InsideSources

Democratic leaders unveiled the latest addition to their worker-centered platform Wednesday, but the proposed plan has faced criticism from Republicans for favoring union bosses at the expense of workers.

President Donald Trump was able to win the election with strong support from working-class voters. Democrats have responded by refocusing their economic platform to win back that voting block. “A Better Deal” was unveiled by Democratic leadership July 24 as a new economic agenda focused on the working-class. The plan primarily covered wages, jobs, and training.

Democratic House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer joined labor union officials to unveil the latest addition to their plan. Among the key proposals are stiffer penalties on businesses for misclassification of independent contractors, mandatory mediation and arbitration, a ban on right-to-work, and a shorter timeline for union elections. Democrats argue the added provisions will help further protect workers by strengthening their ability to negotiate.

But Republicans on the House Education and the Workforce Committee counter that the proposal would actually benefit unions at the expense of workers.

“Let’s be clear what this is really about,” Bethany Aronhalt, a spokeswoman for the committee, told InsideSources. “Big Labor knows the only way they’re going to get a ‘better deal’ is at the expense of worker rights.”

A Better Deal has still gained plenty of support despite the criticism. United Food and Commercial Workers President Marc Perrone praised the decision for strengthening the collective voice and negotiating rights of workers. The AFL-CIO praised Democrats for implementing a true workers’ rights agenda.

“I’m proud to stand with them as the Democratic Party embraces strengthening unions and expanding collective bargaining as a core value and necessary element of a fair and growing economy and a strong democracy,” AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka said in a statement. “We’re leading with our issues and engaging working people at every level, every day.”

Democrats argue that many workers choose not to join a union out of fear of retaliation from their employers. But the proposal might actually limit workplace rights. Democrats note that their proposal will ban state laws that undermine worker freedoms to join together and negotiate. No such state law exists because such actions would be barred by federal labor law.

Democrats are actually referring to a state law known as right-to-work. The policy outlaws mandatory union dues or fees as a condition of employment. States that have enacted the policy simply allow workers to choose whether they want to fund their workplace union. It does not ban workers from joining a union if they so choose.

Former President Barack Obama oversaw several notable expansions of federal labor policy during his time in office. Those reforms have faced legal and congressional scrutiny with critics contesting the changes went well beyond what the law allows. Some critics even countered the changes helped unions and hurt workers. A Better Deal seeks to enforce some of those reforms.

A Better Deal includes provisions intended to speed up the union election process. The last administration tried to enact a similar policy which critics denounced by calling it the ambush election rule. Supporters argued it was to prevent delay tactics by employers, while critics countered it gave employees little time to understand the full ramifications of unionization.

“Democrats and union bosses have tried desperately to jeopardize the privacy of workers in union elections, give workers less time to make a decision on whether joining a union is right for them, and take away secret ballot protections,” Aronhalt said. “They couldn’t be more out of touch.”

Democrats are also pushing for streamlining the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which was at the forefront of implementing pro-union reforms during the last administration. The agency was able to essentially create new policies by changing how it interpreted workplace dispute cases. It tackled issues like union elections, how companies can contract together, and how contract workers are classified.

Republicans and the business community have been highly critical of those reforms. The last election gave the GOP the control it needed to rollback the changes. The party has proposed legislation that is intended to counter the election rule, preserve secret ballot elections, and give workers more control over what personal information unions can obtain from them.

A Better Deal will also push employers toward accepting unionization campaigns. The proposal creates a mandatory mediation and arbitration process that compels employers to reach a first contract after being unionized. It would also allow the federal government to implement policies and pull financial support from companies in order to encourage union bargaining.

The Democratic proposal could also potentially allow unions to organize a workplace even if they lost the election. Employers that hold mandatory meetings during unionization drives to explain their views will be required to start bargaining whether the majority of workers agreed to unionization or not. The NLRB will simply set the ballots aside.

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Some of the most powerful Democrats in the Senate want the Federal Communications Commission to delay its repeal of net neutrality rules until the public has a chance to review thousands of consumer complaints alleging rule violations.

Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer asked Republican FCC Chairman Ajit Pai Thursday to give stakeholders and the public time to comment on tens of thousands of complaints it didn’t release until after August’s deadline to comment on the repeal plan.

“Although the commission has undertaken an historic proceeding to undo the Open Internet Order, the FCC has failed to provide stakeholders with an opportunity to comment on the tens of thousands of filed complaints that directly shed light on proposed changes to existing net neutrality protections,” Sens. Al Franken of Minnesota, Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey of Massachusetts wrote to Pai. “The public deserves an opportunity to review and analyze evidence that has a direct impact on the proceeding.”

Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Kamala Harris of California signed the letter describing the 47,000 complaints, 1,500 ombudsperson documents and other materials as “valuable evidence.”

Those documents, posted on the agency’s website last week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the National Hispanic Media Coalition (NHMC) in May “cut to the core of several questions posed by the commission, including whether there exists ‘evidence of actual harm to consumers sufficient to support maintaining [the rules],'” lawmakers wrote.

The FCC confirmed the existence of the complaints in July but didn’t start releasing the actual text of them until one day before the close of the deadline to comment of Pai’s plan to repeal the rules. Those complaints go back to 2015, when the rules were passed, and were filed by consumers against their internet service providers. The complaints were filed against Comcast, Charter, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and others, and accuse some of violating net neutrality rules against web traffic throttling and blocking.

They also include complaints about data caps, varying speeds falling below what customers pay for, privacy violations, billing charges, and more — many of which are not expressly addressed in the rules.

Lawmakers told Pai ignoring the complaints is tantamount to a violation of the Administrative Procedures Act. The law says the FCC and other agencies cannot “promulgate rules on the basis of inadequate data, or on data that, [to a] critical degree, is known only to the agency.”

“[T]he commission has an obligation to consider all relevant data and be able to articulate a rational connection between the facts found and the choices made,” the letter reads.

The NHMC posted many of the complaints before the FCC, as well as responses from internet companies and the agency’s Open Internet Ombudsperson.

Carmen Scurato, NHMC’s policy and legal affairs director, said in August the complaints “show that the FCC blatantly ignored the evidence that the agency had in its possession throughout its push to scrap the vital consumer protections established by the Open Internet Order.”

Senators asked Pai if the FCC analyzed the complaints, carrier and ombudsperson responses, if it plans to incorporate them in the proceeding’s record, and if it will issue a public notice on the complaints with its own window for public comment. They asked for answers by October 11.

The net neutrality repeal proceeding generated more than 22 million comments, more than any other federal rulemaking in history.

President Donald Trump’s newly Republican-controlled FCC is considering a repeal of net neutrality rules and the reclassification of internet providers as “common carriers,” a public utility designation shared by telephone providers. The classification subjects them to potentially tougher regulations designed to combat monopolies, like setting price caps.

Reclassification is the primary target of Pai’s repeal — he and other Republicans believe it deters investors from investing in broadband, since the threat of price regulation could mean diminishing returns. Less investment means slower growth to rural and underserved areas, which Pai considers the FCC’s top priority.

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Editor’s Note: The story below has been updated to reflect Wednesday’s hearing, and a request for comment was made to Civitas.

The Senate Judiciary Committee convened Wednesday to discuss reforms to what some immigration experts and lawmakers describe as an oft-abused program in the U.S. immigration system — EB-5 visas, designed to grant citizenship to wealthy foreigners in exchange for investments in poor, underdeveloped areas.

According to committee leaders, the $500,000 invested by wealthy foreigners in exchange for green cards frequently ends up in the hands of developers like the Dallas-based Civitas Capital Group. Through its City of Dallas Regional Center subsidiary, Civitas has raised $500 million in EB-5 investments from more than 1,000 foreign families to finance upscale apartment buildings, hotels, office buildings and restaurants in and around downtown Dallas.

“This is done by drawing the targeted employment areas [TEAs]  to include long-chain census tracts, linking the affluent area at one end with the least affluent census tract, perhaps many miles away, that include low-income residents or subsidized housing,” Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley said during Wednesday’s hearing.

Civitas, one of more than 600 private regional entities charged by the Department of Homeland Security with carrying out the program, became a chief example EB-5 abuse last year when the Texas non-profit Urban Equality NOW sued DHS to block Civitas from using EB-5 funds to build an upscale hotel-convention center in Laredo.

“One TEA has an astonishing 190 census tracts, covering 200 miles in order to include far away economic distressed areas,” Grassley said referring to Civitas’ Laredo project.

The developer received approval for the project by zoning the hotel inside a TEA, drawn by Civitas, cutting across five counties and 200 miles along the Gulf coast. The abnormal district shape strings together 190 economically-stressed census tracts all the way to depressed Brownsville, and meets the TEA-required unemployment rate of 1.5 times the national average.

Known as “gerrymandering,” the process has been used from California to New York, where TEAs are drawn from depressed areas like poor Bronx neighborhoods and Brooklyn housing projects to Wall Street, Lower Manhattan and across the Hudson to a 50-story Trump building in Jersey City. Groups like Urban Equality NOW and the Center for Immigration Studies say the unemployed stand little chance of benefitting from gerrymandered districts.

“The way the TEAs are worked out is almost totally in the hands of the developer,” David North, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, told InsideSources. “There’s a nominal clearance at the state level, and absolutely no scrutiny as far as we can see from DHS.”

“To my knowledge, no state has ever turned down one of these gerrymanders,” North said, adding states have little incentive to turn down proposals and send money elsewhere.

“Since the USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] accepts anything that the state accepts, and the states accept anything that is given to them, all you have to do is pull together the census tracts in such a way that you reach that statistical goal,” North explained.

As an exercise in how easy it is to gerrymander EB-5 districts, North drew an eligible TEA district in downtown Washington, D.C. including the most prosperous residential area in the country — the White House. North tied 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.’s census tract to another in Capitol Hill, encompassing the U.S. Capitol, National Mall and Lincoln Memorial, and linked it to tracts east, including prosperous neighborhoods, finally stretching to depressed neighborhoods across the Anacostia River.

“You can very easily construct a depressed area, in the terms of this law, that includes the White House,” North said.

Grassley and Ranking Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy are leading the charge for reform via legislation mandating districts are drawn away from affluent areas. The bipartisan, bicameral effort includes the support of colleagues Reps. Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers, their House equivalents, both of whom testified during Wednesday’s hearing.

“The EB-5 program also encourages a whole host of financial fraud and corruption. The program’s abundant loopholes and lack of regulation have created a virtual playing field for unethical gamesmanship and con-artists,” Grassley said in December. “The Targeted Employment Areas created by Congress to steer foreign investments to rural and distressed areas have been greatly abused. The designations have been gerrymandered to include the most lavish of developments in the richest neighborhoods.”

Not all of their colleagues agree. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas and New York Democrat Sen. Chuck Schumer pushed back against Grassley and Leahy’s attempt to include EB-5 reforms in last year’s omnibus spending bill, criticizing what they described as an emphasis on rural development and away from urban.

Both of their states have received sizable development projects from EB-5 funding, in Cornyn’s case much of it through Civitas.

Texas business mogul G. Brint Ryan, a business partner of Civitas CEO Daniel Healy — a witness in Wednesday’s hearing — held a fundraiser for Cornyn in his Dallas home last month, according to an email obtained by InsideSources.

“There’s a lot of common ground,” Cornyn said in December. “But rather than try to pass it in an omnibus appropriation bill without having much in the way in daylight or transparency involved, we need to have a hearing and then a regular markup.”

Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake drafted his own EB-5 reform legislation in December, sponsored by the Senate’s number two Republican and number three Democrat, which shifts the focus to urban development.

Supporters of the Grassley-Leahy bill organized by the Dallas-based More American Jobs Alliance — an EB-5 reform group representing “more than 170 EB-5 stakeholders, white and blue collar workers in different industries” — sent letters to Cornyn in February urging him to support the changes.

“We strive for Senator Cornyn’s recognition regarding the Grassley-Leahy EB-5 reforms and its potential and exponential economic impacts for Texas,” Shae Armstrong, an attorney for the group, said Tuesday. “So far, we haven’t received a response.”

According to a MAJA statement rural Texas, which makes up 84 percent of the state, would have benefited most from the reforms.

“Texas rural communities would have been a prime beneficiary of EB-5 capital under the proposed reform last year, which would have allocated 20 percent of the annually available EB-5 visas for investment in rural communities,” Armstrong said.

Civitas Capital Group did not respond to InsideSources’ request for comment.

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Connecticut Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Wednesday President Barack Obama’s pick to replace Justice Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, deserves a Senate hearing within 100 days of being submitted — and an up-or-down vote within 237 days.

Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., meanwhile, hasn’t budged from his vow that Senate confirmation of a replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is off the table until after Obama leaves office in January, setting up a possible 11-month standoff with the White House.

Blumenthal, who joined N.Y. Sen. Charles E. Schumer and the leaders of a coalition of progressive groups Wednesday in criticizing GOP “obstructionism,” predicted public outrage would force Republicans to reconsider.

“We are not saying the president’s nominee should be rubber-stamped,” Blumenthal said. “There is clear precedent with moving ahead with the president’s nominee. Every nominee within the last 30 years has received a hearing and a vote within 100 days, the longest was Clarence Thomas, 99 days. No seat has remained vacant longer than 237 days. I think those time periods are the proper parameters for what should, on the outside and at the longest, should be the time taken.”

Blumenthal offered his timeline as he, Schumer and leaders from MoveOn.org and civil rights group Color of Change announced a petition drive aimed at convincing Republicans that stalling on the Supreme Court pick will cost them at the ballot box next fall.

Schumer, meanwhile, has become a focus of pushback on the right after critics resurfaced a 2007 video in which he urges Democrats to oppose any nominees from then-lame-duck President George W. Bush. But on Wednesday the senator expected to take over next year as the Senate  Democrats’ leader after Harry Reid retires sounded confident: “Senator McConnell will have to back off. I believe we’ll get hearings and a vote.”

Republicans have accused both Schumer and Obama of hypocrisy when it comes to the Senate’s handling of Supreme Court nominees submitted by a president of the opposing party.

Comparing 2007 to today is “apples to oranges,” Schumer said, insisting he did not suggest nine years ago that the Senate judicial approval process be halted —only that Democratic senators vote down any Bush appointee.

Schumer also posted an explanation on the Medium.com website, writing: “What I said in the speech given in 2007 is simple: Democrats, after a hearing, should entertain voting no if the nominee is out of the mainstream and tries to cover that fact up. There was no hint anywhere in the speech that there shouldn’t be hearings or a vote.”

The administration also struggled Wednesday to explain Obama’s political history.

At the White House, where the president has said he intends to submit an “indisputably” qualified nominee and expects the Senate to “do their job,” spokesman Josh Earnest on Wednesday said Obama now regrets his support, as a young senator, for an unsuccessful 2006 filibuster by Senate Democrats against the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito.

“What the president regrets is that Senate Democrats didn’t focus more on making an effective public case about those substantive objections,” Earnest said. “Instead, some Democrats engaged in a process of throwing sand in the gears of the confirmation process. And that’s an approach that the president regrets.”

Schumer and Blumenthal said Democrats are counting on progressives to create a grassroots movement to force Republicans to yield, but conservative activist Carrie Severino, a former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, now chief counsel of the Judicial Crisis Network, said the Supreme Court traditionally generates more energy in the Republican base.

“This upcoming election — people have a unique amount of frustration and anger with, really, both parties and with the way things are done in Washington. It’s a real populist movement that’s going on,” she told InsideSources. “This is exactly the kind of decision where people would like to see their voices being heard — not just more of the same.

“This isn’t even about a particular nominee at this particular point,” she said. “This is about the process, and whether this is something that should be decided by the people or by President Obama.”

Some Republicans, including Judiciary Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, indicated Wednesday more willingness to hold hearings on a potential Obama pick.

Severino said holding hearings and a vote would be destructive and a disservice to whomever the president nominates if Republicans, who control 54 of the 100 seats in the Senate, are committed to waiting for the next president.

Obama, who could theoretically make a recess appointment to fill Scalia’s seat this week while the Senate is out of town, has said he wants his as-yet-unnamed nominee to go through the normal process. But Severino had some advice for Senate Republicans:

“If I were a Republican senator, I would not vote to recess again between now and January.”