Biden's corporate tax plan takes aim at income inequality


Make no mistake about it - bi-partisanship, compromise and finding common ground are goals of a foregone era. From the first day of both the Obama and Biden Administrations, the GOP has made it abundantly clear that for purely political reasons they will do everything in their power to block every single Democratic initiative, no matter how worthy it is.

Is our politics contributing or causing the divide? Or are our politicians simply reading us and responding to us? I don’t know the causality.

But we are definitely a people who are severely divided along ideological lines. If after more than 600,000 deaths from a deadly pandemic, we can’t agree to temporarily wear a cloth mask and social distance, how are we going to resolve the most pressing issues facing our nation?

It appears that President Biden has come to the conclusion that being Pollyannaish and focusing on trying to achieve bi-partisan solutions would be a waste of precious time. To steal the title of a song by Bob Dylan “The Times They Are a-Changin” and now is the time to act audaciously instead of attempting to appease the Republicans.

It appears that if he can’t secure Republican support for his $2.3 trillion infrastructure plan, to be funded by increasing the corporate tax rate, he will go at it alone as he did with his $1.9 trillion stimulus package.

The Biden Administration has acknowledged that America is facing an unprecedented overwhelming legislative assault on voting rights justified by falsehoods that have been repeatedly rejected by bipartisan election officials and the courts. With this in mind, the Administration is fighting back against the outrageous 95-page law passed in Georgia whose sole intent is to suppress the vote that elected two Democratic senators in 2020. The Georgia bill would limit easy-access drop boxes for ballots; shrink early voting for runoff elections, place onerous voter restrictions on voting by mail. All of this would have an extremely deleterious effect on Black voting. Absurdly, the bill would make it illegal to give food and water to those waiting in line to vote.

To thwart what is going on in Georgia and in many other states the Biden Administration must consider modifying, and if necessary eliminating, the Senate filibuster law and pass the For the People Act, which recently passed the House of Representatives. This bill, known as H.R. 1, would expand voting rights by rolling back suppression efforts that would make it harder to vote.

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, an independent, nonpartisan law and policy organization which has championed public policy solutions to strengthen democracy such as automatic voter registration and small donor pubic campaign financing, as of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive voting provisions in 47 states.

The Brennan Center has reported that “two of these bills have passed, and many are moving aggressively through state legislatures. Fueled by the Big Lie of widespread voter fraud and often discriminatory in design, these bills have the potential to dramatically reduce voting access, especially for Black and brown voters.” WORK

H.R. 1 would further create a national baseline for voting access that every American could rely on, and it would foil state efforts to manipulate voting rules to exclude eligible voters or create discriminatory outcomes by putting the brakes on voter suppression laws. According to Nicholas Stephanopoulous, a law professor at Harvard, whose specialties include election law, the bill would “require a series of participation-enhancing policies for congressional elections; automatic voter registration, same-day voter registration, at least 15 days of early voting, expanding mail-in voting, restrictions on voter purges, restrictions on photo ID requirements.”

H.R. 1 would also change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of dark money flowing into politics since the 2010 Citizen United Supreme Court decision, which allows billionaires to buy election outcomes. Further, it would also limit partisan gerrymandering for all offices by requiring all states to use truly independent commission and create new ethic laws for federal officeholders.

Along with the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, H.R. 1 includes all of the critical reforms needed to prevent voter suppression. The Brennan Center extolled the virtues of the John Lewis Act: “it would modernize the Voting Rights Act and restore the requirement that certain states and localities with a history of voting discrimination get prior federal approval — or “pre-clearance” — of any changes to their voting rules and practices to make sure that they are not discriminatory. It would also require all jurisdictions in the country to submit for pre-clearance any “covered practices,” meaning those practices, such as strict voter ID laws and polling place closures in communities of color that have typically been implemented for a discriminatory purpose or have had discriminatory effects.”

For sure, the Republicans will try to kill the two bills by using the filibuster. The Democrats should not, under any circumstances, allow the Republicans in the Senate to turn back the clock and return to the Jim Crow South.


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