The phone rang just before midnight on Jan. 11, 2012. The caller, Howard B. Glaser, who was Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo's bellicose director of state operations, had learned that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had just filed comments unfavorable to the state's impact studies on hydrofracking.
Glaser was on a mission to have the EPA analysis rescinded before the midnight deadline for receiving public comments expired. At that time, the Cuomo administration was on a path to approve the controversial natural gas drilling technique in New York — a position that would be reversed months later. Judith Enck, then the regional administrator for the EPA's Region 2, which includes New York and New Jersey, answered the call.
Facing a Republican Party with a growing anti-democratic contingent, Democrats are debating what to do — to bolster their party and, in the view of some in the party, American democracy itself. At the heart of the discussion is how much structural reform do the nation’s governmental and electoral systems need.
This debate is largely happening in public, in op-eds and on Twitter. But it’s mostly in the background, lurking behind basically everything that is happening in the Democratic Party — like which issues to prioritize, whether to try to work with Republicans in Congress and, most of all, whether to ditch or reform the Senate filibuster. It’s often implicit, rather than explicit, as the people doing the debating are trying to persuade — but not annoy — a small group of people in the party who will ultimately decide the Democrats’ posture on these issues: President Biden and a handful of senators.
Prices for accommodation at Trump's Washington, D.C., hotel rose sharply for the dates of March 3 and March 4, 2021, and that sudden price hike was not common to other five-star hotels in the city, nor common to Trump's other hotels in Chicago and New York. March 4 is the date on which some pro-Trump conspiracy theorists believe he will be inaugurated for a second term.