Campaign News

Source: The New Republic 

During the presidential primary, Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz has managed the impressive feat of angering virtually every liberal in America. Bernie Sanders supporters think she displays a transparent biasfor Hillary Clinton. Party stalwarts, including Clinton fans, criticize the decision tohide primary debates on weekend nights, ceding hours of free media time to Republicans in the formative stages of the election. And in a recent interview with the New York Times Magazine, Wasserman Schultz insulted millennial women for being “complacent” about abortion rights. This is an incomplete list.

In two separate petitions, more than 94,000 people have demanded that Wasserman Schultz resign as DNC chair. But back in her district, in Hollywood, Florida, Timothy Canova has another idea: vote her out of office.

Last Thursday, Canova, a former aide to the late Sen. Paul Tsongas and a professor at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law, jumped into the Democratic primary in Florida’s 23rd congressional district. It’s Wasserman Schultz’s first primary challenge ever, and with frustration running high against her, it’s almost certain to draw national attention. But Canova first became interested in challenging Wasserman Schultz not because of her actions as DNC chair, but because of her record.

“This is the most liberal county in all of Florida,” Canova said in an interview, referring to Broward County, where most of Wasserman Schultz’s district resides (a small portion is in northern Miami-Dade County). But she more closely associates with her significant support from corporate donors, Canova argued. He listed several of Wasserman Schultz’s votes, such as blocking the SEC and IRS from disclosing corporate political spending (which was part of last month’s omnibus spending bill),opposing a medical marijuana ballot measure that got 58 percent of the vote in Florida, preventing the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from regulating discrimination in auto lending and opposing their rules cracking down on payday lending, and supporting “fast track” authority for trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

“I think anyone who voted for fast track should be primaried. I believe that ordinary citizens have to step up,” Canova said. 

Canova espouses many of the populist themes that attract the left: fighting corporate power, defending organized labor, and reducing income inequality. But this is not just a Bernie Sanders Democrat. You have to go back further. Tim Canova is a Marriner Eccles Democrat.

Eccles chaired the Federal Reserve during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. And Canova believes the central bank should revisit Eccles’s unorthodox strategies to jump-start a broad-based economic recovery. “In the 1930s, the regional Fed banks made loans directly to the people,” Canova said. “Instead of purchasing $4 trillion in Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities, [the Fed] could buy short-term municipal bonds and drive the yield to zero for state and local governments. They could push money into infrastructure, making loans to state infrastructure banks.” Canova has even suggested that the government create currency outside of the central bank, breaking their monopoly on the money supply, as President Abraham Lincoln did with the “Greenback” in the 1860s.

During World War II, FDR directed Eccles’s Fed to finance American war debt at low rates, eventually producing a stimulus that helped to end the Great Depression. It was a time when the Fed was far more accountable to democratically elected institutions, one that Canova looks back upon fondly. “People like to talk about the Fed’s independence, that’s really a cover for the Fed’s capture,” he said. “They look out for elite groups in society, and the hell with everybody else.” 

A growing faction of progressives are beginning to return to their roots, asking whether Fed policies truly support the public interest. The Fed Up campaign, with which Canova has consulted, seeks to pressure the Fed to adopt pro-worker policies. A surprise movement in Congress just cut a 100 year-old subsidy the Fed handed out to banks by $7 billion. Even mainstream figures like economist Larry Summerswonder whether the Fed’s hybrid public/private structure, which critics believe makes it beholden to financial interests, makes sense. 

Progressive debates on central banking are not as advanced here as in Europe, where British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn wants a “quantitative easing for people,” where the central bank injects money directly into the economy rather than filtering it through financial institutions. But Canova, who says his views were most influenced by an undergraduate economics professor who taught with one book—John Maynard Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money—bridges this gap. Twenty years ago this week, he wrote an op-ed for the New York Timesopposing the reappointment of Alan Greenspan as Fed chair because of his support for high real interest rates. If elected this fall, he would instantly become the strongest advocate in Congress for a people’s Fed.

While Debbie Wasserman Schultz has few known views on the Federal Reserve, Canova’s populism offers a strong counterweight to her corporate-tinged philosophy. And even before that contrast plays out, the hunger for any challenge to Wasserman Schultz is palpable. 

“The money is coming in more rapidly than believable,” said Howie Klein, co-founder of Blue America PAC, which raises money for progressive Democrats. Wasserman Schultz has been on Klein’s radar since she, as chair of the “Red to Blue” campaign for electing House Democrats, refused to campaign against three Republicans in Florida because of prior friendships and their joint support for the state sugar industry.

Klein sent a Blue America fundraising email shortly after Canova’s announcement, and raised $7,000 within 12 hours, and over $10,000 at last count. The intensity of support reached beyond the PAC’s traditional donor base. “Our average donation is $45, but in this case we’re getting $3, $5,” Klein said. “For people who our donors have never heard of, it can take three-four months to do that. It’s just because ofDebbie Wasserman Schultz.” 

Similarly, Canova says he’s seeing tens of thousands of visits to his website andFacebook page, suggesting support beyond south Florida. However, he wants to localize rather than nationalize the race. The district, initially drawn with Wasserman Schultz’s input when she served in the Florida state Senate, is now more Hispanic and less reliable for a politician who Canova believes has lost touch with her constituents.

“You talk to people at the Broward County Democratic clubs, they say she takes us for granted,” Canova said. The political model for his campaign is David Brat, another academic who took on a party leader—then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor—and defeated him, on the grounds that Cantor ignored his district amid constant corporate fundraising.

If there’s one thing Wasserman Schultz can do, it’s raise money—that’s why she chairs the party. She will have a big cash advantage and the power of incumbency. But Canova thinks he can outmatch her by riding the populist tide. “There’s a tendency to get so down about the system, but this is an interesting moment we’re living in,” Canova said. “This is a grassroots movement. We’re tapping in without even trying yet.”

Huffington Post – September 9, 2013, by Brittny Saunders -

On August 22, the New York City Council took the final step toward enacting the Community Safety Act (CSA), overriding Mayor Bloomberg’s recent veto and striking a blow against stop-and-frisk and other discriminatory NYPD tactics. This is more than a win for those who have fought hardest for the CSA. It’s a victory for everyone who wants smarter and more effective policing — in NYC and beyond.

In June, the Council approved two CSA measures: the “End NYPD Discriminatory Profiling Bill,” which will expand and strengthen the ban on bias-based policing and the “NYPD Oversight Act,” which will create a new Inspector General to provide independent oversight of the Department. Despite the Mayor’s rejection of the bills and weeks of aggressive advocacy by the administration and its surrogates, the Council re-affirmed its decision recently.

The hard-won victory is due to the tireless efforts of Communities United for Police Reform — a coalition of base-building, legal and policy groups in the City — their allies in the Council and the countless New Yorkers who raised their voices in opposition to discriminatory policing. It also amounts to a repudiation of a set of policies and practices that the Bloomberg administration has vehemently defended, even in the face of statistical evidence undermining their claims and growing concern among members of the public.

The basic facts are undisputed. Under Mayor Bloomberg, NYPD officers have made over 4 million stops on the streets of the city. Over 80 percent of those stops have targeted black or Latino New Yorkers. And in nearly 9 out of 10 cases, there has been no accusation of wrong-doing — no arrest was made and no citation was issued. Where the Mayor and Commissioner Kelly have set themselves against the opinion of growing numbers of New Yorkers is on the legality of these stops. Both Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly have maintained that the city’s use of stop-and-frisk is consistent with what the law requires and that these stops are an essential means of keeping the city safe. Advocates, meanwhile, have challenged both the constitutionality and the effectiveness of these stops, arguing that they are neither responsible for the decline in the city’s crime rates nor particularly effective at removing weapons from the city’s streets. Just over a week ago, federal judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, agreed, declaring the NYPD’s racially discriminatory stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional in her decision in Floyd v. City of NY.

The sheer volume of stops conducted, the magnitude of the city’s investment in these tactics and the intensity of Mayor Bloomberg’s commitment to them have, unfortunately, established New York City as a poster child for discriminatory policing. And to some degree, the persistence of such discriminatory tactics in New York — long an innovator in public policy — has legitimized these approaches. The administration’s failure to evolve in this respect has reinforced the message that both Bloomberg and Kelly have made fairly explicit: that it is impossible to preserve public safety while also respecting the rights of all residents. For over a decade, they have asserted through words and actions that even the most sophisticated police force in the nation is incapable of doing things differently. Even with billions in funding and what are purported to be the greatest public safety minds in the nation at its disposal, the Department has been unable to break with a shameful history of subjecting people of color and other historically marginalized groups to invidious forms of social control.

New York’s recent move to reject discriminatory policing, however, contains a lesson for elected leaders everywhere. Put simply, in the 21st century, outdated notions of government accountability must expand. The Bloomberg administration’s efforts to defend the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk practices are, perhaps, most instructive when understood as a failure to deal with this fact. Local leaders must, of course, safeguard the rights and attend to the needs of all constituents, regardless of their numbers. But in a city with large numbers of black, brown, immigrant, homeless and LGBTQ residents, the unsustainable nature of policies that subject members of these and other groups to regular surveillance, harassment and civil rights violations should have been exceedingly clear. Still, over the last ten years, the administration has missed countless opportunities to shift course because it has ignored a sizeable chunk of its constituents. It has overlooked, for example, how unjustified street stops undermine trust between the police force and the next generation of New Yorkers, a puzzling choice for an administration that claims to be interested in keeping the city safe over the long term.

With the Council’s most recent vote and implementation of the CSA imminent, the city is poised to set precedent for how large urban centers can both enforce the law and respect the constitutional rights of all residents. And the prospect of a new local executive makes this a particularly hopeful moment. If the upcoming election brings with it a mayor who aims to be a leader for all New Yorkers, the city may at long last step into the leadership role it should always have occupied, demonstrating what local government can produce when it holds itself accountable to all constituents.

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CBS Minnesota - March 4, 2015 - A report to be released on Thursday aims to highlight employment disparities in the Twin Cities.

The groups Neighborhoods Organizing for Change, the Center for Popular Democracy, and the Economic Policy Institute say they plan to hold a rally at the Neighborhoods Organizing for Change offices on Thursday afternoon to draw attention to the racial differences between wages and jobs available here.

The groups say that, though the economy is adding jobs, the unemployment rate among black residents in the Twin Cities metro area is nearly four times that of white residents.

The groups said that the racial disparities on display in Minnesota are “among the worst in the nation.”

The rally is scheduled for 3 p.m.

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USA Today - July 17, 2014, by Jake Grovum - With federal immigration bills stalled on Capitol Hill, many states are charging ahead on their own to open doors to unauthorized immigrants, from allowing them to pay in-state tuition at state colleges and universities, to giving them driver's licenses and providing them with welfare or Medicaid benefits.

Sixteen states now offer in-state tuition rates to students who are in the country illegally and at least four other states (Hawaii, Michigan, Oklahoma and Rhode Island) seem to be moving in that direction, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Unauthorized immigrants can now get driver's licenses in 11 states and the District of Columbia. Just five years ago, no state issued the licenses.

Other states are pursuing smaller, yet still significant, measures to make life easier for unauthorized immigrants and draw them out of the shadows. Some of the proposals would allow them to vote in state elections and even run for office, while others are looking to smooth immigration-related problems in foster care programs, for example.

It's all part of a trend of states moving away from the enforcement-focused immigration laws that took hold after the 2010 elections, most notably in Arizona, which pushed local law enforcement to check the status of people suspected of being in the country illegally. Courts have largely blocked enforcement of the Arizona law.

One measure of the momentum is that some Republicans are getting on board. Florida Gov. Rick Scott, who took a hard line on illegal immigration during his campaign in 2010, signed a bill this year to offer unauthorized students in-state tuition. Last year, Nevada's Republican Gov. Brian Sandoval signed a driver's license law, which cleared the Democratic-controlled legislature.

"It seems like it's becoming more widely accepted across political lines that it makes sense to invest in immigrants who live and work in our communities," said Tanya Broder of the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant advocacy group.

Washington state Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos, a Democrat who co-chairs the NCSL immigration task force, said states are filling the vacuum left by Congress.

"Without federal action states are really focusing in on what is the specific nature of immigration or immigrant integration policy that resonates or that is a priority at home," she said. Santos is worried, however, that the recent influx of Central American children on the U.S.-Mexico border could reverse the trend. "It does make me concerned that we may see a resurgence of border security proposals," she said.

California Courts

Few states have gone as far as Democratic-dominated California in aiding unauthorized immigrants. For example, Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown last year signed a law directing child welfare courts and agency workers not to let a potential guardian's citizenship status stand in the way of placing a child in the guardian's care.

Previously, courts or social workers across California handled the issue inconsistently, sometimes placing children with noncitizen guardians, other times seeing immigration status as a roadblock, said Phil Ladew, legal director at the California CASA Association, whose members serve as court-appointed advocates for children in the foster care system.

"When you do that, and you have a system that's overburdened, time passes and after a year the child is still in foster care, then you just threw a grenade into the entire family," Ladew said. "This is getting back to that notion that in the first instance you need to keep the child with that family."

In 2012, Brown signed another measure designed to keep immigrant families together. Under the Immigrant Family Reunification Act, immigrant parents who have been placed in immigration custody or deported now have an additional six months to meet the requirements of the courts for family reunification. The bill also allows children who cannot be reunited with their parents to be placed under custody of a relative without taking into consideration the relative's legal status.

For years, many California cities have been "sanctuary cities," offering assistance and protection to undocumented immigrants. And California is one of four states (New Mexico, Texas and Washington are the others) to offer state financial aid to unauthorized immigrants, in stark contrast to those states where even offering discounted in-state tuition rates paid by all other residents remains a political nonstarter.

Citizens of the State

New York state Sen. Gustavo Rivera, a Democrat from the Bronx, last month introduced what might be the most sweeping state-based immigration measure in the country. Under the New York is Home Act, New York could declare both documented and undocumented immigrants citizens of the state, regardless of federal immigration status.

The measure would make unauthorized immigrants eligible to participate in most aspects of civic life, from voting in state elections and serving on juries to holding public office, earning professional licenses and enrolling in safety-net programs such as Medicaid.

"There has not been a proposal that is this broad and this comprehensive," Rivera said. "The purpose of this bill is to recognize that there are people who are already contributing."

While the measure has limits—applicants would have to prove their identity and that they have lived in the state and paid taxes for the previous three years —it has garnered plenty of skeptical and negative headlines. Even Rivera sees a long road ahead before it would become law, although he's already in contact with interested lawmakers in other states.

"I understand that it is new and out-of-the-box thinking," he said. "There are a lot of details that would have to be worked out."

Others see it as simply the latest attempt to whittle away at the distinction between citizens and noncitizens, all but neutering federal immigration policy in the process. Indeed, some see the New York proposal as the culmination of the chipping away at immigration policies that has been underway for years.

"This is usually how these things start," said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an organization that supports more border security and limiting illegal immigration. "It is part of this incremental acceptance based on helping people who have violated the law in the first place."

The problem, he added, is "if you sort of take the position, 'Well they're here, so we have to accommodate,' you're going to have to keep accommodating."

The New York move also sets up a potential clash with federal law, although Rivera said his measure is designed to focus only on areas under state control.

Nevertheless, components like allowing unauthorized immigrants to sign up for Medicaid — the joint state-federal health care program for the poor — would surely raise questions about whether federal money is being used to care for people who are in the country illegally under federal law.

City-State Clash

Clashes between local governments, states and the federal government have become a defining feature of the immigration debate.

Earlier this month, for example, the Maine Municipal Association filed a lawsuit against Republican Gov. Paul LePage over his order to stop payments from the state's General Assistance welfare program to unauthorized immigrants.

The LePage administration, citing a 1996 federal law against states offering certain benefits to those immigrants, ordered the state's cities (which administer the benefits and are reimbursed by the state) to stop paying them.

"We are moving forward and will continue our efforts to align programs with federal rules to ensure that precious taxpayer dollars are used appropriately for those in need and protected for those who are legal residents of Maine and this country," Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew said in a statement announcing the change.

But the cities balked, saying LePage circumvented proper rule-making procedure. The state's Democratic Attorney General Janet Mills has questioned the order as well.

In the meantime, a number of cities are continuing to pay the benefits, even though the LePage administration has raised the stakes, threatening to withhold funding for benefits for anyone on the program, regardless of their immigration status, if cities refuse to remove unauthorized immigrants from their welfare rolls.

The cities say their lawsuit is intended to clarify procedure, leaving aside for now the politics of offering welfare to unauthorized immigrants.

Jerre Bryant, city administrator for Westbrook, Maine, said many of people in question are asylum-seekers who need help.

"The bottom line is these individuals, regardless of their current citizenship status, are members of our community, they live in our community, they have children in our schools," Bryant said. "The whole concept behind General Assistance is, when you have members of your community, who, for whatever reason, can't provide their basic needs, the community is there to assist them."

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