Biden’s Fresh Pitch for Prosperity: Fund My Agenda, Dammit

Here are the big-ticket domestic items from his first State of the Union.

Shawn Thew/Pool/CNP/Zuma

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As I described earlier this evening, the first section of President Joe Biden’s speech tonight, in which he forcefully rebuked Vladimir Putin, generated some bipartisan support from a bitterly divided Congress. But as Biden moved to his domestic agenda, the chamber’s unusual unity began to splinter, sparking the kinds of raucous murmurings that are now familiar from our divided government.

Let’s quickly recap the economic and social priorities Biden laid out in his first State of the Union.

After suggesting a 15 percent minimum tax rate for corporations, to grumblings from Republicans, Biden called on Congress to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour—which it failed to do as part of the Covid relief package passed last year. In the same breath, he issued a call to extend the Child Tax Credit, garnering applause from most Democrats, but not from Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.V.), who has long refused to support the poverty-relieving measure without a work requirement. Manchin, who has been rumored to have considered leaving the Democratic Party, notably sat in the Republican section of the chamber, near moderate Sens. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Susan Collins (R-Maine).

Biden did not dedicate more than a few sentences to the push for voting rights, which animated Congress earlier this year but failed to gain traction in the Senate when Republicans and two Democrats voted against the Senate rules reform that would have made passage of the Freedom to Vote Act or the John Lewis Voting Rights Act feasible. Instead, he focused on (ostensibly) less polarizing issues: beating the opioid epidemic; addressing mental health; supporting veterans, including by expanding health benefits to those suffering from nine respiratory cancers; and increasing congressional funding for cancer research.

Even as he called the House chamber a “sacred space,” Biden refrained from mentioning the January 6 attack on Congress by Trump supporters. “As hard as these times have been, I am more optimistic about America today than I have been my whole life,” he said, “because I see the future that is within our grasp. Because I know there is simply nothing beyond our capacity.”

But the lasting image of the night might very well be this Reuters photo of Republican lawmakers, Reps. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), yelling at the president—highlighting just how fleeting moments of national unity have become.

 

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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