Death Panel podcast co-hosts Beatrice Adler-Bolton, Artie Vierkant, and Phil Rocco discuss how recent claims that Biden has tried to bring about “the largest expansion of the welfare state in a half century” ignore his track record of ending every last pandemic welfare program.

Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)

[ Intro music ]

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 0:32

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So today I am here with my co-hosts, Artie Vierkant.

Artie Vierkant 1:09

Hello.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:10

And Phil Rocco.

Phil Rocco 1:11

Hey.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:11

And the three of us are checking back in on a topic that we cover often and have covered for years now, which is the current state of the welfare state in the United States. Now, when the pandemic began way back in 2020, the conversation that we had been having prior to the pandemic was mostly surrounding Medicaid, Children's Health Insurance called CHIP, SNAP known as food stamps, state level SSI for disability, and that was all really blown wide open by the fact that during the early months of the still ongoing COVID pandemic, we saw a kind of impressive and very quick expansion of the welfare state in the United States. And since 2021, our coverage, unfortunately, has been characterized by a kind of long, slow dirge of watching the Biden administration do nothing as this pandemic welfare state is unmade, and as they've even hastened some of the ends of these programs, even as the pandemic continues, obviously. So now here we are in COVID year five and I guess unsurprisingly, what we're going to be talking about today is about how in the lead up to the 2024 US presidential election cycle this year, we are seeing the centrist and liberal Democratic take machines kind of kick into high gear. And we're gonna be covering and rebutting and refuting a lot of recent attempts to sort of rewrite Biden's record on pandemic welfare expansion. So many listeners might recall that when Biden was elected, they tried to run with this line about Biden being FDR 2.0 [laughter], in reference to the kind of massive expansions of the US welfare state under President Roosevelt during the Great Depression, which is between 1933 and 1938, called the New Deal. Now most people in the US know this, but people now listen to Death Panel in over 80 different countries around the world, so I'm mentioning for context. Basically, making a comparison to FDR is a quite loaded reference point in US history. Most of the parts of it, of the FDR program that are most famous come from the second New Deal, and that was setting up stuff like the National Labor Relations Board, the WPA, etc. But the bottom line is that this period and FDR's administration is basically talked about as this very important point in the modernization of the US state, a kind of turning point, a transformative moment in politics and policy in the US, particularly with regard to providing dignity and security to working class and poor people. So it's a very bold claim to say that Biden was FDR 2.0, right as he was coming into office when he had not done anything yet. But the claim was based on, you know, the fact that these pandemic welfare expansions were largely all in place when he started the job. When that comparison was initially made back in 2021, the Biden team was kind of laughed into dropping it writ large. So now that some time has passed, however, and collective memory has really already been made hazy by the sociological production of the end of the pandemic, the Biden team seems to be trying to make the FDR 2.0 argument again, except for unlike last time, where there was no evidence to support the claim, they now need to rewrite very recent history to even try and pass this off as remotely applicable to the Biden administration's actual actions while in power these last three years. So we're going to be talking about these recent attempts to rewrite Biden's record on pandemic welfare expansion and what the Biden administration's real impact on the welfare state actually was over the last four years, and as they oversaw the undoing of many of the programs that helped to get folks through the early years of the pandemic. And just for reference, the latest numbers are showing about 2,000 people a week dying of COVID in the United States, hospitals have been hit hard with a surge of patients. Northeast and Midwest are being hit incredibly hard right now. So I know one thing that's going to be heavily on my mind while we talk about this today is how different things might have been right now if some of these programs that we're about to talk about hadn't been ended in order to get people back to work and to get the juices of the economy flowing again.

Artie Vierkant 5:18

Yeah, I mean, simple example, we're also now up to 15 million people, more than 15 million people kicked off of Medicaid in the unwinding so far.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 5:26

[sighs]

Phil Rocco 5:26

More to come.

Artie Vierkant 5:27

Yeah. But anyway, so yeah, to pick up from where Bea left off. Yeah. So today, we're gonna be talking about some of those programs, what they were, and how they went away, and how the story of how they went away differs from this sort of retcon of sorts that media figures and the Biden administration are participating in right now, that Bea sort of referenced. But first, just as we start, I think, let me just make sure to be clear about what we're talking about. So in 2020, and later, in early 2021, the US government instituted this set of dramatic if frankly, in many ways, still insufficient expansions of some of its welfare programs and propped up a few new things targeted at COVID, specifically, also. So when we're talking about these, we're referring to basically this set of programs that includes but is not limited to expanded unemployment insurance, which was a very dramatic shift, the Medicaid continuous enrollment requirement, which now we're having seen this undone as one of the last things essentially that has been undone as part of these welfare programs. That's the unwinding. Also, stimulus checks, eviction moratoria, a foreclosure ban, a pause on student loan payments, emergency rental assistance, an expansion of SNAP benefits, free school meals in public schools, a Child Tax Credit, which reportedly temporarily reduced child poverty by 44% in six months, and also stuff like the PPP loans, which I'm not saying those were good. These are the loans that went out directly to businesses. You know, there's plenty of things to obviously -- with all of these, there's plenty of things to quibble about, which we may get into. But you know, these are some of the programs that we're talking about. And I'm also going to throw in a couple of other things, like federalizing payments for COVID vaccines and treatments and the federal program to pay for COVID care for the uninsured, including the cost of hospitalization. Those two things are like never included on the lists of pandemic welfare expansions for some reason, which I find suspect.

Phil Rocco 7:18

But they are, yeah.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 7:20

Mhm, mhm.

Artie Vierkant 7:20

So you know, again, these programs, by no means perfect, but while there are so many different things to talk about in relation to these programs, there's one very specific angle we want to approach them from today. And that's a question that seems to be on some liberals' minds all of a sudden, after frankly seeming to not care all that much, or at all, which is, why have these gone away? Or why did these go away? Why did they -- why do we allow them to expire? One good example of what I'm talking about, I think, of some of this retrospection happening over these programs is the following, which is from a piece in The New York Review of Books this month, the author Matthew Desmond writes, "The blunt truth is that pandemic anti-poverty aid went away because we didn't fight to keep it. We didn't care enough. Millions of children were lifted out of poverty. Millions of renting families were spared the pain and humiliation of eviction. Millions of gig workers were finally protected from the cruel indignities of the market. And we seemed to barely notice. We didn't march. We didn't phone our congressperson. We didn't write letters to the editor. We didn't even talk about it, really. Sure, there were political obstacles—including a certain Democratic senator from West Virginia—but when aren’t there? We can pin the blame on the Democrats’ "messaging problem." We can point to the lack of serious policy ideas voiced by the modern Republican Party. But why absolve ourselves? Congress didn’t act to make pandemic aid permanent in large part because we didn’t. And in our silence, over five million children were cast back into poverty." So I think for people who've been listening for a long time, you might know what question I suppose that we might have about this, which is who exactly is the "we" here?

Phil Rocco 8:56

Yeah. Who is "we"? I mean, I have to say, when I first read this paragraph, I really -- I was like, what the hell? I mean, who -- in part because I think that that, you know, "we didn't," is doing a lot of work. And I think, seen in one light, it has a kind of victim blaming -- you know, one could read it with a kind of victim blaming lens. I read it again, and actually hearing you read it again, Artie, and I kind of feel like there's a harder edge to it. And one that I agree with more, which is like what is happening in kind of like the American political landscape that results in this kind of inertia, not just -- and I think he's right to point out the fact that the inertia is not just from the veto points. But when we have been covering the expiration of pandemic relief programs, you could call it the pandemic welfare state, or what I referred to several years ago as the waning of pandemic time, right, the expiration of the temporary relief programs that -- that really, if it was going to be a second New Deal would be transformed, converted, made permanent, or at least thought about in that way. It is the case that a lot of this was never even on the radar screen of the administration, evidently.

Computer Generated Voice Over (Daniel) 10:20

Press secretary Jen Psaki, June 4th, 2021.

Clipped Audio, Jen Psaki (Link) 10:25

It is important for people to understand factually that the president, no one from the administration, has ever proposed making these permanent or doing it over the long-term. At the end of the day, what we see as the biggest driving factor is vaccines and individuals being vaccinated, feeling safe to go back to workplaces.

Phil Rocco 10:44

But also, I think that you see a lot of advocacy organizations that we have tracked over the years have not really -- were not like super active, like you didn't see them out there kind of beating down the door of the White House, issuing even strongly worded press releases, issuing recommendations on legislation to make these things permanent. I do think that there was sort of a lack of energy around that. And I do think that that's something important to explain, you know, and I think about the examples of like these major organizations that I think historically have been seen as like defenders of the welfare state. I even think about like AARP, and like AARP is a great example of like, oh yeah, then you have to think about the fact that they have a private Medicare Advantage Plan, which is one reason why they happen to be like great defenders of Medicare privatization. And there are all kinds of examples like this, where like the incentives of these interest groups that you would think would play that role that Desmond is saying they should play, and for a variety of reasons, they don't have incentives that line up with that. So I do think that that's something to be explained. But I also think that it doesn't, to me, capture the absence of the role of the Biden administration, in playing a leadership role in some of these things, which as I think we're going to see, is pretty important when it comes to leading on programs that can be obscure, technically complex, or as in the case of Medicaid, are designed in ways that explicitly I think, demobilize people, which really puts a premium on the leadership of a president. So I mean, I think, you know, read in that way, I'm sympathetic with that point. But I also think it could be very easily misread as a kind of, you know, blaming ourselves, rather than actually taking stock of --

Artie Vierkant 12:33

For the people, yeah.

Phil Rocco 12:33

Right. I sort of read it as, we should really be taking stock of what is the sort of organizational rot at the core of American politics that makes this sort of thing possible? Because it isn't just the veto points. I agree with that.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 12:45

Yeah. And I think partially in sort of trying to pin it to just one thing, right, because if you -- if you take this sort of framing at face value, right, it leaves out and absolves all of the other contingent pressures involved, right. The memos and the strongly worded letters that were coming into the Biden administration were not --

Artie Vierkant 13:06

From businesses.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:06

Were from businesses --

Phil Rocco 13:07

Yes, yes.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:08

Being like, we need to get people back to work.

Phil Rocco 13:09

Exactly.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 13:10

And from the airline industry saying, we need people to travel again. That framing, one, excludes those pressures. And it also excludes, you know, as we're gonna talk about, the actual literal actions of the Biden administration itself, right, like the sort of performativity of this is a problem of us not caring enough is not only a limited frame for several political reasons, it also, as a sort of structural device, tells us to kind of look away from these other pressures that our speech and our pressure that wasn't enough, in this framing, like was actually up against, right. So it's hard to do a power analysis if you're just trying to point to one thing and say, this is the reason these welfare programs ended. And honestly, if you weren't aware that from the beginning, you know, these things were timed and had end dates that weren't even connected to the end of the federal public health emergency, you know, I could understand why that might seem true, right. But largely, what we're talking about here is way more complex than can be described with simply pointing to one thing as the cause.

Artie Vierkant 14:16

Definitely. And I just want to be clear, I think, Phil, a lot of the stuff that you're pointing to in terms of like interest groups, clinical interest groups, not pushing back against this, a lot of that you're talking about like the nonprofit world, I assume, right?

Phil Rocco 14:29

Yeah. Right. I mean, yes.

Artie Vierkant 14:31

Because as we'll talk about later, like there was a lot of -- it's actually, I think, really important to the story in general to not write out the fact that there was a lot of activist or ground pressure. It's just that for the most part, major political institutions -- I think basically, what I'm saying is, like to be sort of charitable to the argument made in this New York Review of Books piece, the statement is true, if you're looking at the discourse among like mainstream Democrats, or maybe specifically within like the institution of the -- like the institutional apparatus of the Democratic Party itself, in some of the most powerful media institutions, for example, like yes, I think absolutely true, there was not a lot of concern. We've made -- we've made the same comment. But I do think at the same time, there is a really important alternative story here, which is that, in fact, for a lot of these programs, there was in fact, a constant battle to keep them going. It's just a question of who was heard, basically, right. As an example, unemployment insurance itself was renewed multiple times, first by a unilateral action of the Trump administration in August 2020, then by Congress in December 2020, and again in March 2021. And those renewals were not an accident. They were the result of public pressure. The thing is, and I think that this is the most important thing, that like by the time September 2021 rolled around, and the pandemic unemployment insurance expansion was dying for good, like there was also a public outcry at the time. But the difference was that by the summer of 2021, I think the Biden administration not only hadn't mounted much of a defense of their own on these programs, but in many cases is actually on record saying that, you know, it was now an appropriate time for these programs to end.

Computer Generated Voice Over (Daniel) 14:31

Joe Biden, June 4th, 2021.

Clipped Audio, Joe Biden Speaking (Link) 16:18

A temporary boost in unemployment benefits that ended -- that we enacted, I should say, helped people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own, and who still may be in the process of getting vaccinated, but it's going to expire in 90 days. That makes sense, it expires in 90 days.

Artie Vierkant 16:36

So they just kind of like stopped listening to a lot of the public outcry, coming from people who wanted the programs extended, and in fact, started to listen more to the public outcry that Bea's talking about, which is, you know, we can remember all of the conversation in 2021, a lot of business owners saying like, I can't find enough employees to hire or whatever, it must be the unemployment insurance's fault, not the fact that I'm not paying, you know, enough to my employees to maintain them, or to make it like attractive for them to apply for a job here. Or you had, you know, landlords saying, like, I'm not making as much money as I used to, because, you know, there's an eviction moratorium and so I can't like evict my tenants. But anyway, I mean, I wanted to bring this all up early, because while the thing I was reading earlier, the thing we're talking about, the New York Review of Books piece, is one thing, there's another more explicitly obnoxious media take bubbling up that I want us to address directly, which is more of, I think, what we're addressing in this episode than the other thing. This is the kind of retcon part of recasting -- like casting in a new light everything that we've seen unfold directly over the last few years. And this is best articulated, I think, by Eric Levitz, a writer for New York Magazine [now Vox]. So I'm just gonna read a, let's go with colorful, series of tweets by Eric Levitz about this topic. Apologies in advance for some of his word choices. They are his, not mine.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 17:59

Ugh.

Artie Vierkant 18:01

"Biden did not cut the pandemic welfare programs. Congress enacted aid programs on a temporary basis. Biden then attempted to enact the largest expansion of the welfare state in a half century. The Senate refused to pass it. I don't understand why some leftists, who are ostensibly deeply interested in interrogating the deep structures of power, nevertheless insist on a small child's conception of the legislative process in which the President is a king. There are many things to criticize Biden for, not least his complicity in Israel's war crimes, and approach to immigration. You don't need to pretend to have had a lobotomy and believe that House Republicans would have enacted a second Great Society if only Biden had asked."

Phil Rocco 18:45

Well.

Artie Vierkant 18:46

So.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 18:48

[sighs]

Artie Vierkant 18:48

Okay, Eric, let's talk about it. Because I mean, I think if you think Biden attempted to enact the largest expansion of the welfare state in a half century, to quote you, then I have a bridge to sell you.

Phil Rocco 18:59

Yeah, I mean, look, the thing about this is, this is a -- I think, a very common rhetorical kind of position, especially like, why is this all happening now? Because we're like going into an election year, and, you know, real median household income has been declining. And if it doesn't -- you know, if the long history of the political economy of election cycles is any indication, like if it doesn't rebound significantly, if people don't start getting some better medicine, you know, quickly, then Biden doesn't have a shot. And probably regardless of what happens, I think is, you know, going to be heading out of the White House. So like, that's why I think the --

Artie Vierkant 19:45

Plus there's the whole genocide thing, so, you know.

Phil Rocco 19:48

You know, that as well, right? I mean, it's like so, you know, we should be having these debates about like why these huge packages aren't getting through as they're happening, but now -- it's like the classic aspect of American political journalism and discourse is everything gets shoehorned into the lead up to the election year and then the appraisal of what happened or the diagnosis tea leaf reading about like what happened in the election and why, as opposed to like why real power gets exercised the way that it does or doesn't. And I think the thing about his claims here, some of them are just really, really easy, profoundly easy to refute. So let's just think about the pandemic welfare state claim, which is something that we've talked about on this podcast like many times, written about, and let's talk about one of the biggest examples of that, which is the temporary Medicaid expansion that happened during the early months of the pandemic, a boost in payments to states, as well as a requirement that states keep continuous coverage for people who gain coverage during the pandemic on Medicaid. So huge expansion in the Medicaid rolls as a result of that. Medicaid being a program of the Democratic Party, you know, long vaunted innovation of the Democratic Party, that has over the years, you might think that you'd want to sort of defend those gains, or at the very least, preserve coverage, so that there's not a massive cliff in benefits prior to, I don't know, an election year. So the claim, right, is that Biden wanted to preserve this. It was just those pesky Republicans in the Senate that didn't make that happen. Well, the problem here, right, is this is a claim about the preferences of somebody. His claim is that if you looked at Biden's preferences, you would see that his preferences were to keep that welfare state going, expand that welfare state, and that it was the actions of somebody else, not Biden's preferences, that caused that not to happen. The problem here is it's really difficult to measure preferences. But one thing you definitely shouldn't do when you're measuring them, I don't know, is assume that the President's preferences are the warmest and fuzziest feeling you have about them in your head. Admittedly, like we can't get inside Biden's head and know what his real preferences were. Okay. So like this is a fundamental measurement problem. But the thing that I like to do, and this isn't quite preferences, it's also behavior. But it gives you a pretty good indication of where the President is at on some issues, is to look at one, their budget, and two, their statements of administration policy, which they, through the White House Office of Management and Budget release, which basically says this is their position on the different bills and their requests to Congress. So looking at Biden's budget, I don't see any evidence that he wanted to keep the Medicaid expansion going in perpetuity. There was no, you know, argument for that.

Artie Vierkant 19:48

Yeah, they never talked about that.

Phil Rocco 22:41

They never talked about that. Moreover, and not to center the blame on Biden here, Eric, like Democrats didn't introduce any bills on that either, which does -- I do sort of think goes to the Matthew Desmond point, which is like, yeah, there's some absence of concerted effort here. But the other thing is that unlike a lot of those interest groups that exist in society and maybe aren't doing their part, their interests are misaligned, or it's just a bunch of academics studying the problem who have no understanding of collective action, which I do think sort of characterizes the kind of Medicaid policy community for worse, the President does have a lot of authority to do things especially when there's an emergency involved, unilaterally. The two things to consider: the Medicaid expansion was not like one of these other temporary welfare state programs that expired, okay, as I sort of documented back in 2021, there were tons of programs that Congress enacted in the CARES Act, that they had a baked in, temporal sunset date that was going to be there and Congress could have chosen to reauthorize them, by the way, as it does with countless other programs, okay. Congress can always choose to reauthorize something or a president can push for it. But unlike those things, which we can get to in a second, this program was set to run until the public health emergency was declared over and the only person that can do that, or the only arm of government that can do that, is the executive branch, okay, which Biden, by the way, at the head of. So two important things happen. One, in their year-end appropriations package, Republicans pushed to decouple Medicaid expansion, temporary pandemic Medicaid expansion from the public health emergency, right. So basically ending the Medicaid expansion or unwinding Medicaid before that emergency ended. Okay. So that basically was a proposal to take power away from Biden. One, it was evidence in reading administration statements that even if the Republicans hadn't done that, he wanted to rollback the public health emergency in the summer of 2023 anyway. So whether the Republicans were going to force him to or he was going to do it himself, Medicaid was going to be unwound on Biden's watch, and that was planned for. He didn't end up doing that, and basically allowed Republicans to, I don't know, take the -- you could say take the blame for doing it, but except for the fact that when that bill was released, in the year end Appropriations Act, the statement of administration policy was for Congress to pass the bill as soon as possible, right. And you could say, well, that was because there were a lot of other things in it. But it contained this stick of dynamite, I should say, you know, huge box of like Acme dynamite, to Medicaid expansion, which is now one reason why so many millions of people are losing coverage. So to absolve Biden of blame, because, you know, he's not the king, or, you know, Congress routinely tries to fuck up his shit, which they do, especially Republicans, is to blatantly ignore the actions that Biden took, and the things that came out of the White House that led to Medicaid unwinding, or even if the Republicans hadn't forced them to, would have done it anyway. Does that sound like good politics to you? Like, why are you carrying water for that? And that, you know, I think is one very clear case where this has nothing to do with what Republicans are proposing. Biden didn't have to have that happen on his watch. Had he maintained the public health emergency, we would not be in a position where tens of millions of people are getting kicked off Medicaid.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 26:48

Mhm. Well, and it's frustrating, because I feel like the kind of Levitz attitude -- and this isn't unique to Levitz, but it's particularly on display in his framing -- the thing that I think is really frustrating is you really can't just point to like, well, we've got this intent there, we've got this like plan to have enacted this, and say that that is evidence that can hold a candle to like the actual record of the events that happened, which is, I mean, I think, perhaps best exemplified in what's happened, for example, with home and community based services during the Medicaid unwinding, where you have, you know, all of these National Centers for Independent Living, even pushing back saying, listen, you know, all of these sort of small changes that were enacted in 2020 to Medicaid were tied to the continuous enrollment provision. And so now, you know, you're sort of fucking up these tiny streams of procedural changes that allowed people to stay in their homes and to actually alleviate some of the pressures on the waitlists for home and community based services. And what you stood up the month before things started unwinding was not a sufficient replacement, right. And yet, you have the claim on paper that the Biden administration stood up revolutionary style, you know, transformative disability policy, once in a lifetime changes to disability policy. And, you know, the truth has to be stretched so fucking far. Even the NCIL, which again, is like a very liberal mainstream organization, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had not pushed back against the unwinding, for example. They did, though, and even they are not happy, right? And so I think this kind of idea of like, well, what are we even owed, and what does the state even sort of owe "citizens" anymore has just become so diminished, and the Democratic Party actually has a huge role in that. But they like to play like they are still doing FDR 2.0. They like to play like they are the party of the working people and of poor people. And there are few examples better than the last three years of the pandemic for exactly why that's not true.

Artie Vierkant 29:01

Well, and this is why I think it's really important to just refute very directly this claim that Biden did all he could. This is like -- and this is the retcon. Like this is the core of the retcon that is being attempted. It's the thing that's like on display, that figures like Levitz have just bought hook, line and sinker. And I think, in addition to this, the Medicaid unwinding example is obviously very instructive. I think it's also -- you know, we've spoken a lot about Medicaid unwinding recently and there's a lot of coverage that we've done, trying to follow explicitly, sort of step by step, as new things happen, how so much of the things that the Biden administration is claiming to do to even stem the tide of disenrollments is mostly show, right. That's all very damning. I do think one important thing that I just want to do really quickly though, is to draw back to two explicit examples of some of these pandemic welfare expansions that expired much earlier than Medicaid unwinding. Because by the time that we get to Medicaid unwinding, we're talking -- obviously, as we've talked about, started in -- the process started in 2023. It's one of the last things that was remaining. It's tied up in this false decoupling of it from having to continue until the end of the public health emergency. It's caught up in the sort of tail end of all of the sociological production of the end of the pandemic work that we've been chronicling. But that's why it's really, I think, illustrative to look at some of the fights that happen much earlier. One example -- I'll say the two examples I'm going to talk about, I think. One is the eviction moratorium, and the other is the pandemic unemployment insurance. So I'll just say like kind of briefly about the eviction moratorium. I think it's easy to forget, for example, that when -- so basically, the eviction moratorium expired at the end of summer 2021. There was a huge political fight over that, not just within the halls of Congress and between the Biden administration and Congress, but also in public. Even within Congress, though, you had stuff like Cory Bush sleeping on the Capitol steps --

Phil Rocco 31:12

Right.

Artie Vierkant 31:13

In protest of the fact that Congress left.

Computer Generated Voice Over (Daniel) 31:15

August 2nd, 2021.

Clipped Audio, Local News Report (Link) 31:18

The rent was due for many yesterday, the first of the month, but an estimated 3.6 million Americans are now at risk of eviction. And this is after the federal eviction moratorium expired yesterday morning. Missouri's first district Congresswoman Cory Bush slept on the steps on the US Capitol Building Friday and Saturday night to protest the end of the moratorium. Bush, who admits to being evicted herself three times in her life, joins House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other House Democratic leaders, who are now calling on the Biden administration to immediately extend the moratorium. They call it a moral imperative to prevent Americans from being put out of their homes during a COVID-19 surge.

Artie Vierkant 32:00

The weekend before the eviction moratorium was supposed to expire, Congress fucking left, right. And obviously, this was something that the Biden administration could have taken a unilateral role on, but they were doing their standard thing that we've seen in so many different instances, where they're like, oh, one of our legal advisors says that there's probably nothing that we could do, or it'd be just way too hard. So we're just not going to fucking try at all, right? And this all culminated -- I won't recount the entire story, but you know, I think it's very worthwhile to look back on that moment. This all kind of culminated in this thing where it kind of ended up in a partial reinstatement in some places of an eviction moratorium with less coverage that lasted only until October, and then that was it, again. Then it expired again, right. The other thing, though, which I want to kind of dive into a little more detail, though, is the various political fights over the pandemic unemployment insurance. And this too is a situation where much like with the expiration of the eviction moratorium, I mean, so much of all -- all of the coverage, basically, from the time, all of the contemporaneous reporting on this shows a pretty lackluster to disinterested approach from the Biden administration. Actually, not just disinterested, in some cases, basically, with both of these programs, there are sort of comments from the Biden administration that come forth as though basically, you know, this is the right move, it's the right time to end these programs. We don't need them anymore. Like, oh, this was just temporary. It's done. This is part of their -- in a way, I think, what's really important to understand from this, I guess, is that this retrenchment of these welfare state expansions, right, the peeling back of these welfare state expansions, was bound up in their sociological production of the end of the pandemic, was bound up in their back to normal, actually. Peeling these things back and returning them to their, you know, pretty pitiful baseline was part of this. And so I think, you know, on unemployment insurance, in particular, for example, this -- like just as a refresher, this was the federal program that started in March 2020, that made it so that, you know, the unemployment insurance system, which is this horrible hodgepodge that every state manages their own unemployment insurance system, and are bound by things like, you know, states can't deficit spend, so they're bound by their budgeting processes. And there have been calls for a long time to federalize, actually, the unemployment insurance program. We talked about this in 2020 on the show a lot, actually. And what this program did was a couple of things. First, it expanded it to apply to more people, meaning for the first time across the United States, people who were gig workers or self-employed could apply for unemployment insurance. It added first, $600 a week to everyone's unemployment insurance claims. That lasted until July 31st, 2020. Then added, after that point, it went down to $300 a week after the first renewal, and then $400 a week after the American Rescue Plan in 2021, which extended it, but only until August -- extended it only until August 29th of 2021, when it finally ended. And so in August of 2021, I want to just read a sort of -- I guess this is actually kind of a large chunk from a Washington Post piece from September 3rd, 2021. This is from Jeff Stein. The headline is, "At odds with boss, some Biden aides privately alarmed as millions of workers head over jobless benefits cliff" -- "Biden administration officials have been at odds over the consequences of allowing unemployment benefits to expire for millions of workers next week, with numerous White House economic advisors frustrated by Biden's support for letting the aid lapse. In private conversations, senior officials across multiple parts of government have made clear they think the cut off of benefits poses a serious danger to millions of Americans who remain out of work, according to two senior administration officials and five people in frequent communication with administration officials. That belief is in conflict with the administration's stated position that it is "appropriate" for the emergency federal program to end, a view held by Biden personally, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. Anticipating a backlash to the program's expiration next week, the Biden administration two weeks ago said states could on their own extend the jobless benefits using leftover state aid from Biden's stimulus bill in March. Not a single state appears likely to do so, at least as of Friday." Just as an aside, I think it's interesting, because they said a similar thing about Medicaid. And obviously, if you don't give them continuing funding to do that, they're not going to do it. Continuing, "As a result, roughly 10 million people are set to lose unemployment benefits on September 6th." Skipping down a little bit, "A senior congressional Democratic aide added, 'At the White House staff level, there's a ton of support for focusing on at least trying to extend additional weeks for gig workers and self employed workers, but they're not trying.' White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, struck a markedly different tone at the press briefing on Monday, echoing Biden's prior comments that 'it makes sense' for the benefits to lapse. 'Biden made a decision based on where things stand and our economic recovery at this point in time,' Psaki told reporters." And then I'll just skip towards the end of this where it was from a July townhall that Biden did in Ohio, where Biden was asked a question by a person identified as John Lanni, the owner of -- "The owner of the Thunderdome Restaurant Group," which I think is hilarious and apt here.

Phil Rocco 37:39

[laughing] Great family restaurant chain, Thunderdome Restaurant.

Artie Vierkant 37:43

So, "At a town hall in Ohio in late July, Biden fielded questions from John Lanni, owner of the Thunderdome Restaurant Group, who complained to the President about difficulty hiring. Biden was sympathetic, saying, 'We're ending all of those things that are things keeping people from going back to work.' And so --

Phil Rocco 38:05

Thunderdome Restaurant Group -- you want to eat? You gotta go back to work, and you're gonna fight to the death.

Artie Vierkant 38:11

Yeah, back to work, reopen the economy, [whispering] Thunderdome. No, but I mean, I think the thing that really sticks with me here, right, I just have to say this, is if you think about the timing of this, for instance, you know, I don't know if listeners, for instance, listening to this have not or have not recently listened to our episode called How Liberals Killed Masking, which is from, I think, we recorded that like end of 2022 and unlocked it in early 2023. In that episode, we also are talking about this specific time period a lot, which is about kind of the early days of the Biden administration and how they sort of did this sort of double move of they are establishing their policy, which sort of continues to this day, of we are defining a narrower and narrower group of who the "vulnerable" people are, and pursuing reopening and more economic interests over anything that could be called a public health interest. It's the same time period, like this exact period, like summer 2021, we have a slide deck from within the CDC saying, with the emergence of the Delta variant, "The war has changed." And we also have the introduction, just like a week prior or so, of the term, "the pandemic of the unvaccinated," right. And so, again, we can't separate this idea of their campaign, which we knew was -- their idea that they were going to, you know, supposedly end the pandemic in the first 100 days of the administration, end the pandemic, at least by, you know, July 4th, and that they were going to go forward with this normalization, which in their view, I think, back to normal included back to a baseline of where the welfare state was before, right? Not embracing these expansions, and in fact, saying it was, as they say, quoting the Biden administration in the article, "appropriate," right? An appropriate time to bring these programs to a close. We can't separate that from this push to end the pandemic, and their insistence on sticking to that plan, even as they saw that, you know, as of summer 2021, surprise, as they start to roll back protection after protection after protection, like, oh God, all of a sudden, so many cases, more deaths, right, and they never changed their plan.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 40:35

Yeah. And I think one of the things too, is if you think about the sort of time period that's being rewritten, you know, we have the messaging that comes in May of 2021, that's if you are vaccinated, you don't need to wear your mask anymore, right? And that proceeds to really shift the landscape of also how many people are paying attention to what's going on with COVID. That is the summer where the Biden administration ran that obscene, obnoxious ad, do you guys remember this, where it was like the price of a Fourth of July picnic, and there was the commercial, I think you even clipped it, Artie, as part of the COVID year-end round up that we did that year, but the implication was really like that regular people could go back to their lives, quote unquote, and this is the period, right, where we saw so many programs end. This is really where I think the meat of this retcon is really targeting for a reason, right? Because to say like, okay, you know, the Biden administration may have done this situation with Medicaid, right, but like look at what they did during the early months of the administration, and they were operating under the assumption that everybody was gonna be fine after the vaccine, and oh, they made an oopsie, but we had already been too far into it anyways, and so we've got to end this stuff and things are normal anyway, shut the fuck up, right. And the totality and reassurance that that is the right take, that you have broadcasted from all over the administration. I mean, from the CDC director to the press secretary to Biden's own comments, right. This is a united front, to the point that they're even trying to pretend that there aren't people in the administration upset about enhanced unemployment ending, right, that there aren't people skeptical of this moving forward at the pace that it's moving. And I think ultimately, like, they really did think that the pandemic was gonna be fine, and that they just needed to get people back to work in order to keep things moving, so to speak. But whatever they thought or felt doesn't fucking matter, whether it's genuine or not, like, what did they actually do? Well, ushered a lot of these things out the door, right. Like, it's not unusual, Phil, as you wrote way back in 2021, it's not unusual for policies to get passed with sundown dates, right? It's not unusual for, you know, emergency provisions to be calculated by the CBO with like an imagined end date, right. But what is incredibly frustrating is that the sort of depiction of it now looking back is rewritten into this narrative of like Biden being this fucking champion for these programs when it's so obvious, just looking back two years, to see how quick and urgently they were trying to dissociate themselves from these programs, right? That they were trying to embody that image of being there for the restaurant, the Thunderdome Restaurant owners, you know, that -- that is the constituency to which they were trying to resoundingly project their availability to, their empathy to. And it's really kind of insulting to see that transformed into, you know, Biden supported working people and families, you know, no. Like poverty for children has increased, homelessness has increased, medical debt is out of control. 13 million people have been kicked off with Medicaid. This is not fine, right. And actions, frankly, matter way more than mood and vibes. And if you look at their actions, there's very few actions that they took to protect any of this shit, right.

Artie Vierkant 44:19

Well, and if you look at their mood and vibes, it's nonchalant.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 44:22

Exactly.

Phil Rocco 44:22

But this is why I think, you know, the specifics of this sort of argument matters, not just because of like a sort of retrospective assessment of Biden's performance in office, but also kind of a -- you know, a diagnostic, I think, for where the Democratic Party is now, because I think that to a large extent, there's this kind of received wisdom that there was a pivot, that we moved -- the Democratic Party moved beyond neoliberalism, and you get some progressive candidates, and you have this platform writing in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election, that it's like this big pivot, and it's a pivot towards, I don't know, something like economic populism again, and away from neoliberalism. And a lot of that hinges not on what Biden did with the -- what I think we've been calling the pandemic welfare state, basically all the stuff that was like in the CARES Act and those sorts of things, but on the signature package, set of packages that Biden proposed soon after he took office, which are collectively referred to as Build Back Better. And I think that's part of where Levitz is, anyway, like resting his argument, is that it's that package, that's the place where you see Biden's true preferences come out, and also where you see the real power at checking those ambitions being lodged in the Senate, where they are killed by, in one version of the story, Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, like in one version of their stories, it's those people that are like the Scylla -- I would call like the Scylla and Charybdis narrative of what happened. And when you go back and look at what was in those packages, and I think it's kind of difficult, right, because Build Back Better was not one thing. I would call it like a meta governance framework, which had all of these different things in it. And when you go back and look at it, like the first impression is wow, okay, it is fairly ambitious, if you start looking at what was initially in the package. And I think that that might -- by just simply looking at the laundry list of things that were in those three bills, which I want to talk about kind of briefly, it's easy to look at that laundry list and kind of read Biden's preferences off that laundry list, which, you know, it's a common thing. It's a thing we do. But I also think if you look at what happened as the bills came out of the White House, and his Biden gave his first State of the Union, which outline that plan, you can see Biden's preferences in ways that cut across those different programs, and really affected the way he negotiated with members of Congress in ways that ultimately led to the elimination of a lot of those things that look really ambitious. So I guess my point is, I'll kind of explain what I mean here, is that you can't just say, because the laundry list of things that are in the legislation look ambitious, that that means that the only reason why they didn't get enacted is because of what happened in Congress, that has nothing to do with Biden's preferences. And you also can't say that the only two versions of reality were one, all of the things that Biden promised in those packages and two, what happened, right? There were a lot of different other versions of the legislation that could have emerged. And the question is why they didn't. And I'm not by any means absolving these -- you know, Sinema and Manchin from playing a role. But they're also a very -- their figures are very convenient, right? They become like any number of other characters in the story, the CBO, the Senate parliamentarian, that are like sort of narrative baffles when something doesn't happen good, then you can just say it was the parliamentarian, it was the CBO, it was, you know, Joe Manchin or it was Kyrsten Sinema. And that's basically it. But the thing is, a lot of things happened before the legislation hit those baffles. And I think it's really important to talk about what that was. So let's just like -- let's go back, because I think the language --because the names of the laws keep changing and it's like, everything is Build Back Better, nothing is Build Back Better. When I say Build Back Better, what I mean is there were three plans that Biden outlined at the beginning of the administration -- the American Rescue Plan, which passed in the spring of 2021. That was like the emergency relief package. It had temporary extensions to unemployment, it had temporary extensions to paid leave, the child tax credit, schools, rental assistance, temporary changes the ACA. It was sort of an extension, I would say, of the pandemic welfare state, right. And I think that you can say that, in that moment of emergency, the Biden administration saw that as politically feasible, and they did it, right. Nothing made permanent, okay, that's the distinguishing feature. The things that were supposed to be lasting and new came in two latter plans. One was called the American Jobs Plan, which initially called for 621, I think, billion spending on transportation -- largely on transportation infrastructure, but other things, too. And it had a lot of the climate kind of policies within it. And then there was this other thing called the American Family Plan, which sometimes people refer to it as the human infrastructure, or social infrastructure plan.

Artie Vierkant 44:22

Oh boy.

Phil Rocco 44:35

But it got all wrapped up in this sort of very beltway discourse of like, [goofy voice] it's infrastructure week again, and like, you know --

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 49:51

I forgot about that.

Phil Rocco 49:51

And the whole idea -- and of course there were all of these absolutely simpering sort of pieces in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, like is care work really infrastructure, is it really like highways, and it's like, okay, whatever.

Artie Vierkant 50:05

Oh, that was so annoying.

Phil Rocco 50:05

We just refer to it all as infrastructure.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 50:08

[sighs]

Phil Rocco 50:08

But it was basically that was the provision, or that was the the package that included universal childcare, or some version of universal childcare, labor protections, a lot of things to address climate change, you know, paid family and medical leave, a commitment towards making community college free. It was, you know, if I have to be serious about what was in that laundry list, there were a lot of things tucked into it. So the question is, okay, if we look at that laundry list, and it looks ambitious, the typical story runs, again, we have great ideas, it's actual progress. Biden, his preference were to, you know, push all of those things as aggressively as possible, you know, but they all got mauled, as they obviously would, by the legislative process, whittled them down. So go watch Schoolhouse Rock, you know, it's like, wake up and smell the coffee, you know, it's politics, you know, sort of the hard edge, realist version of the story. Now, a couple of things about that. The first is, like, again, there's never any doubt -- I don't think there was any doubt in anybody's mind that Congress is going to be a buzzsaw on some of these programs, okay. Like, even with, again, Scylla and Charybdis, Manchin and Sinema, whatever. Like, of course they're going to take, you know, a lot of meat off of the bones here. That's not up for dispute. But here is the problem with that narrative, which is I think it really ignores what happened in terms of presidential leadership and agenda setting, because what Biden did was he made a series of strategic moves at the beginning of negotiating all of that shit with Congress that made it almost impossible for him to enact the bill that he wanted to -- the bills that he wanted -- putatively wanted to enact. Okay. So when the American Rescue Plan, remember, that was the first of the three, it was like the big -- the temporary emergency package. When that passed, people were astounded or like observers were astounded, because it seemed like Biden had lost the Obama vintage deficit reduction rhetoric. He wasn't talking about like this is necessarily going to like pay for itself. I'm sure a lot of Democrats were, but he wasn't. But by the time that he got to the two other bills, in his April 28th State of the Union address, here's what he says, "So how do we pay for my jobs and family plan? I make it clear, we can do it without increasing the deficits. What I propose is fair, fiscally responsible, and it raises revenue to pay for the plans that I propose." So his White House adviser around the same time said, we have to pay for the plan, because we, "don't want to put the burden on the American people." Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury, "President Biden has made clear that permanent increases in spending should be paid for and I agree. We don't want to use up all of that fiscal space, and in the long run deficits need to be constrained to keep our federal finances on a sustainable basis." Okay, so any thought that like Biden had abandoned that self restricting, self immolating rhetoric, or any idea that that had been purged through the cleansing fire of COVID from the Democratic Party's soul is wrong. There was no pivot on that. That's neoliberalism, baby. And it ain't going anywhere, right? So now, here's the -- to get back to my claim about why does this not absolve Biden of responsibility, is that if you make the claim over and over again, that this plan is going to pay for itself, every cent's accounted for, what do you think's going to happen as a result of that? So like, first, this is entirely unnecessary. And people said that at the time. You go back and look at contemporary reporting, people were like, look, you don't have to talk about the pay fors, you don't have to talk about paying for all of this. You've already proved through the American Rescue Plan that you can do legislative politics without talking about like this bill's gonna like pay for itself. These like, frankly, claims that are just bullshit claims anyway, because a lot of it involves kind of like fiscal trickery, or whatever. But the problem with this is it has the worst possible effects on your ability to get a deal done. So you could have dealt with that in one or the other way, but you can't deal with it with that -- that marker that you set down initially, which is we're going to have this plan, it's going to be fiscally responsible, it's going to pay for yourself. You've basically put on the fucking handcuffs. And again, this is why I'm saying, at the end of the day, if there are two big stories about why a lot of the things that people wanted to happen under Biden didn't happen, and one of them is the Eric Levitz story, which is like, well, you're dumb, because the legislative process, and Biden can't do everything he wants, and it was those bad people, you know, in Congress that caused all of this, you know, they're the central cause of all of this legislative failure. And the other story is, it's Biden. It's, you know, Biden's inadequacies, as a president. A lot of that rests on what did Biden actually want to accomplish, okay. And if you take a really shallow look at the laundry list of stuff that is in the Build Back Better packages, it looks really ambitious, you know. I don't think that it qualifies as like the New Deal, the new New Deal, but it is ambitious, right. And so the important thing, though, is that is not the sum total of Biden's preferences, nor is it the sum total of the preferences of the people in his administration. The idea that these people were not deficit hawks, or that they had somehow put down that religion in favor of a new one is fundamentally wrong. And all you have to do to see that is look at what Biden says in his State of the Union, and look at what Yellen says over and over again, about, you know, how these plans should work. They basically say, we can't increase the deficit to pay for all of these new -- the new New Deal, which is absurd, right? And it's not only absurd, because guess what, doing things that are ambitious requires spending a lot of money, you know, including like increasing the deficit, because guess what, the deficit doesn't matter, and not a -- nobody cares. Nobody cares. But it also means that Biden deserves blame for this politically, because by saying, we can't do this unless it pays for itself, you don't give yourself the ability to build a political coalition, because what you're going to do is you now have to find ways of paying for this thing that are going to divide even your own party when it comes to passing this policy. So the idea that like, because this was a nice laundry list of things, and because you have some people who didn't want it to happen, and tried to chip away at it, that does not mean that Biden is blameless here, right? He has a lot of blame to bear here because despite what a lot of people thought, he never abandoned the absolutely toxic and self defeating logic of deficit reduction, of the idea that good laws pay for themselves. That's never been true.

Artie Vierkant 56:17

Yeah. I mean, it's saying, it's actually explicitly saying, anytime you hear like the it'll pay for itself, or like, we're not going to have to spend new money on this, or whatever, it is basically just saying, oh, don't worry, we're not really doing anything. We're not trying to do anything ambitious, we're not trying to make things meaningfully better. We're just kind of moving the pieces around, right? We're changing the orientation of the state a little bit so that this thing is a little better, and in doing so, we'll make this other thing a little worse. But I think, again, this, this is why it's so important, I think, to understand this, as -- you know, again, the last few years, what has happened with these programs has been we had sort of a sudden expansion of parts of the welfare state, which was inadequate, which left a lot of people out, you know, I think something like 94% of small businesses or something got like a PPP loan. But then on the other hand, a huge percentage of people were not able to get the child tax credit. You had to have a social security number to get the stimulus checks, all of that stuff.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 58:44

They shorted us on the amount even, on the stimulus checks.

Artie Vierkant 58:46

There's like a whole bunch of things that we could, you know, have a whole other conversation just about don't over romanticize the pandemic welfare state, right? But also, I think it is just very important to understand that there was this dramatic expansion of these things for some people. And there is a dramatic retrenchment of it, under Biden, that they oversaw, that is in parallel with their premature declaration of an end to the pandemic, that is in parallel with their push to keep up economic demand.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 59:23

I've been sitting with what you said, Phil, and one of the things that I really can't stop thinking of is why, if that makes sense. That's not even a good way to describe it. But you know, why? Like, let's be real about what these people really fucking want, right? And what ultimately we're looking at is like intent or not, Biden's goals or not, his messaging or not, what happened was, we had a temporary shift in how sort of quickly we were willing to fund welfare, direct welfare supports. We had a temporary change in our willingness to do direct cash payments, which is another thing that I can't stop thinking about. Because in the realm of like disability policy, right, the idea of direct cash in kind payments is something that's controversial, right? And the reason why people say that we can't do direct payments is very different from the real reasons why they really feel we shouldn't do direct payments. And it's tied into these sort of moralistic framings of really who's deserving and who is not, who's going to use the money responsibly and who is not. And what I think plays into this here is that while these pandemic welfare expansions, so to speak, remained in place, they represented like a profound existential threat to many of the rhetorical sort of signposts that uphold the status quo.

Phil Rocco 1:00:54

That's right.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:00:54

Right, like so, these programs, each of these programs in and of themselves, was inadequate, but also a threat to the very sort of strict rhetorical moral framing that prevents like basically anything new and good from coming out of the electoral system. And so I understand the urgency to end them, especially if you are someone who, you know, deludes themselves into believing like some lie, like the one bad apple in Congress, but for Manchine and Sinema, everything would be fine. But for,, you know, so and so, everything would be fine. Sure, there's always going to be a new bad guy, right? There's always going to be a new bad apple. But the way that it actually did go reinforces the idea that many of these people who were receiving "pandemic era welfare supports" are people that lawmakers and people with power and technically a mandate to act on social and political and economic crises, you know, that they don't think that the people that were getting support deserved it, right. Like they didn't think that --

Phil Rocco 1:02:05

Or that they were really a threat politically.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:07

Right.

Phil Rocco 1:02:07

What were they gonna do that?

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:02:08

Right. That they didn't think those people mattered anymore. And they didn't think the pandemic mattered.

Artie Vierkant 1:02:14

Yeah. And I think to your point, one thing that we haven't mentioned here yet that I guess I'll just -- maybe this is a good place to end on. Because while we have talked about this in other episodes, I think it's just important to call this out within this context. It's also important just to call out all the things that they just didn't do, or didn't try, or think about doing. I mean, we talk about the pandemic welfare state. As I mentioned before, just kind of as an aside, right, we talk about the pandemic welfare expansion, the pandemic welfare programs completely independently from things like Operation Warp Speed, or from things like, you know, the government buying vaccines and therapeutics for everyone, the government having a program in place that provided COVID care, including hospitalization, for the uninsured. All of those things, I think, have something in common, which is they're a little bit closer to many of the programs that never emerged as even things that the Biden administration took very seriously, or in some cases took very seriously or even spoke about, really, at any point, after maybe some mentions on the campaign trail. I mean, like, for example, universal paid sick leave, which was something that was sort of floated on the campaign trail, and then just completely disappeared. But also, you know, all the things that never materialized and instead, we had only retrenchments. So, for example, you know, was the government fighting for statewide mask mandates? No. And in fact, now we have this like, you know, retcon recently from Karine Jean-Pierre saying basically that, like, they just feel like they have no -- or have had no role ever in talking to states about mask mandates, right. Even though we know that at various points, both Jeff Zients and Ashish Jha have discouraged mask mandates from returning. Were they fighting for paid sick leave or for OSHA protections? Were they buying up N-95s in droves and sending them out to everyone, distributing them for free, right? Bigger things that we could talk about, like, obviously, part of Biden's campaign, his entire campaign was against something like single payer Medicare for all, but this is something also that the negative space, I suppose, of Biden's activity on the welfare state is something that we have to also contend with equally. I mean, those are just things like off the top of my head, right, like the low hanging fruit of pandemic interventions, really, that were not pursued and in their place was just dropping everything. So yeah, whenever these various attempts to rewrite history, wherever they occur, Eric Levitz, if you're listening, I suppose, we need only look, I think, at literally very recent history, at just yhe immediate past, to see that this is entirely a mirage. This is a bridge we're being sold.

Beatrice Adler-Bolton 1:05:06

Well, I think that's a good place to leave it for today. Patrons, as always, thank you so much for your support. We couldn't do any of this without you. To support the show, become a patron at patreon.com/deathpanelpod. You'll get access to all of our weekly bonus episodes and entire back catalogue of bonus episodes. And if you'd like to help us out a little bit more, share the show with your friends, post about your favorite episodes, pick up a copy of Health Communism at your local bookstore, preorder a copy of Jules' new book, coming at the end of January, called A Short History of Trans Misogyny, or request them both at your local library, and follow us @deathpanel_. As always, Medicare for All now, solidarity forever. Stay alive another week.

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Transcript by Kendra Kline. (Kendra is currently accepting freelance transcript work — email her if you need transcripts!)