The Coffee Klatch with Robert Reich

Has Joe Manchin really, finally seen the light? Word is that President (sorry) Senator Manchin has agreed to roughly $433 billion in new spending, much of it focused on lowering energy costs, increasing clean energy production, and reducing carbon emissions. Part of the Manchin-approved deal would raise $739 billion in taxes over the next decade — including a new minimum tax on corporations and ad...

Today, Donald Trump returns to Washington — his first visit since leaving in disgrace after January 6 — to deliver the keynote address for the America First Policy Institute’s “America First Agenda Summit.” The purpose of this confab is to give Trump some policy creds as he prepares to announce a 2024 run for re-election. Brooke Rollins, one of the organizers of the Institute and the Summit (who w...

Friends, On June 30, the Supreme Court agreed to hear a case called Moore v. Harper. With all the controversial decisions handed down by the Court this term, its decision to take up this case slid under most radar detectors. But it could be the most dangerous case on the Court’s upcoming docket. You need to know about it. Here’s the background: Last February, the North Carolina Supreme Court block...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week: The just-finished series of January 6 hearings. Why more Republicans still want Trump to run in 2024 than Democrats want Biden to run in 2024. Why 195 House Republicans voted against a bill to protect contraception (and why every American male over...

Friends, One final point about the Select Committee on January 6 as it concludes this series of hearings. Its members and staff deserve our heartfelt thanks for a job (although not over) extraordinarily well done. So much has gone so wrong with so many aspects of our government and other institutions we rely on that I think it’s important to recognize and salute this sort of excellence. And courag...

On Tuesday, in a House Democratic primary contest to represent a predominantly Black middle-class district north and east of Washington, DC., Glenn Ivey, a former state’s attorney for Prince George’s County, defeated Donna Edwards, the first Black woman elected to the House from Maryland. (Edwards left the seat to run unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2016 and had hoped to return.) Progressive grou...

Tonight is the eighth and last of the scheduled public hearings of the House Select Committee on the January 6 attack (the committee is still gathering evidence and may schedule additional hearings). So this is a good time to press the pause button and examine what the committee is accomplishing. The committee is clearly building a criminal case against Trump and his closest enablers of seditious...

Friends, Today I want to connect some dots. What do congressional Republicans, Joe Manchin, and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have in common? They all oppose the Biden administration’s proposed global minimum corporate tax — designed to stop corporations from playing one country against another in a worldwide race to the tax bottom. The reason for Manchin’s opposition? As he told a West Virginia radio ho...

On Friday, after putting a final spear through the heart of what remained of Biden’s and the Democrat’s domestic agenda, West Virginia’s Democratic Senator Joe Manchin also rejected any tax increases on big corporations or the wealthy — until inflation is no longer a problem. This is rich, in every sense of the word. Raising taxes on big American corporations and the wealthy would not fuel inflati...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about Joe Manchin’s final destruction of Biden’s domestic agenda, Schumer’s and Biden’s inability to hold him accountable, this week’s terrifying inflation number and its potential effect on the midterms, appreciation for the House Ja...

Friends, A while back, I shared with you my love of Frank Capra’s “ It’s a Wonderful Life ” — the essential American fable about the generosity and goodness of Americans toward one another, as opposed to the greedy oligarchs at the top (such as Mr. Potter) who care only about building their own wealth and power. In light of Putin’s war and the rise of authoritarianism around the world, including t...

At 79, Joe Biden is the oldest president in American history. Concerns about his age top the list for why Democratic voters want the party to find an alternative for 2024. I don’t think this reflects an “ageist” prejudice against those who have reached such withering heights so much as an understanding that people in their late 70s and 80s wither. I speak with some authority. I’m now a spritely 76...

Uber’s then-chief executive  Travis Kalanick texted fellow executives that “violence guarantees success”  when clashes with taxi drivers broke out in 2016 in Paris, a key market for the company. Uber leveraged the violence against its drivers to win sympathy from regulators and the public, as it also did in South Africa where Uber drivers were burned when their cars were set on fire. ( This look i...

This morning, I heard a commentator allude to “Mitch McConnell and other conservative senators.” Yesterday, a news report described the upcoming Alaska Republican primary as pitting Trump’s “conservative wing against Murkowski’s more moderate base.” I keep seeing references to the “conservative majority” on the Supreme Court. Can we get real? There is nothing conservative about these so-called “co...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about the impending midterms, whether Biden should run again in 2024, Boris Johnson’s resignation, the failure of Democratic messaging, and the limits of hype in Silicon Valley. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this...

Friends, Much of today’s Republican Party is treacherous and treasonous. So why are Democrats facing midterm elections that, according to most political observers, they’re likely to lose? Having been a loyal Democrat for some seventy years (my father liked Ike but my mother and I were for Adlai), including a stint as a cabinet secretary, it pains me to say this, but the Democratic Party has lost i...

The link is tightening between America’s move toward theocracy and its slide toward autocracy. It is important to understand these connections. The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe, its expanded reading of the Second Amendment, and its eagerness to elevate religious freedom over the Constitution’s guarantee against established religion come from the same cloth as Republican state legislative att...

On Saturday, President Biden demanded on Twitter that Big Oil “bring down the price you are charging at the pump to reflect the cost you’re paying for the product.” This prompted Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the second richest man in the world, to call Biden’s statement either “straight ahead misdirection or a deep misunderstanding of basic market dynamics.” That’s rich. Bezos of all people should know th...

I have no patience for all the handwringing by Democratic lawmakers in Washington over the Supreme Court’s regressive decisions on abortion and the climate. “This MAGA, regressive, extremist Supreme Court is intent on setting America back decades, if not centuries,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said last Thursday after the Court dumped its final opinions for the term. Well, yes. So what ar...

On this Fourth of July, it's worth pondering the true meaning of American patriotism. It is not the meaning propounded by the “America First” crowd, who define it as securing our borders. For most of its existence America has been open to people from the rest of the world fleeing tyranny and violence. Nor is the meaning of patriotism found in the ravings of those who want America to be a white Chr...

My informal weekly coffee with Heather Lofthouse (Executive Director of Inequality Media Civic Action and my former student), discussing the past week. Today we talk about the rogue Supreme Court and what Democrats can — and must — do. In particular, Senate Dems still have the power to carve out filibuster exceptions for reproductive rights, voting rights, and the climate — and then enact national...

Friends, I recently gave a lecture to students who were considering careers in public service, either in the public sector or in nonprofits. My lecture was about why so many public problems have worsened over the last decades — climate change, economic inequality, gun violence, access to healthcare, public education, child poverty, homelessness, even democracy itself. When I finished, one of them...

Today the Supreme Court — again, with the 6 Republican appointees on one side and the 3 Democratic appointees on the other — limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants. This ruling deals a major blow to America’s (and the world’s) efforts to address climate change. Also — as with its decision reversing Roe v. Wade — today’s ruling has far l...

After today’s explosive testimony by Cassidy Hutchinson — who served as chief assistant to Mark Meadows and was literally and figuratively in the middle of Trump’s White House — I don’t see how Attorney General Merrick Garland can avoid prosecuting Trump, as well as Mark Meadows and Rudy Giuliani. If you didn’t hear or see her testimony, Hutchinson portrayed a plot, in which Trump was directly inv...

Donald Trump’s legacy — a proto-fascist movement we might call Trumpism — includes a Supreme Court rapidly taking America backwards, state legislatures suppressing votes and taking over election machinery, and an emboldened oligarchy taking over the economy. While the January 6 committee is doing a fine job exposing Trump’s attempted coup that culminated in the attack on the Capitol, it is not par...