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Coalition Praises Efforts to Expand Early Voting, Same Day Voting in Maryland
A coalition of government reform groups praised efforts by Governor Martin O'Malley and Delegate Kiril Reznik that would help Marylanders vote and make sure every vote is counted. The groups also encouraged the Governor to further strengthen his voting package and fix the range of problems Marylanders encountered last year at the polls. Those would include an increase and fair distribution of early voting sites and funding for a new voting system.
Annapolis, MD
A coalition of government reform groups praised efforts by Governor Martin O'Malley and Delegate Kiril Reznik that would help Marylanders vote and make sure every vote is counted. The groups also encouraged the Governor to further strengthen his voting package and fix the range of problems Marylanders encountered last year at the polls. Those would include an increase and fair distribution of early voting sites and funding for a new voting system.
"The 2012 national elections spurred a new level of citizen engagement and interest in the political process. Early voting centers were flooded and voter engagement was at a high," said Jennifer Bevan-Dangel, Executive Director of Common Cause Maryland. "Early voting and same-day voter registration are critical steps to make it easier for people to engage in the political process and have their vote counted. "We look forward to working with the administration to ensure that the details are worked out in a way that makes our voting system inclusive, accountable, and accurate.
Legislation introduced by Governor O'Malley would expand early voting and allow same-day voter registration at early voting sites. HB 17, introduced earlier this session by Delegate Kiril Reznik (D-39), would allow same-day voter registration on Election Day.
"Our democracy works best when all citizens participate and allowing voters to register the same day they go to vote strengthens the franchise by expanding access, solving registration problems, and promoting participation," said Sara Love, Public Policy Director of the ACLU of Maryland. "We applaud the Governor and Delegate Reznik for their leadership in realizing this common-sense measure for voting rights in Maryland."
"Early voting and same-day voter registration is a priority of the NAACP because it is a critical step towards making our democratic process more fair and inclusive," said Gerald Stansbury, President of the Maryland State Conference of NAACP Branches.
"States with Same Day Registration regularly lead the nation in voter turnout. Demos applauds Gov. O'Malley and Del. Reznik for opening up new avenues to voter participation," said Steven Carbo, State Advocacy Director at Demos.
Advocates did express strong concern over the need to fund a new voting system this session. "Our current voting machines are reaching the end of their lifespan. This contributed to the long lines that voters experienced in the 2012 election cycle. The legislature has already authorized the purchase of an optiscan system that will have a paper trail and be more secure, accurate, recountable, accessible and transparent than our existing system," said Nancy Soreng, president of the League of Women Voters of Maryland. "However, if the Governor and the General Assembly do not begin funding the purchase of these machines this year, our 2014 elections could be problematic for voters."
Coalition members expect early voting and same-day voting, as well as funding for voting machines, to be dominant issues this session.
Demos is a think tank that powers the movement for a just, inclusive, multiracial democracy. Through cutting-edge policy research, inspiring litigation, and deep relationships with grassroots organizations, Demos champions solutions that will create a democracy and economy rooted in racial equity.
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Complying With Right-Wing Supreme Court, Biden EPA Guts Wetland Protections
"Congress and local elected officials must now step in and do more to protect clean water through durable legislation and state-based action," said one advocate.
Aug 29, 2023
Under a U.S. Supreme Court ruling condemned by clean water advocates earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday announced a revised rule that could clear the way for up to 63% of the country's wetlands to lose protections that have been in place nearly half a century under the Clean Water Act.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan said he had been "disappointed" by the 5-4 decision handed down in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agencyin May, but he was obligated under the ruling to issue a final rule changing the agency's definition of "waters on the United States."
As Common Dreamsreported, the high court ruled in May that the Clean Water Act protects waters and wetlands that have a "continuous surface connection to bodies that are waters of the United States in their own rights," such as major rivers and coastlines.
Prior to the ruling, the Clean Water Act protected wetlands as long as they had a "significant nexus" to regulated waters, but the EPA rule removes that test from consideration when determining if a waterway should be protected. The rule will leave streams and tributaries—and the communities adjacent to them—without protections from pollution that can be caused by housing and business development, mining, pipeline construction, and a number of industries.
The ruling and resulting EPA rule reflected "the Supreme Court's disturbing pattern of striking down environmental regulations to serve industry interests," said environmental law group Earthjustice on Tuesday.
An EPA official toldThe Washington Post that an estimated 1.2 million to 4.9 million miles of ephemeral streams across the U.S. would immediately lose protections now that the final rule has been issued.
Julian Gonzalez, a water policy lobbyist with Earthjustice, told the Post that changing the rule is "not necessarily what they want to do" at the EPA, while Patrice Simms, the group's vice president of litigation for healthy communities, called the court's ruling a "politically motivated decision" that "ignores science and flies in the face of what almost everyone knows: that we all need clean water."
"The Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority's disastrous ruling in Sackett v. EPA reduced EPA's ability to protect our wetlands and waters from destruction and contamination," said Simms. "The new rule from EPA adjusts its existing regulations to comport with Sackett and reflects our dangerous new reality—one where mining companies, Big Ag fossil fuel developers, and other polluting industries can bulldoze and fill wetlands indiscriminately, harming our public health and ecosystems."
With state regulatory agencies and legislatures now empowered to determine how wetlands are protected, Earthjustice said waterways in states including Texas, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Colorado are the most vulnerable to industrial pollution. States including Vermont, New York, and Minnesota currently have some of the strongest protections in place.
Marc Yaggi, CEO of Waterkeeper Alliance, said that with the climate and pollution crises becoming increasingly destructive, "there could not be a worse time to weaken the Clean Water Act."
"Intensifying droughts are wreaking havoc on agriculture, pollution and toxins are increasingly threatening water sources nationwide, and millions of people are contending with dangerously contaminated drinking water," said Yaggi. "Congress and local elected officials must now step in and do more to protect clean water through durable legislation and state-based action."
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Sanders Says 'Much More Has to Be Done' to Cut Prescription Drug Prices
"Bottom line: We should not be paying any more for prescription drugs than other countries around the world," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Aug 29, 2023
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday called for additional action to curb prescription drug costs in the United States after the Biden administration unveiled its list of the first 10 medications that will be subject to direct price negotiations with Medicare.
Sanders (I-Vt.), the chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee, welcomed the administration's move as "an important step forward in taking on the greed of the pharmaceutical industry and their 1,800 paid lobbyists in Washington, D.C."
But "much more has to be done to protect the American people," the senator added, noting that the median annual price of medications approved by the Food and Drug Administration last year was over $222,000.
"Bottom line: We should not be paying any more for prescription drugs than other countries around the world," said Sanders. "I look forward to working with the president and my colleagues to make that happen."
Sanders has been demanding additional legislative and executive action to curb prescription drug prices since the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) last year. That bill's prescription drug provisions, including those related to Medicare price negotiations, did not go nearly far enough, Sanders argued at the time.
"While the pharmaceutical industry makes huge profits every year, the American people pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs."
In June, Sanders pledged to stonewall President Joe Biden's health agency nominees until the administration puts forth a "comprehensive" plan to slash U.S. drug costs, which force millions to skip or ration medications—including lifesaving drugs such as insulin.
Sanders has repeatedly urged the president to use his executive authority to cut the prices of medications developed with public funding.
The senator has also proposed legislation that would require Medicare to pay no more for prescription drugs than the Department of Veterans Affairs, which paid about half as much as Medicare Part D for certain drugs in 2017. The change would save Medicare an estimated $835 billion over a 10-year period.
The Biden administration expects the IRA's drug price negotiation provisions to save Medicare $160 billion over the next decade.
"While the pharmaceutical industry makes huge profits every year, the American people pay, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs," Sanders said Tuesday. "And that situation is getting worse."
According to a recent analysis by Accountable.US, the nation's five largest pharmaceutical companies—Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck, and AbbVie—reported combined earnings of $81.9 billion last year.
Merck and Johnson & Johnson subsidiary Janssen are among the pharmaceutical companies suing the Biden administration in an attempt to block direct price negotiations with Medicare.
"Why is pharma suing to stop President Biden from lowering prescription drug prices? Follow the money," Sanders wrote in a social media post. "Januvia, Merck's diabetes drug, costs $547 in the U.S. but just $16 in France. Eliquis, Bristol-Myers Squibb's blood clot drug, costs $561 in the U.S. but just $63 in Germany."
Before the IRA's passage—which the pharmaceutical industry and Republican lawmakers worked aggressively to prevent—Medicare was prohibited from negotiating prices directly with drug companies.
"Big drug companies raked in billions in profits while standing in the way of lower prescription drug costs for millions of seniors," Tony Carrk, executive director of Accountable.US, said in a statement Tuesday. "The time of Big Pharma grossly overcharging American seniors on lifesaving medicines is coming to an end."
"This historic achievement is still under threat, however, because the MAGA House majority is hellbent on repealing the Inflation Reduction Act," Carrk added. "They would rather pad the profits of their major industry donors than help seniors who are literally choosing between food and medicines."
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Green Groups Urge US Credit Agency to Oppose Papua New Guinea LNG Project
"Rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and environmental degradation are already threatening many people's existence and threatening our way of life," said one local, warning the project will worsen the climate crisis.
Aug 29, 2023
More than two dozen advocacy groups from Papua New Guinea, the Asia Pacific region, and the United States on Tuesday urged the U.S. export credit agency to reject a liquefied natural gas project that they warned "presents significant financial risks and opportunity costs, as well as harmful climate impacts."
The groups—including the Center for Environmental Law and Community Rights Inc. (CELCOR), Food & Water Watch, Friends of the Earth (FOE) United States, Global Witness, Oil Change International (OCI), and Sierra Club—wrote to U.S. Export-Import Bank (EXIM) Chair Reta Jo Lewis about the Papua LNG project led by TotalEnergies.
The coalition argued that approving Papua LNG not only would contradict the Biden administration's 2021 pledge to end new public support for fossil fuel energy projects abroad and "further position the United States as an international laggard on climate, but would further jeopardize international climate goals, risk $13 billion USD in stranded assets, and put Pacific frontline communities at further environmental, social, and economic risk."
Peter Bosip, executive director of the Papua New Guinea-based CELCOR, stressed in a statement Tuesday that "the people of PNG are already facing the full force of climate change."
"Rising sea levels, extreme weather events, and environmental degradation are already threatening many people's existence and threatening our way of life," Bosip said. "Papua LNG will add to and exacerbate this climate crisis—and financiers cannot, and should not, finance it."
"Approving this project risks wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure that will become a stranded asset, and worse, further places our climate goals of minimizing global warming to 1.5°C far out of reach."
The fossil fuel project "has not secured any guaranteed sales—with no long-term sales and purchase agreements (SPAs) or nonbinding heads of agreement supply deals," the letter notes. "In addition to these climate and financial risks, Pacific civil society and governments have repeatedly called for the end of all fossil fuels in order to safeguard a habitable climate for the region, as warming above 1.5°C risks the habitability of many Pacific island communities."
Limiting global temperature rise this century to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels is the more ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris agreement. Representatives of countries who have signed on to the deal—including the United States—are set to gather in the United Arab Emirates in November for the next United Nations climate summit, COP28.
"EXIM's potential support for this project signals that the agency and this administration [are] not serious about achieving international climate goals," OCI export finance climate strategist Nina Pusic charged Tuesday. "Approving this project risks wasting billions of taxpayer dollars on infrastructure that will become a stranded asset, and worse, further places our climate goals of minimizing global warming to 1.5°C far out of reach."
The letter points out that "PNG itself does not need fossil gas for its own energy needs—it could dramatically expand its energy usage and still provide 78% of its on-grid energy needs from renewable energy by 2030 were appropriate financing made available."
During the Obama administration—for which President Joe Biden was vice president—EXIM dumped billions of dollars into PNG LNG, a project led by ExxonMobil that, as the letter highlights, "has previously been associated with human rights abuses, escalating tensions, land-related issues, and broken economic promises."
FOE U.S. senior international finance program manager Katie DeAngelis said Tuesday that rather than repeating past mistakes of EXIM "by continually approving support for liquefied natural gas projects" that harm local communities and the climate, the Biden administration should "instead invest in renewables that will help the people of Papua New Guinea transition to a clean energy future."
Along with pressuring EXIM to reject the Papua LNG project due to the "enormous risks" associated with it, the letter concludes by calling on the agency to "take immediate action to implement the Clean Energy Transition Partnership (CEPT), by announcing a fossil fuel exclusion policy which most other high-income signatories of the CEPT have already done."
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