In what is a rarity in American history, this past week was a good week for workers. From the UAW’s historic victory at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on Friday, to the FTC banning noncompete agreements and the Department of Labor overhauling wage laws to make an additional four million Americans eligible for overtime pay, the progressive movement has a lot of victories to be proud of.
Why has the Biden administration passed so many regulations this month? The Congressional Review Act, passed in 1996, allows Congress to overturn federal agency rules with a simple majority in the Senate—meaning that a second Trump administration and a GOP-controlled Congress would be able to overturn all of the progress the Biden administration has made. Rules finalized before late May are exempt from the threat of being overturned, so federal agencies are rushing to get as many parts of the Biden administration’s agenda as possible on the books before the deadline. David Dayen and Harold Meyerson discuss the suite of regulations federal agencies have passed in the past few weeks, and how all of these regulations will inevitably have to go through the courts.
They also briefly discuss the Gaza solidarity encampments across the country. Harold has the particular distinction of having been a student at Columbia University in 1968, when student demonstrators occupied campus to demand an end to the Vietnam War and were arrested en masse, and he described some of the parallels he sees between this current generation of anti-war protesters and their forebears.
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