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US Supreme Court to Hear Case of Surveillance of Muslims

The U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments Monday whether the U.S. government can invoke the protection of “state secrets” to withhold information about its surveillance of Muslims at mosques in California.

The dispute began a decade ago when three Muslim men filed suit against the Federal Bureau of Investigation, alleging the top U.S. law enforcement agency deployed a confidential informant who claimed to be a convert to Islam to spy on them based solely on their religious identity.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees freedom of the practice of one’s religion.

But the government is claiming in this case that it can refuse to disclose information about its surveillance under authority granted it by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, as well as its use of the state secrets privilege defense, which allows the government to block the release of information it considers to be a risk to national security.

The three Muslim men, Yassir Fazaga, Ali Malik and Yasser AbdelRahim, have argued that the use of the surveillance law violated their religious rights and allowed the government to avoid accountability.

Patrick Toomey, a senior staff attorney at the ACLU National Security Project, told reporters last week, “This case has significant implications for cases where the executive branch asserts state secrets privilege in an effort to foreclose accountability for other types of illegal government conduct, especially in the two decades since 9/11,” when al-Qaida terrorists attacked the U.S., killing nearly 3,000 people.

Muslims in California said they reported the FBI’s own informant in the case to the agency after the informant began asking people about “violent jihad.”

Hussam Ayloush, a Muslim leader in the Los Angeles area, said Muslims in the U.S. “are hoping to shed light on how a government and federal agency that is charged with protecting us all continues its attempt to treat Muslims as second-class citizens.”

“The outcome of this case will impact every American, not just Muslims,” Ayloush said. “Can you be spied on by the government simply because of how you choose to worship?”
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White House ‘Confident’ Its Vaccination Mandate Will Be Upheld

The White House said Sunday it is confident that the courts will eventually approve President Joe Biden’s mandate that U.S. businesses with 100 workers or more insist their workers either be vaccinated against the coronavirus or be frequently tested despite an initial court ruling halting the vaccination requirement. 

White House chief of staff Ron Klain told NBC’s “Meet the Press” show, “I’m quite confident that when this finally gets fully adjudicated, not just a temporary order, the validity of this requirement will be upheld.” 

Klain characterized the Biden vaccination order, which affects 84 million private sector workers and is set to take effect January 4, as “common sense” to help end the pandemic in the United States. 

He said if the government’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) “can tell people to wear a hard hat on the job, to be careful on chemicals, it can … put in place these simple measures to keep our workers safe.” 

The U.S. Supreme Court last month approved a vaccination mandate covering health care workers in the northeastern state of Maine but has yet to consider a broad national mandate such as Biden’s order affecting private businesses or his order requiring 4 million federal employees and contractors working for the federal government to get vaccinated by November 22. 

Numerous Republican state governors opposed to the Democratic president’s national mandate, along with some government employee unions and individual workers, have filed lawsuits in an effort to block Biden’s orders, all claiming they are an overreach of his authority. 

In filing a lawsuit against the Biden order affecting workers at private businesses, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton called the vaccine mandate “a breathtaking abuse of federal power” that is “flatly unconstitutional.” He contended that the mandate goes beyond OSHA’s “limited power and specific responsibilities.” 

On Saturday, the conservative-dominated 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which hears cases in the adjoining Southern states of Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, temporarily blocked the Biden mandate for private businesses, saying there were “grave statutory and constitutional” issues concerning the rule. It ordered Biden administration lawyers to voice their opposition to a permanent injunction by late Monday, pending further court action. It is unclear if the appeals court’s decision applies outside those states. 

White House aide Cedric Richmond defended the use of the OSHA authority to mandate the vaccinations, telling the “Fox News Sunday” show, “OSHA’s job is to protect workers. If it means doing something tough, that’s what this president does.” 

“We think we’re on solid ground,” Richmond said. 

It appears that hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been vaccinated ahead of the deadline in two weeks, but opposition to the shots has emerged at some agencies, especially those related to law enforcement and intelligence. Other lawsuits filed by workers unions and individuals that contest Biden’s mandate remain to be adjudicated. There is no testing option available for government employees as there would be for workers in the private sector. 

The number of new coronavirus cases has been diminishing for several weeks in the U.S., but even so about 70,000 additional cases are being recorded every day. 

More than 193 million people in the U.S. out of its population of 333 million have been fully vaccinated. But millions of adults have for various reasons refused inoculations, curbing Biden’s effort to fully control the pandemic.

More than 750,000 people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, more than in any other country, according to the government’s U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 
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Musk Asks Twitter if He Should Sell 10% of His Tesla Stock 

Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk on Saturday asked his 62.5 million followers on Twitter if he should sell 10% of his Tesla stock. 

“Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock,” Musk wrote in a tweet referring to a “billionaires’ tax” proposed by Democrats in the U.S. Senate. 

Musk tweeted that he would abide by the results of the poll. 

The poll received more than 700,000 responses in one hour since he posted it, with nearly 56% of respondents approving the proposal to sell the shares. 

Musk’s shareholding in Tesla comes to about 170.5 million shares as of June 30 and selling 10% of his stock would amount to about $21 billion based on Friday’s closing, according to Reuters calculations. 

Analysts say he may have to offload a significant number of shares anyway to pay taxes since a large number of options will expire next year. 

The comment from Musk comes after a proposal in the U.S. Congress to tax billionaires’ assets to help pay for President Joe Biden’s social and climate-change agenda. 

Musk is one of the world’s richest people and owner of several futuristic companies, including SpaceX and Neuralink. He has previously criticized the billionaires’ tax on Twitter. 

“Note, I do not take a cash salary or bonus from anywhere. I only have stock, thus the only way for me to pay taxes personally is to sell stock,” Musk said on Twitter. 

Tesla board members including Elon Musk’s mother, Kimbal, have recently sold shares of the electric carmaker. Kimbal Musk sold 88,500 Tesla shares while fellow board member Ira Ehrenpreis sold shares worth more than $200 million. 
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Are Democrats Playing a Budget ‘Shell Game’ with Biden’s $1.75 Trillion Spending Plan?

As Democrats in the House of Representatives struggled Friday to schedule votes for two pieces of legislation vital to President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, there were complaints from members of both parties about the decision to move forward before lawmakers had an official budget “score” for the larger of the two bills.

Republicans staged a press conference Friday morning on the grounds of the Capitol, calling on Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to postpone a planned vote on the president’s Build Back Better package of climate and social services spending until the budget score, which is prepared by the Congressional Budget Office, is released.

Moderate Democratic members of the House also groused about the lack of a budget score. Meanwhile, in the Senate, which will have to sign off on the Build Back Better legislation if it is to become law, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin accused Pelosi and her leadership team of playing a “shell game” to disguise the bill’s effects on the federal budget.

Manchin contended Monday that “the real cost” of the $1.75 trillion bill would be nearly twice that amount if key elements of the package were extended or made permanent. Without knowing how this would “impact our debt and our economy and our country,” Manchin said he wouldn’t support it.

Both the White House and Democratic leaders in the House insist that the legislation they have put forward is fully paid for. By that, they mean that all new spending in the bill is offset, either by new revenue sources or decreased spending in other areas.

What is a budget ‘score’?

A common problem in political battles in Washington is that the two sides frequently talk past each other, using words and phrases that one party interprets as meaning something completely different than the other.

When it comes to how proposed legislation is expected to affect the federal budget, however, there is a neutral arbiter whose decisions both parties, sometimes grudgingly, respect.

The Congressional Budget Office, or CBO, is an agency created in the 1970s to provide lawmakers with nonpartisan analysis of the expected economic effects of proposed legislation. When lawmakers ask the CBO to provide that analysis of a specific bill, the product the agency delivers is known as the legislation’s budget score.

“The CBO is the neutral gatekeeper,” said William Gale, a senior fellow in the Economic Studies Program at the Brookings Institution and a former senior economist for the Council of Economic Advisers under President George H.W. Bush.

“Especially in the politically charged environment we have, we need some organization to be able to put out numbers that the two sides can agree are legitimate,” he said. “If the numbers that two sides are using are completely different, then you can’t even really have a discussion about it. CBO, through many hard-won battles and careful work, has earned and I think deserves that role.”

Hard-won credibility

The CBO has the reputation of being something of a thorn in the side of the White House. The agency’s director is a presidential appointee, but the tradition of independence within the agency is typically adopted by the director, which frequently leads to intraparty strife.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who ran CBO for nearly three years during the first term of President George W. Bush, came under frequent fire from his own party after the agency under his leadership continued to present relentlessly honest assessments of the true effects of proposed tax cuts and ideas like a partial privatization of the Social Security system.

CBO directors usually “cause the most trouble for their own parties,” Holtz-Eakin told VOA.

“When I was appointed CBO director, the Republicans, of course, said good things about nonpartisanship … but they really wanted me to give them a break every now and then. And if you don’t, they get mad. So, every director, his own party is mad at him,” he said.

Build Back Better’s cost

None of this is to say that Congress is operating completely in the dark in the absence of CBO scores. The bill that is currently before the House has been reviewed by both the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT), another arm of Congress, and the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

Both JCT and OMB have reported that, by and large, the Democrats’ claim that the spending in the bill is offset is accurate. However, because the elements of the bill keep changing, it is difficult to say for certain whether the latest version lives up to lawmakers’ claims.

The bill that was originally supposed to cost $3.5 trillion has been trimmed to $1.75 trillion at last count. But critics say that lower number doesn’t really reflect a 50% drop in spending.

Temporary programs, or permanent? 

Some longtime observers of congressional budget fights believe that objections from fiscal hawks like Manchin arise from the early termination of many programs that the Democrats plainly mean to make permanent.

In that case, the “shell game” Manchin is referring to involves strategies like reducing the overall cost of the bill by making a popular new refundable child tax credit expire after only one year, even though everyone involved knows that congressional Democrats plan to reintroduce the tax credit after it expires.

Moves like that have allowed Democrats to claim to Manchin that the latest version of the bill cuts spending in half. “But that’s not an apples to apples comparison,” said G. William Hoagland, a senior vice president at the Bipartisan Policy Center, and a former Republican staff director of the Senate Budget Committee.

“So the question then becomes, ‘Well, wait a minute, if it was really 10 years, what would it really cost?’ ” said Hoaglund.

As written, Hoagland said, he has little doubt that the bill has most of its spending offset, as Democrats claim. But that doesn’t provide the full picture — and that’s where the CBO might come in.

“All I can say is that I think that’s why you need an independent group of people who have no party affiliation, to be able to look at this and analyze it as separate and apart from everything else that’s going on,” Hoagland said.
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US Democrats Pass $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill, Ending Daylong Standoff

After a daylong standoff, Democrats set aside divisions between progressives and centrists to pass a $1 trillion package of highway, broadband and other infrastructure improvement, sending it on to President Joe Biden to sign into law.

The 228-206 vote late Friday is a substantial triumph for Biden’s Democrats, who have bickered for months over the ambitious spending bills that make up the bulk of his domestic agenda.

Biden’s administration will now oversee the biggest upgrade of America’s roads, railways and other transportation infrastructure in a generation, which he has promised will create jobs and boost U.S. competitiveness.

Democrats still have much work to do on the second pillar of Biden’s domestic program: a sweeping expansion of the social safety net and programs to fight climate change. At a price tag of $1.75 trillion, that package would be the biggest expansion of the U.S. safety net since the 1960s, but the party has struggled to unite behind it.

Democratic leaders had hoped to pass both bills out of the House on Friday, but postponed action after centrists demanded a nonpartisan accounting of its costs – a process that could take weeks.

After hours of closed-door meetings, a group of centrists promised to vote for the bill by Nov. 20 – as long as the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office found that its costs lined up with White House estimates.

“Welcome to my world. This is the Democratic Party,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters earlier in the day. “We are not a lockstep party.”

The $1.75 trillion bill cleared a procedural hurdle by a vote of 221-213 early Saturday, which will enable Democratic leaders to quickly schedule a final vote when the time comes.

The standoff came just days after Democrats suffered losses in closely watched state elections, raising concerns that they may lose control of Congress next year.

The infrastructure bill passed with the support of 13 Republicans, fulfilling Biden’s promise of passing some bipartisan legislation. The phrase “infrastructure week” had become a Washington punchline during his predecessor Donald Trump’s four years in the White House, when plans to focus on those investments were repeatedly derailed by scandals.

“Generations from now, people will look back and know this is when America won the economic competition for the 21st century,” Biden said in a statement.

Aim to move forward

The party is eager to show it can move forward on the president’s agenda and fend off challenges in the 2022 midterm elections in which Republicans will seek to regain control of both chambers of Congress, which they lost to the Democrats under Trump.

Congress also faces looming Dec. 3 deadlines to avert a politically embarrassing government shutdown and an economically catastrophic default on the federal government’s debt.

With razor-thin majorities in Congress and a united Republican opposition, Democrats need unity to pass legislation.

The infrastructure bill, which passed the Senate in August with 19 Republican votes, would fund a massive upgrade of America’s roads, bridges, airports, seaports and rail systems, while also expanding broadband internet service.

The “Build Back Better” package includes provisions on child care and preschool, eldercare, healthcare, prescription drug pricing and immigration.

It would bolster the credibility of Biden’s pledge to halve U.S. greenhouse gas emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 during the U.N. climate conference taking place in Glasgow, Scotland.

Republicans uniformly oppose that legislation, casting it as a dramatic expansion of government that would hurt businesses.

“This is potentially a very black day for America,” said Republican Representative Glenn Grothman, who characterized the legislation’s child-care and preschool provisions as a “Marxist” effort to have the federal government raise children.

The nonpartisan U.S. Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the social-spending bill would raise $1.48 trillion in new tax revenue over the next decade, short of its $1.75 trillion cost.

Pelosi and other top Democrats have said that fails to account for increased tax enforcement and savings from lower prescription drug prices. 

 
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Roads, Transit, Internet: What’s In the Infrastructure Bill

The House has passed a $1 trillion bipartisan plan to rebuild roads and bridges, modernize public works systems and boost broadband internet, among other major improvements to the nation’s infrastructure. The legislation now goes to President Joe Biden for his signature.

Once it is signed by Biden, the new law will reach virtually every corner of the country — a historic investment that the president has compared with the building of the transcontinental railroad and Interstate Highway System. The White House is projecting that the investments will add, on average, about 2 million jobs per year over the coming decade.

The bill cleared the House late Friday on a 228-206 vote, ending weeks of intraparty negotiations in which liberal Democrats insisted the legislation be tied to a larger, $1.75 trillion social spending bill — an effort to pressure more moderate Democrats to support both.

The Senate passed the legislation on a 69-30 vote in August after rare bipartisan negotiations, and the House kept that compromise intact. Thirteen House Republicans voted for the bill, giving Democrats more than enough votes to overcome a handful of defections from progressives.

Here’s a breakdown of the bill that Biden is expected to soon sign into law:

Roads and bridges

The bill would provide $110 billion to repair the nation’s aging highways, bridges and roads. According to the White House, 278,416 total kilometers of America’s highways and major roads and 45,000 bridges are in poor condition. And the almost $40 billion for bridges is the single largest dedicated bridge investment since the construction of the interstate highway system, according to President Joe Biden’s administration.

Public transit

The $39 billion for public transit in the legislation would expand transportation systems, improve accessibility for people with disabilities and provide dollars to state and local governments to buy zero-emission and low-emission buses. The Department of Transportation estimates that the current repair backlog is more than 24,000 buses, 5,000 rail cars, 200 stations and thousands of miles of track and power systems.

Passenger and freight rail

To reduce Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, which has worsened since Superstorm Sandy nine years ago, the bill would provide $66 billion to improve the rail service’s 735-kilometer-long Northeast Corridor as well as other routes. It’s less than the $80 billion Biden — who famously rode Amtrak from Delaware to D.C. during his time in the Senate — originally asked for, but it would be the largest federal investment in passenger rail service since Amtrak was founded 50 years ago.

Electric vehicles

The bill would spend $7.5 billion for electric vehicle charging stations, which the administration says are critical to accelerating the use of electric vehicles to curb climate change. It would also provide $5 billion for the purchase of electric school buses and hybrids, reducing reliance on school buses that run on diesel fuel.

Internet access

The legislation’s $65 billion for broadband access would aim to improve internet services for rural areas, low-income families and tribal communities. Most of the money would be made available through grants to states.

Modernizing the electric grid

To protect against the widespread power outages that have become more frequent in recent years, the bill would spend $65 billion to improve the reliability and resiliency of the nation’s power grid. It would also boost carbon capture technologies and more environmentally friendly electricity sources like clean hydrogen.

Airports

The bill would spend $25 billion to improve runways, gates and taxiways at airports and to improve terminals. It would also improve aging infrastructure at air traffic control towers.

Water and wastewater

To improve the safety of the nation’s drinking water, the legislation would spend $55 billion on water and wastewater infrastructure. The bill would include $15 billion to replace lead pipes and $10 billion to address water contamination from polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS — chemicals that were used in the production of Teflon and have also been used in firefighting foam, water-repellent clothing and many other items.

Paying for it

The five-year spending package would be paid for by tapping $210 billion in unspent COVID-19 relief aid and $53 billion in unemployment insurance aid some states have halted, along with an array of other smaller pots of money, like petroleum reserve sales and spectrum auctions for 5G services. 

 
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US Indicts Russian Analyst Who Contributed to ‘Steele Dossier’

A U.S. federal grand jury has indicted the Russian analyst who contributed to the “Steele dossier” alleging potential ties between Donald Trump’s 2016 election campaign and Russia, a special prosecutor investigating the matter said Thursday.

Analyst Igor Danchenko is accused of five counts of making false statements to the FBI relating to sources for the material he gave a British firm that prepared the dossier, said John Durham, the special prosecutor appointed by the U.S. Justice Department during Trump’s administration.

At a brief hearing on Thursday in Alexandria, Virginia, U.S. Magistrate Judge Theresa Buchanan ordered Danchenko’s pretrial release on $100,000 unsecured bail after his lawyer told the court he lived with his family in Virginia.

Danchenko’s lawyer indicated his client would plead not guilty to the charges although his plea was not formally entered. A prosecutor said that, if convicted, Danchenko could face up to five years in prison on each count of his indictment. 

The indictment alleges that between June and November 2017, Danchenko made false statements regarding the sources of certain information he provided to a British investigative firm which Durham did not identify.

Sources identified the firm to Reuters as having been linked to former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele. The dossier, which was circulated to the FBI and media outlets before the November 2016 election, set out still-unproven assertions that Russia had embarrassing information about Trump and some of his Republican campaign’s advisers and that Moscow was working behind the scenes to defeat his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

The indictment alleges Danchenko made false statements about information he said he had received from an anonymous caller who claimed the Kremlin might have been helping to get Trump elected. It says Danchenko knew the information to be untrue. A lawyer for Danchenko did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Two sources familiar with Durham’s activities said he had issued subpoenas seeking evidence from multiple sources, including people linked to Fusion GPS, the Washington investigations firm that commissioned the dossier.

Steele is a former British intelligence officer who prepared the dossier for Fusion GPS, which was working for a law firm that represented the Democratic Party and Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign. Steele declined to comment in an emailed message.

One of the sources familiar with Durham’s activities said Fusion GPS was not a target of Durham’s investigation. Steele had previously declined to cooperate with investigators working for Durham.
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3- and 4-Year-Olds in a Washington School Ahead of the Game

The 3- and 4-year-olds who attend prekindergarten at Two Rivers Public Charter School in Washington are part of the roughly 60% of U.S. children who go to preschool. U.S. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better spending plan aims to make pre-K free and universal, expanding it to millions more youngsters. VOA’s Laurel Bowman has our story.

Camera: Adam Greenbaum Produced by: Adam Greenbaum
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Texas Law Renews Contentious US Fight Over Abortion

Texas’ abortion law has landed in the nation’s capital this week, as the U.S. Supreme Court weighs whether limitations on a woman’s ability to terminate her pregnancy are legal. Lawmakers heard from experts Thursday who urged the high court to strike it down. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson has more.

Producer: Katherine Gypson.
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Democrats’ Virginia Losses Could Spell Trouble for 2022

U.S. Republicans won big Tuesday in at least one off-year state election. As VOA’s Carolyn Presutti reports, some see Democrats’ losses in the state of Virginia as a warning sign for the party ahead of next year’s midterm elections, when all seats in the U.S. House of Representatives and a third of the U.S. Senate will be up for grabs.
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Russian Analyst Who Helped Compile Trump-Russia Dossier Arrested by US Authorities

A Russian analyst who provided information for a dossier of research used during the Trump-Russia investigation has been arrested by U.S. authorities as part of an ongoing special counsel investigation, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Igor Danchenko is the third person, and second in a two-month span, to face charges in special counsel John Durham’s probe into the origins of the Russia investigation.

Danchenko functioned as a source for Christopher Steele, a former British spy who was paid by Democrats to examine ties between Russia and Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. The research he compiled was provided to the FBI and used by federal authorities as they applied for and received surveillance warrants targeting a former Trump campaign aide aide.

Both the dossier and the Durham probe are politically charged. Trump’s Justice Department appointed Durham as Trump claimed the investigation of campaign ties to Russia was a witch hunt and pointed to the dossier, some of which remains uncorroborated or has been discredited, as evidence of a tainted probe driven by Democrats.

But the dossier had no role in the launching of the Trump-Russia investigation and special counsel Robert Mueller ultimately found questionable ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, but not sufficient evidence to pursue criminal charges. Democrats have lambasted the Durham probe as politically motivated, but the Biden administration has not stopped it.

The Justice Department’s inspector general has faulted the FBI and the Justice Department for their handling of the dossier. Danchenko — who was not identified by name in the watchdog report — had revealed to FBI investigators during a 2017 interview about the dossier’s origins and veracity — “potentially serious problems with Steele’s descriptions of information in his reports.”  

But those qualms from Danchenko were omitted from the final three surveillance applications, making the dossier appear more credible than even one of its own sources thought it was, according to the report from Inspector General Michael Horowitz.

Danchenko, who previously worked for the Brookings Institution, has himself suggested that the information he offered to Steele was not meant to be portrayed as indisputable fact.

“Even raw intelligence from credible sources, I take it with a grain of salt,” Danchenko said in an interview with The New York Times last year. “Who knows, what if it’s not particularly accurate? Is it just a rumor or is there more to it?”

It was not immediately clear what charges Danchenko might face. But it would be the third criminal action brought by Durham, following the September indictment of Michael Sussmann, a cybersecurity lawyer accused of making a false statement to the FBI during a 2016 meeting, and a guilty plea last year from an FBI lawyer who admitted altering an email related to the surveillance of the Trump aide, Carter Page.
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Boston Elects First Woman, Person of Color as Mayor

Not every mayor-elect of an American city gets post-election congratulations from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan. 

Soon after news broke late Tuesday that Michelle Wu won the race for mayor of Boston, Massachusetts, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs tweeted its “heartiest congratulations to @wutrain on winning the #Boston mayoral race. We couldn’t be prouder of the 1st woman & Asian American to hold the city’s top job. More power to her as she keeps breaking those glass ceilings!”

In an historic race where the four top candidates were women of color, Wu, the daughter of Taiwanese immigrants to the United States, became the city’s first woman and person of color to be elected mayor of Boston.  

Seen a progressive Democrat and protégé of U.S. senator and 2020 presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, Wu won 62.2% of the vote in Boston. Her rival, centrist Democrat Annissa Essaibi George, won 35.8% of the vote.  

“In 2021, we are still seeing barriers come down that can be a little surprising,” Wu told reporters Wednesday morning. She said when she ran for City Council in 2013, only one other woman served on the 13-member panel.  

“And now, just four election cycles later, to be coming into office with a City Council that is reflective and representative of our communities, to keep building on the progress of this current administration, and to do the work for partnership with communities is incredibly meaningful,” she said. 

An early start 

Warren, one of Wu’s professors at Harvard Law School, congratulated Wu soon after her win. 

“From teaching her in law school, to working together on my first Senate run, to supporting her campaigns, I’ve seen her positive energy, her good heart, and her ability to make big change for Boston,” Warren tweeted.

Early in her time at Harvard Law, Wu moved her mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, and her younger sisters to Boston from Chicago, Illinois, so she could take care of them while attending school. Wu, whose first language is Mandarin Chinese and who interpreted for her parents, has said that trying to run a tea shop in Chicago while caring for her family persuaded her to go into public service.  

Wu graduated from law school in 2012 and worked on Warren’s campaign for the U.S. Senate. She ran for Boston City Council in 2013, becoming the first Asian American woman on the council. She was reelected three times and was City Council president from January 2016 to January 2018. In September 2020, she announced she would run for mayor the following year.  

‘Extraordinarily impressive’ 

Denise Baer, a political scientist who teaches at George Washington University, told VOA Wednesday that Wu is “extraordinarily impressive” for having started her career early and building a broad base of support.  

But, she said, “I think it’s going to be really challenging for her to control the levers of power” in Boston, a city that has until now elected only white men as mayor.  

Wu takes office November 16. Her plan for the short transition, she said Wednesday, is to ensure “there will be a continuous ability to make sure residents are getting all the city services that are needed.” She also called for civility and “a growing sense of what’s possible in city government.” 

Kerri Greenidge, Mellon Assistant Professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Boston-area Tufts University, said Wu’s election in a city known for its institutions of higher learning, as well as being a bastion of Democrat-dominated politics, means she will be taking control of a city “that has often struggled to live up to the highest ideals it has about itself.”  

“The fact that the city has not had a mayor that is of color or a woman has indicated that that city has not lived up to its reality” as a minority-majority city, one where the population is of a range of ethnicities, Greenidge told VOA in an email. 

According to U.S. census data from 2020, Boston’s white, non-Latino population makes up 44.5% of the population; those identifying as Black or African American alone, 25.2%; those identifying as Asian alone, 9.7%; and those identifying as Hispanic or Latino, 19.8%. Other races and those identifying as mixed race make up smaller percentages. 

Challenges and assets 

Among the goals Wu talked about in her campaign are reintroducing rent control to bring down the cost of living in Boston, which has been against state law since 1994; making Boston public transportation free, which her critics say is too costly; and solving the problems of homelessness and addiction as Boston’s winter begins to settle in. 

Her gender could be either an asset or a liability, according to Baer, who coauthored a study on women and higher office. The study found that women tend to be problem-solvers, “which makes them really excellent officials,” Baer said. But she noted that taking control of a well-established power base is challenging.  

“It’s going to take a lot of strong leadership,” she said. 

And Greenidge said she believes women of color are judged more harshly for their political actions than white men, particularly on the local level.  

“Michelle Wu will have to face that reality,” she said. But she believes Boston’s breadth of ethnicities will help. The city, she said, “has a strong and well organized Asian American, African American, and immigrant community, and those communities’ engagement will be key to mitigating any obstruction or difficulties that Wu will face.” 
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