For Senate rules arbiter, wage case latest minefield
Obscure figure to play outsized role in fate of $15 push
WASHINGTON — She’s guided the Senate through two impeachment trials, vexed Democrats and Republicans alike with parliamentary opinions and helped rescue Electoral College certificates from a pro-Trump mob ransacking the Capitol. She also does spot-on impersonations of senators including Bernie Sanders.
Elizabeth MacDonough, an English literature major and the Senate’s first woman parliamentarian, is about to demonstrate anew why she’s one of Washington’s most potent, respected yet obscure figures. Any day, she’s expected to reveal if she thinks a federal minimum wage boost, progressives’ most prized plank in Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief plan, should fall from the bill.
Her decision, a political minefield likely to elicit groans from whichever side she disappoints, will play an outsized role in deciding the wage increase’s fate. It may not be definitive — majority Democrats might try overriding an opinion they don’t like.
“Elizabeth has a soul-crushing job, to which she brings an enormous amount of soul,” said her predecessor, Alan Frumin, whom she replaced when he retired in 2012.
Part of MacDonough’s job, in which she’s supposed to be nonpartisan, is enduring highstakes lobbying from both parties when she’s making pivotal decisions. But she’s found a home in the Capitol, where she’s spent most of the past three decades after starting as an assistant Senate librarian in 1990.
“She knows the names of every police officer and janitor,” Frumin said.
Sometimes, the pressure can be extraordinary. Frumin said that when the Senate was enacting former President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law — which was opposed by Republicans and infuriated grassroots tea party conservatives — he had police protection at his home as a precaution.
“And the political climate hasn’t gotten friendlier,” he said.
Even so, MacDonough, 55, has garnered high marks from both parties. Underscoring that, while she was initially appointed in 2012 by Democrat Harry Reid of
Nevada, Senate majority leader at the time, she was retained by Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., when he became majority leader in 2015.
“She’s very solid. She listens to all the evidence,” Sanders, the independent Vermont senator and chief sponsor of the minimum wage proposal, said in a recent interview.
“She is a brilliant lawyer, a thorough and fair referee and a walking encyclopedia of Senate precedent and procedure,” McConnell spokesman David Popp said Tuesday.
MacDonough has earned her reputation for fairness while helping steer the Senate
through some of its highest-profile moments. Rulings she issued striking anti-abortion and other provisions from numerous failed GOP attempts to repeal Obama’s health care law weakened their bills.
She helped Chief Justice John Roberts preside over then-President Donald Trump’s 2020 Senate impeachment trial, and was beside Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., for Trump’s second trial this month. Trump was acquitted both times.
And as Trump supporters fought past police and into the Capitol last month in hopes of disrupting Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s Electoral
College victory, MacDonough and other staffers rescued those ballots and hustled mahogany boxes containing them to safety. MacDonough’s office, on the Capitol’s first floor, was ransacked and declared a crime scene.
Raised by a single mother in the comfortable Washington suburb of Chevy Chase, Maryland, MacDonough graduated with an English literature degree from George Washington University. She began her Senate career in its library before leaving to get a law degree at Vermont Law School.
She worked briefly as a Justice Department trial attorney before
returning to the Senate in 1999, this time as an assistant in the parliamentarian’s office.
As Democrats begin pushing Biden’s sweeping relief package through Congress, they’re using a special procedure that shields the bill from Senate Republican filibusters, which require 60 votes to thwart. That’s out of reach for Democrats in a 50-50 chamber they control with Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote.
But Senate rules require that items in such a bill must have a substantial budget impact that is not “merely incidental” to the language’s main intended purpose.
MacDonough has been meeting with Democrats who’ve tried persuading her that their minimum wage provision meets that test, and Republicans who’ve told her it doesn’t. Democrats want to raise the federal floor, fixed at $7.25 hourly since 2009, to $15 over five years.
If MacDonough says it should be stricken, Democrats would have no chance of garnering 60 votes to overrule her. But they might choose the rarely utilized tactic of having the presiding officer, presumably Harris, ignore her and announce that the minimum wage language meets the test to stay in the overall legislation.
WASHINGTON — The Senate confirmed President Joe Biden’s choice to lead U.S. diplomacy at the United Nations on Tuesday. Linda Thomas-Greenfield’s confirmation reflected the Biden administration’s determination to reengage with the world body and former President Donald Trump’s diplomacy that often left the U.S. isolated internationally.
Senators voted 78-20 to confirm Thomas-Greenfield to the post, which will be a Cabinet-level position.
Also Tuesday, the Senate voted 92-7 to confirm Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, his second run at the Cabinet post. The former Iowa governor spent eight years leading the department for former President Barack Obama’s administration.
In his testimony, Vilsack endorsed boosting climatefriendly agricultural industries such as the creation of biofuels, saying, “Agriculture is one of our first and best ways to get some wins (on climate change).”
With systemic racial inequity now a nationwide talking point, Vilsack also envisioned creating an “equity taskforce” inside the department. Its job, he said, would be to identify what he called “intentional or unintentional barriers” that prevent or discourage farmers of color from properly accessing federal assistance programs.
Thomas-Greenfield, a retired 35-year veteran of the foreign service who resigned during the Trump administration, will be the third African American, and the second Black woman, to hold the job. Her confirmation was hailed by Democrats and advocates of the United Nations, who had lamented the Trump administration’s unilateral approach to international affairs.
“This confirmation sends a message that the United States is back and that our foreign service is back,” said Rep. Karen Bass, D-Calif., who chairs a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee on Africa, global health and global human rights. “We as a country and as a world are safer with Linda Thomas-Greenfield serving as the United States ambassador to the United Nations.”
Republicans who opposed her said she was soft on China and would not stand up for U.S. principles at the United Nations.
Thomas-Greenfield had rejected those concerns during her confirmation hearing, telling senators that a 2019 speech she gave to the Chinese-funded Confucius Institute had been a mistake and was not intended to be an endorsement of Chinese government policies. In the speech, she had praised China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road global infrastructure program in Africa and called for “a win-win-win situation” where the U.S. and
China would promote good governance and the rule of law.
She told senators that China is a strategic adversary and that “their actions threaten our security, they threaten our values and they threaten our way of life, and they are a threat to their neighbors and they are a threat across the globe.”
She spoke of China’s diplomatic inroads during the Trump administration, which pursued an “America First” policy that weakened international alliances. She made clear there would be a change under Biden to reengage internationally and promote American values.
She stressed that U.S. leadership must be rooted in the country’s values — “support for democracy, respect for universal human rights, and the promotion of peace and security.” She said effective diplomacy means developing “robust relationships,” finding common ground and managing differences, and “doing genuine, old-fashioned, people-to-people diplomacy.”
For a time, Cortland Cronk, 26, was Canada’s most famous — and infamous — coronavirus patient.
Cronk, a traveling salesman went viral after testing positive in November and recounting his story of being infected while traveling for work to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.
He was called a virus-spreader, a job-killer, a liar and a sleaze. Online memes painted him as the Grinch, since subsequent outbreaks led to restrictions against Christmas parties. Many people, including a newspaper columnist, made elaborate fun of his name.
He also received threats; so many that he fled his hometown of Saint John, New Brunswick, for Victoria, British Columbia — a city on the opposite end of the country — 3,600 miles away.
“They were acting like I purposely got COVID,” Cronk said from his new apartment. “I had hundreds of death threats per day. People telling me I should be publicly stoned.”
Many Canadians believed it was just rewards and that his case formed a cautionary tale to others who flagrantly break the rules, putting lives and livelihoods at risk. Some even think more formal shaming should happen in Canada, with governments not just fining culprits for breaking coronavirus regulations, but broadcasting their names.
Others have argued Cronk is a victim of a worsening civic problem — public shaming of people testing positive — which is not just unfair but ineffective and that makes the coronavirus harder to quash.
“It might feel like a release for the community, but it does very little to prevent virus transmission,” said Robert Huish, an associate professor at Dalhousie University in Halifax, who is conducting a study on the coronavirus and stigma. “In the process, we are causing people harm.”
Canadians might be known internationally as nice, apologetic and fair-minded. But, a year after the pandemic arrived, some Canadians worry it has exposed a
different national persona: judgmental, suspicious and vengeful.
COVID-shaming has become fervent in parts of the country, with locals calling for the heads of not just politicians and doctors breaking the rules, but their own family members and neighbors.
“It’s not getting COVID — it’s breaking the rules that worries us,” said Randy Boyagoda, a novelist and English professor at the University of Toronto, noting that a Canadian foundational motto is “peace, order and good government.”
Complaint lines — or so-called
snitch lines — set up across Canada have been flooded with tips about people suspected of breaking quarantine rules, businesses flouting public health restrictions and outsiders, arriving with unfamiliar license plates, potentially bringing the disease with them.
Facebook groups are full of stories of people being labeled potential vectors and being refused service, disinvited from family gatherings and reported to the police and public health authorities.
“This is impacting our ability to
contain the virus,” said Dr. Ryan Sommers, one of eight public health doctors in Nova Scotia who published a letter beseeching locals in the small Atlantic province to stop shaming one another, as fear of discrimination was delaying reports of COVID symptoms and potentially driving cases underground.
The province has one of the lowest COVID-19 rates in the country: just 18 active cases, as of Feb 20. But instead of offering solace, people have become hypervigilant, Sommers said.
“We want to create a social norm, where people will be supportive and caring and compassionate” Sommers said. “Social media can be more virulent than the virus itself.”
In the country’s four eastern provinces, which have enforced self-isolation rules for anyone entering the region, the shaming is not just online, Huish said. It’s intimate, particularly in small communities, where “community cohesion quickly flips to become community surveillance.”
Some say the fear of stigma has become worse than the fear of catching the disease.
Recently, after taking her second mandatory coronavirus test, Jennifer Hutton pulled out her suitcases, preparing to leave Halifax, Nova Scotia, if she tested positive. She envisioned a frontpage newspaper story saying she had brought the virus into the community because she travels for her job as an IT director for a medical supply company, she said.
Already, she had received a cold reception from local stores and a profane note had been put on her vehicle, which had Ontario license plates, telling her to go “home and take the rona with you.”
“I just couldn’t handle any more stigma,” she said.
Arthur Schafer, founding director of the Center for Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba, said that “for many people, the scorn and contempt and disapproval of their neighbors will be at least as effective as a fine.”
Schafer believes people who are fined for breaking the rules should be publicly named.
“We need to fully exploit every kind of deterrent,” he said. “Nobody wants to be seen as a terrible community neighbor.”