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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer began the process of passing key parts of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill with a simple majority, even as bipartisan talks continue and a group of select senators announced their agreement on a basic legislative framework.
Schumer met with the 11 Democrats on the Senate Rules Committee Wednesday, where they discussed in part beginning a process known as reconciliation that skirts the Senate filibuster and could create a pathway to pass parts of the infrastructure plan to which Republicans are uniformly opposed.
Ten senators five from each party have simultaneously continued talks after compromising on a proposal totaling approximately $1.2 trillion over eight years. Half of that is expected to be new spending, with the overwhelming majority of it going towards roads, waterways and other physical infrastructure.
MA school wants students, staff to rat on each other for jokes, China virus, microaggressions
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The House of Representatives passed a bill establishing Juneteenth as a federal holiday, doing so one day after the Senate and sending the legislation to President Joe Biden’s desk.
Juneteenth, already celebrated in the majority of states on June 19, commemorates the official end of slavery in Confederate states on that day in 1865. Though former President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on Jan. 1, 1863, hundreds of thousands of slaves did not learn of their freedom until after the end of the Civil War.
Slavery was formally eradicated with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December of 1865.
The House version of the bill was sponsored by Texas Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and was co-sponsored by 166 members, two of whom are Republicans. It passed 415 to 14, with all the no votes coming from Republicans. It passed the Senate via unanimous consent late Tuesday.
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Nearly 40% of small businesses closed since the first COVID-19 case in the United States, a recent report found.
Across the U.S., 39% of all small businesses that were open in January 2020 had closed as of June 2, according to the most recent metrics published from Opportunity Insights.
The data shows the professional and business services industry dealt with a 25% decrease in small businesses compared to January 2020. Around 33% of small businesses in the education and health services industry had to shut their doors. The retail and transportation industry lost 34% of small businesses.
The leisure and hospitality industry data showed the most substantial difference, with a decrease of 52.4%.
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A Manhattan district attorney candidate has sworn to provide alternatives for all crimes, including rape and murder, as well as not prosecuting low-level offenses, according to an interview with The Wall Street Journal.
Tahanie Aboushi is currently running as a progressive under the Democratic ticket, with plans of altering prosecutorial powers for certain crimes, including a range of misdemeanors and specific felonies, the WSJ reported. Aboushi’s campaign has vowed to hold prosecutors to a higher standard and cut district office budgets by at least 50%.
Aboushi told the WSJ that she would provide an alternative-to-incarceration program “in every case” with no exceptions, including for crimes such as gunpoint robbery, rape, and even murder. She has received a bevy of celebrity endorsements, including from Rashida Tlaib, Shaun King, and Bernie Sanders as a result of her progressive policies.
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