Encore for Yellen: Giving heft to relief plan
WASHINGTON >> On a cold, gray February afternoon, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen stepped out of the West Wing wrapped in a puffy black parka and clutching a folder of documents, seemingly oblivious to the Washington custom of having an aide schlep the paperwork.
Viewed as an outsider to partisan politics, she now has a place in President Joe Biden’s inner sanctum, a Ph.D. economist who does the reading, knows the numbers and treats her staff as peers rather than underlings.
Yellen, entourage in tow, had been at the White House to strategize about how to push through Biden’s proposed $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan — a package that could determine how quickly the U.S. economy heals, how the Democrats fare in the midterm elections and just how much Americans can trust the government to
solve the nation’s toughest problems.
The House passed the package Saturday, sending it to the Senate.
As a former chair of the Federal Reserve, Yellen carries the authority of a public servant who has already helped steer the economy back to health once and now has been called back at age 74 for an encore after former President Donald Trump declined to offer her another term as chair.
She is framing the need
for the giant COVID-19 bill in starkly human terms, applying a lifetime of research and thought to the challenge of recovering the jobs lost to the pandemic at a record clip. And her credentials are enough to give pause to Republican lawmakers and other economists who argue the package is so big it would overwhelm the economy.
“Yellen is uniquely poised,” said Brian Deese, director of Biden’s National Economic Council.
“She has as much experience and expertise of addressing the challenges of our time as any living economic policymaker today. She doesn’t have a steep learning curve.”
Even in a Washington riven by partisanship, Yellen is held in high regard by members of both parties. As president of the San Francisco Fed, she sounded the alarm about the housing bubble before it fully burst in 2008, triggering the Great Recession. She helped nurse the economy back to health as the Fed’s vice chair and then as chair sustained the longest expansion in U.S. history by holding interest rates near historic lows.
During Yellen’s confirmation hearing, Republican Sen. Mike Crapo of Idaho opened his questioning by saying how much he appreciated her public service: “We had a good working relationship while you were at the Fed and I look forward to developing and continuing that good working relationship.”
OKLAHOMA CITY >> As many as 10 death row inmates in Oklahoma, more than one-fifth of the state’s prisoners condemned to die, could escape execution because of a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling concerning criminal jurisdiction in Indian Country.
The inmates have challenged their convictions in state court following the high court’s ruling last year, dubbed the McGirt decision, that determined a large swath of eastern Oklahoma remains an American Indian reservation. The decision means that Oklahoma prosecutors lack the authority to pursue criminal charges in cases in which the defendants, or the victims, are tribal citizens.
Among the inmates likely to get a new trial in federal court is Shaun Michael Bosse, 38, who was convicted and sentenced to death in the 2010 killing of Katrina Griffin and her two young children. The victims were all found inside a burning mobile home near Dibble, about 35 miles (56 kilometers) south of Oklahoma City.
Dozens of other inmates convicted in nondeath penalty cases also are seeking to have their convictions tossed, which is expected to result in a dramatic increase in the workload of federal prosecutors.
Although Bosse is not a tribal citizen, the court determined that Griffin and her children were Native Americans and that the crime occurred on land inside the Chickasaw Nation’s historic reservation.
The decision is particularly frustrating to District Attorney Greg Mashburn, whose office prosecuted Bosse.
“He’s benefiting from the people he killed,” Mashburn said. “It would be a travesty of justice if he got anything less than death.”
Mashburn said another trial would also revictimize Griffin’s family, who were pleased with the outcome of the state trial.
“Unfortunately, the law doesn’t ask their opinion,” Mashburn said.
Stephen Greetham, an attorney for the Chickasaw Nation, said Griffin’s family has reached out to the tribe with concerns that Bosse could escape his death sentence. But he says the tribe has no say in that case because Bosse is not American Indian.
“He’s not subject to our jurisdiction, so it’s entirely at the discretion of the federal prosecutor,” Greetham said.