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House Democrats are not powerless in the face of Senate intransigence. Democrats therefore have a responsibility to use the powers they have, very much including stringent and overdue oversight.

If Emanuel gets Biden’s ear during the transition, he will do everything possible to protect the powerful and sink the ambitions of the populist base. But, again, it isn’t clear if Emanuel is overstating his supposed influence to, in Ruthhart’s words, “keep himself relevant.”

Scher has run all of JPMorgan Chase’s political influence operations since 2008. He is a brotherly and sociable person, but he has worked for two decades to undermine governance by and for the public, rather than private, interest.

Indeed, this person’s career represents a near total distillation of the elite neoliberal consensus that ”AOC” and other populists oppose.

If Niejelow is indeed taking a major position overseeing campaign policy, it raises significant questions about the line between Biden’s fundraising and policy teams, since Niejelow is a campaign bundler.

Now, especially as Biden pivots to consolidating populist votes for the general election, Harris should consider distancing herself from those corporate forces through clear commitments to wielding executive authority against bad actors and for the common good. Here are a few suggestions.

On April 30, the Biden campaign announced to surprisingly little fanfare that it had selected a committee of advisers who’d help pick his running mate. The only non-politician of the bunch is Cynthia Hogan, Apple’s top lobbyist since April 2016.

If he truly cannot stand the conflicts of interest, revolving doors, and regulatory capture of Washington, then he currently holds perhaps the single most powerful job to do something about it.

Summers’ influence has directly exacerbated our climate crisis by repeatedly halting any meaningful attempt at curbing the crisis.

If Joe Biden wins in November, you can bet that Big Tech’s representatives will do the same thing as every other industry’s political strategists: scour the list of more than four thousand appointments across the executive branch the new president needs to make, and figure out which of their loyalists are ready for a spin through the government’s revolving door.

If and when we (likely inevitably) learn that bailed-out companies and multi-trillion dollar slush funds misuse the public disaster relief dollars doled out by the Trump administration in the wake of the pandemic, we should turn back to this Walmart story for further evidence of why big corporations are rarely held accountable.

A slim majority of individuals whom we could identify, and a strong plurality of the overall data set, have revolved into corporate law firms where they defend clients in the sorts of investigations and approval processes which they themselves used to administer.

Hot off of singlehandedly ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, America’s Son-In-Law-In-Chief has put himself in charge of handling half of the White House response to the coronavirus crisis. Didn’t you know that? No? Oh, well, it seems the White House just decided that, ah, the people didn’t need to hear about this. Oh, and FYI, most of his team are from the private sector. That’s not a problem, Congressional Democrats, is it?

“He’s got a certain talent for this,” President Donald Trump said of Vice President Mike Pence when entrusting him with the response to the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis. Pence’s perpetual grimace is the new face of the U.S. response to the coronavirus, after a chaotic week when the White House health team’s internecine squabbles and revolving-door corruption got a bit too public for Trump’s comfort. GOP operatives are likely relieved that their “adult in the room” has taken over. After all, Pence may be a fundamentalist zealot, but he is at least an actual “normal” policy-maker.

The COVID-19 coronavirus is a public health emergency unlike any the United States has faced in decades, but it is also one which the federal government has tools to counter. Unfortunately, the Trump administration is wielding those tools.