Good morning! Here’s your daily digest of money-in-politics news and the headlines of the day, compiled by BillMoyers.com’s John Light. (You can sign up to receive Morning Reads daily in your inbox!)
Read all about it –> Early this morning, the White House released the full text of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, “kicking off a 90-day period for congressional review.”
What happens to Kentucky’s Medicaid expansion? –> Democratic Kentucky governor Steve Beshear, the South’s main proponent of Obamacare, will be succeeded by Matt Bevin, a Republican who campaigned railing against the healthcare law. At New Republic, Suzy Khimm writes that Bevin’s victory “will be a test of how far Republicans are willing to go to undo Obamacare — and take existing benefits away from ordinary Americans. If Bevin follows through on his campaign pledges, he could jeopardize health coverage for hundreds of thousands in a state that has been one of Obamacare’s signature success stories.”
Pushing forward on climate –> Bernie Sanders declared his support for the “Keep It In The Ground Act” that would patch up many of the holes in Obama’s climate initiatives. The bill would ban offshore drilling in the Arctic and Atlantic, keep the government from opening new drilling leases in the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific, and forbid new drilling and mining on public lands. While the legislation’s almost certainly unable to clear the Republican-controlled Congress, Sanders’ support creates daylight between his environmental agenda and Hillary Clinton’s. James West reports for Mother Jones.
“Confessions of a paywall journalist” –> Journalism is alive and well, writes John Heltman in a longread at Washington Monthly. Problem is, it’s behind a paywall. The high-priced trade press keeps Washington and Wall Street insiders in the know, while the rest of America subsists on a thinning media diet.
UK ramps up surveillance –> “Two years after NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed the vast reach of US and UK surveillance, the US Congress rolled back the most manifestly unconstitutional element: the bulk collection of domestic phone data. The UK government, on Wednesday, chose to double down instead.” Jenna McLaughlin reports for The Intercept.
Going to class while black –> Tierney Sneed at TPM: A new study finds that “the mere presence of African American students at a school makes it more likely the school will take on security measures, even when controlling for neighborhood crime and school misconduct.”
Do election results mean Democrats are losing America? –> A number of folks around the Internet think Tuesday’s low-voter-turnout election results prefigure more bad news for liberals in the years ahead. At The Atlantic, Molly Ball writes that “the left has misread the electorate’s enthusiasm for social change, inviting a backlash from mainstream voters invested in the status quo.” And at The Washington Post’s Plum Line blog, Greg Sargent believes that Democrats’ loss of the Kentucky governorship “is a particularly stark reminder of how deep a hole Democrats have dug for themselves at the state level, and of the consequences that could have for the long-term success of the liberal and Democratic agenda.”
So why do liberals have a disadvantage? –> Writing at Vox, political scientist Lee Drutman dives more deeply into the left’s doldrums. Democrats’ disadvantage is, in part, because “Republicans are taking advantage of being in power to strengthen future electoral success,” and because “Democrats are the party of big, especially federal, government, political dysfunction in Washington hurts Democrats.” But most of all, as inequality has increased and the opportunity gap has widened, the poor have dropped out of politics or moved to the right.
Nice try, TransCanada –> Byron Tau at WSJ: “The State Department said it won’t grant TransCanada Corp.’s request to delay a permit review for the Keystone XL oil pipeline, putting the project on a likely path to rejection.”
The real story –> At The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham uses the Humans of New York photo project to think about today’s storytelling craze. The stories we tell, and the way they are transmitted — often over social media — hold “shallow notions of truth… and egalitarianism. Both come too easily.” They forget that “the truest thing about a person, that person’s real story, is just as often the thing withheld — the silent thing — as the thing offered.”
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