Tammy Murphy’s exit from the race for the U.S. Senate seat that’s held by three-time indicted Senator Robert Menendez marks the end of a counterproductive feud between the First Lady’s campaign and Andy Kim that had swallowed up all of the air.
The contest was framed as a battle between the Murphy Democratic Party machine and Kim as the leader of a reform movement pushing back on the obvious nepotism that the corrupt elevation of the First Lady to the U.S. Senate would so represent. Lost in this narrow casting was any consideration of the deteriorating circumstances of the nation’s millions of financially struggling families with children who were sent into a kind of freefall when the federal government on President Biden’s watch pulled the plug prematurely on a myriad of COVID-era social supports.
Perhaps now, with a race that includes Larry Hamm, social justice advocate, Dr. Patricia Campos-Medina, a labor educator and the former national legislative director for the AFL-CIO, and Patrick Merrill, who wants to “bring a working class voice to Washington” we might get around to debating why our nation is not working for so many families with children.
At the top of the list of post-COVID hits to the poor was multi-millionaire Sen. Joe Manchin, D-WVA, decision to join Senate Republicans to end the Expanded Child Tax Credit. In its brief 12........