Bloc Party

In 2010, the DREAM Act failed in a Senate vote when five Democrats refused to vote for the bill. Will the Biden administration learn from that defeat? 
Greisa Martinez Rosas was in the Senate gallery in 2010 when the DREAM Act died. Since then, she’s organized relentlessly to prevent the next Democratic trifecta from failing to protect immigrants.
This week, Amira Hassan, Justice Democrats’ Political Director, takes the mic to speak with Greisa, executive director of United We Dream. Together they unpack the immigrant rights movement’s wins and losses from the past two decades, what has changed since those battles, and what lies ahead in the fight for immigrant and racial justice during the Biden years. Greisa also shares her evolution from a shy high schooler to a veteran organizer, and gives Senate Democrats some advice after a few of them voted with Republicans to deny stimulus checks to undocumented Americans.

Join United We Dream’s Undeniable campaign.
'The civil rights issue of our time': how Dreamers came to dominate US politics
DREAM Act dies in Senate
Progressive dems show Biden what “sweeping” reform really looks like
On Immigration, Biden Goes Big In Opening Bid To Congress
Biden Signs 3 Immigration Executive Orders. Activists Want More
Hundreds deported under Biden, including witness to massacre

When the slavocracy needed to quash the rising tides of emancipation and free labor, they used the filibuster. When Jim Crow segregationists needed to stymie anti-lynching laws and preserve their poll taxes, they used the filibuster. Today, when the Republican Party must cling to power by strangling the American government and suppressing the American majority, they use the filibuster.
But the filibuster is an accident of parliamentary history; an unintended consequence of minor changes to Senate rules. Now the weaponization of the filibuster against majoritarian democracy has essentially broken Congress.
This week at the Bloc Party, Waleed Shahid, spokesperson of Justice Democrats, sits down with Adam Jentleson, author of the new book KILL SWITCH: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. Waleed figures out why former Harry Reid staffers like Adam end up becoming progressive crusaders, how the filibuster went from accident to shield of white supremacy, and together they assess how the Democratic Party might reform Congress, or fail and forfeit power for a generation.

Group Chat returns after Senate Democrats win back the majority, the Republican Party incites a deadly coup attempt, and Joe Biden is officially sworn in as the 46th President.
President Biden delivered his inaugural address, but what does “unity” mean after Republicans abetted violence against Democratic members of Congress? What does it mean to evoke Lincoln, who was assassinated by a Confederate sympathizer, as a figure of unity? Why would Senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley ever stop aiding would-be fascists if there are no consequences for their actions? We look back at inaugural speeches from FDR and Reagan.
Just hours after his inauguration, Biden signed more than a dozen executive orders in the Oval Office, including measures to rejoin the Paris Agreement, repeal Trump's restrictions on travel from several Muslim-majority countries, stop construction of the Southern border wall and mandate the wearing of masks on federal property. Amira, Guido, and Waleed make sense of President Biden’s Day 1 agenda.

Additional reading & references:

Amanda Gorman’s inaugural poem

Bayard Rustin, From Protest to Politics


Biden, Inauguration Speech 

Biden Transition: How to succeed in hyperpolarized politics 

Climate activists expect a lot from President Biden

League of Conservation Voters: Policy Priorities for Biden

The New Progressive Left Shows How To Deal With Sedition

Sen. Manchin calls for $4 trillion infrastructure spending

Biden unveils immigration plan

Poll: 47 percent of people blame ANTIFA for insurrection

President-elect Joe Biden ran against Medicare-for-All in the Democratic Presidential primary, and he won. Despite millions of Americans losing their medical insurance after being laid off in the midst of deadly pandemic, the crises of 2020 have not brought universal healthcare back onto the national agenda.
So what do advocates for Medicare-for-All do now? And how should we think about using the leverage the Squad will wield inside a Democratic caucus that has only a slim, 222-seat majority in the House of Representatives?
Group chat regulars Guido, Amira, and Waleed make sense of a recent strategic debate swirling around the left: what if AOC and the Squad refuses to vote for Rep. Nancy Pelosi until she brings Medicare-for-All to the floor for an up-or-down vote? Is that a good strategy? The Group Chat sifts the good from the bad while trying to stay humble and keep the good vibes going.

Winning takes long-term planning, it turns out, which is why you, yes you, should nominate a leader in your community to run for Congress in 2022.

Additional references:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s interview with Jeremy Scahill at The Intercept.
AOC: Pelosi needs to go, but there’s no one to replace her yet
Jimmy Dore: How Progressives Could FORCE A Medicare For All Vote
The Campaign Against ‘Medicare For All’ Is Spending Millions. Progressives Not So Much.
The Majority Report with Sam Seder
The Left Can Win, by Pablo Iglesias

Because this is not the Earth of Joe Biden’s childhood.

This week, we take a break from the inside-the-beltway negotiations, zoom out, and ask the important questions: Is the stable foundation of human civilization unraveling? Does anyone or anything have the power to hold the apocalypse at bay? Journalist David Wallace-Wells synthesizes climate science to deduce whether we are still living on planet Earth, and what it means for the future if we’re not. Then journalist Kate Aronoff takes us on a tour through inadequate solutions and false hopes for planetary salvation, before explaining why the U.S federal government, for better or worse, has the power to stop the apocalypse -- or to seal our fate.

Waleed reveals he is actually an animal rights activist before having an existential crisis about the absurdity of American politics. 

Our guests and their work:
The Uninhabitable Earth: LIFE AFTER WARMING
By DAVID WALLACE-WELLS

Overheated: How Capitalism Broke the Planet--And How We Fight Back
by Kate Aronoff

Additional readings and references:
Carlos Maza’s video essay ‘Why you still don't understand the Green New Deal’
What Does ’12 Years to Act on Climate Change’ (Now 11 Years) Really Mean?
Q&A: How do climate models work?
Scientists have gotten predictions of global warming right since the 1970s
SPECIAL REPORT: GLOBAL WARMING OF 1.5 ºC: Summary for Policymakers
What would it take to limit the global temperature rise to 1.5°C?
The Paris Agreement set an unrealistic target for global warming. Now what?
Carbon unicorns and fossil futures. Whose emission reduction pathways is the IPCC performing?
UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2019
Carbon budgets: Where are we now?

Guido and Amira unpack interviews with two foreign policy experts, Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy advisor, and Yasmine Taeb, human rights attorney and progressive foreign policy activist, circling one central question: What happened to the reigning foreign policy consensus in D.C - also known as the Blob - when Congressman-elect Jamaal Bowman unseated the hawkish Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Eliot Engel this summer? Guido interviews Matt about his experience pushing the constraints of the Blob, how a progressive vision for foreign policy was shaping up before the defeat of Eliot Engel and then how Jamaal Bowman’s victory changed the politics of what’s possible all over again. 
Bowman’s race was watched closely for months by grassroots organizations and once it was clear Engel was going to lose his seat as Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee (HFAC), activists like Yasmine Taeb were on the frontlines working to champion a progressive replacement for Engel. For Yasmine, who grew up in a refugee family - and many others who are critical of US foreign policy - the fight against the Blob isn’t just political, it’s personal.

Will Team Biden repeat the mistakes of the Obama 2008 transition?
Reed Hundt, author of A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama's Defining Decisions, sits down with Guido to figure out how and why the Obama administration made critical, Presidency-defining mistakes during the 2008 Presidential transition. Obama staffers on Team Biden are experiencing déjà vu as they navigate the current Presidential transition amidst another economic crisis; Guido asks Reed whether he's optimistic about Biden’s team avoiding the mistakes of the 2008 transition. Then, in the group chat, Waleed Shahid and Amira Hassan, Justice Democrats Political Director and Spokesperson, return to discuss the left’s demands for Biden’s team and evaluate the confirmed picks for Biden’s cabinet so far, before attempting to take certain men and the bad policies they supported in the 1990s and put them outside the Democratic Party’s tent.

Things we might have read before recording: 
Obama's Original Sin
Will Biden Name a Deficit Hawk to Head OMB? 
AOC and Ilhan Omar want to block Biden’s former chief of staff
BlackRock Executive Brian Deese Could Get Major White House Position
RAHM EMANUEL IS PUSHING FOR TRANSPORTATION SECRETARY POST
An Early Test for Biden: Managing a Divided Democratic Party
Biden to Nominate Janet Yellen for Treasury Secretary

Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump by millions of votes but Democrats in the House and Senate underperformed their polling. The Democratic majority in the House of the Representatives got smaller. People are mad, and they’re getting into fights.
But what is this fight roiling the Democratic Party about? Is it really an ideological clash between progressive and conservative Democrats, or is it a fight about campaign strategy? When conservative Democrats claim “socialism” and “Defund The Police” cost them seats, who are they talking to? And if winning majorities of votes again and again only rarely translates into the power to govern, are we missing a bigger, structural crisis here? On the first Bloc Party Group Chat, Guido Girgenti slides into the DMs with Justice Democrats spokesperson Waleed Shahid and Justice Democrats political director Amira Hassan to talk it out.
Want to dig deeper on what went wrong for Congressional Democrats in 2020? Check out this post-election memo co-authored by Justice Democrats, New Deal Strategies, the Sunrise Movement, and Data for Progress.
Questions? Comments? Email us at [email protected]

A new show from Justice Dems about the fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, hosted by Waleed Shahid and Guido Girgenti.