. “Senator Manchin, so much is at stake, affecting the economic security of your constituents and people nationwide,” the letter states. “Yes, we are facing serious threats from COVID and its continuing economic dislocations. But economists and the people of West Virginia are telling you that Build Back Better will help, without increasing inflation.”
The 61.2 million children get coal edition. This week, the U.S. marked two sad milestones. More than 50 million COVID-19 cases have now been confirmed since the pandemic began, and more than 800,000 people have died. The highly contagious omicron variant is here in the U.S. and is ricocheting through Britain and parts of Europe; on Thursday alone, Britain reported 88,376 new infections – the highest number since the pandemic began. “Omicron is spreading at a rate we have not seen with any previous variant,” WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said at a news briefing.
With time expiring in 2021, leaders in the U.S. Senate joined faith leaders this week for a Capitol Hill news conference to urge passage of the Build Back Better Act. Within a day, their quest grew more challenging, as President Biden and congressional leaders acknowledged they were not ready to enact this historic legislation before Christmas. The Senate will return on January 3, a week earlier than originally planned, to resume work on the bill.
CHARLESTON, W.Va. — The final round of the federal government’s Child Tax Credit (CTC) payments ends today, unless Congress votes to extend them before the year is up. Holly Bradley, a farmer in Pocahontas County, said the extra money she has received this year through the CTC has helped keep her family afloat, and losing it would be a setback. “I feel like that’s going to leave a lot of folks having to choose between what bills they pay,” Bradley asserted. “And what food they’re able to put on the table, and if they can make rent or not.”
More than 167,000 children – roughly one out of every 450 in the U.S. — have lost a parent or other primary caregiver to COVID-19, according to a new, bipartisan report released last week by COVID Collaborative and Social Policy Analytics. The report, Hidden Pain: Children Who Lost a Parent or Caregiver to COVID-19 and What the Nation Can Do to Help Them, offers a roadmap to support and provide for these children, roughly half of whom are in elementary or junior high school.
The care economy – including child care, home and community-based care, and paid family and medical leave – is intricately linked to the economic well-being of not just families in the U.S. but the country overall. And the provisions in President Biden’s Build Back Better plan that support care infrastructure are critically needed, right now and in years to come. Those are some of the conclusions offered by a trio of experts who testified before the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth last week in support of both the Build Back Better plan and a stronger domestic work force.
The “variant of interest” edition. Omicron has arrived. But we don’t yet know how infectious it is, how deadly, or how well current vaccines protect us against it. We don’t even know how it will fare on a COVID-19 playing field that has been thoroughly dominated by the delta variant for roughly the past five months. What we do know is this: until all parts of the world are largely vaccinated, variants will continue to emerge, some harmless, others deadly.