The Morning Dispatch: Congress Passes COVID Relief Package

Happy Tuesday! Every day from here until June will have a little bit more daylight than the day before. So we’ve got that going for us.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The House and Senate both voted overwhelmingly on Monday night to approve a $2.3 trillion omnibus bill, which included $900 billion for coronavirus relief and $1.4 trillion to fund the federal government through next September.

• In a Monday press conference, outgoing Attorney General William Barr told reporters he does not see a need to appoint a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden or allegations of widespread voter fraud. Barr added that he “sees no basis” for the federal government to seize voting machines, as President Trump and his allies have reportedly discussed in recent days.

• The recent SolarWinds cyberattack—suspected to have been carried out by Russian hackers—appears to have compromised the email accounts of high-ranking officials in the Treasury Department, according to Sen. Ron Wyden, who was briefed on the topic. “Treasury still does not know all of the actions taken by hackers, or precisely what information was stolen,” Wyden said.

• President-elect Joe Biden is reportedly planning to nominate Miguel Cardona, who is currently Connecticut education commissioner, to lead the Department of Education. Cardona worked as an elementary school teacher and a principal in Connecticut for nearly two decades.

• The United States confirmed 194,214 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 9.3 percent of the 2,087,813 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 1,696 deaths were attributed to the virus on Monday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 319,363. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 115,351 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 4,624,325 COVID-19 vaccine doses have been distributed nationwide, and 614,117 have been administered.

Congress Passes Huge Spending Measure

Both chambers of Congress approved a massive government funding omnibus bill Monday night, including a new coronavirus relief package that came together in recent weeks after months of gridlock between top negotiators.

The legislation, which congressional leaders resolved behind closed doors, was only disseminated to rank-and-file members in its final form Monday afternoon—hours before they were expected to cast votes on it. The package runs nearly 5,600 pages, and is believed to be one of the largest bills ever considered by Congress. 

Members of the House voted 327-85 to approve the first portion of the package, which included four appropriations bills. Lawmakers then voted 359-53 to pass the second portion, which incorporated the remaining eight spending bills, relief provisions, and everything else. Two Democrats—Reps. Tulsi Gabbard and Rashida Tlaib—voted against it, along with 50 Republicans and Libertarian Rep. Justin Amash.

The Senate then voted 92-6 to advance the overall package to President Donald Trump’s desk. The six “no” votes were all Republicans.

The measure funds government agencies through September 2021 to the tune of $1.4 trillion. It also extends an array of tax breaks and provides $900 billion in economic aid programs in response to the fallout of the pandemic, including direct checks to individuals. Single Americans who made up to $75,000 in the 2019 tax year will receive $600—half the amount allocated in an earlier relief package this spring—and married couples who made up to $150,000 will receive $1,200. Another $600 will be sent to each family per dependent under 17 years old. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said yesterday he expects Americans to begin receiving the checks as early as next week.

The legislation also touts $325 billion in aid for businesses, including another round of funding for the Paycheck Protection Program. The legislation partly extends federal unemployment benefits—providing recipients up to $300 per week for 11 weeks—and it funnels money toward vaccine distribution, schools, and the transportation sector. The pandemic relief component adds up to be the second-largest stimulus bill in American history, behind the more than $2 trillion CARES Act passed earlier this year. 

A slate of unrelated bills also made the cut after members fought to include their various priorities in what is one of the last opportunities to pass law during the 116th Congress. These include, among other items, an agreement to end surprise medical billing, language to establish two new Smithsonian museums—a Women’s History Museum and the Museum of the American Latino—and a bill supporting human rights in Tibet, which previously passed the House with overwhelming bipartisan support but never received a vote in the Senate.

While members broadly supported the omnibus, lawmakers across the ideological spectrum slammed congressional leaders for not giving them enough time to digest the bill before voting.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted her concerns as she waited for the completed text of the legislation.

She added that the approach congressional leaders took “isn’t governance. It’s hostage-taking.”

Beyond the extraordinarily quick turnaround for votes on final passage, readers may ask: Why does Congress throw a bunch of unrelated bills together at the end of the year? For a number of the provisions that were included, it boils down to how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell used the chamber’s floor time this session. He prioritized confirming executive appointments like judges rather than holding votes on legislation, like the Tibetan Policy and Support Act. Even though members largely support bills like this and it could have passed sooner, it didn’t get a chance to become law until now.

The system is dysfunctional and actively harms accountability—especially given how little time members had to read the text of the bill on Monday. But the fact that it had a broad scope wasn’t particularly unique to today’s Congress. At the end of every session, members try to cram in as much policy as they can before the start of the new Congress.

Democratic leaders lauded passage of the legislation, although they said there is still work to be done.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer have repeatedly characterized the stimulus portion of the omnibus as a temporary emergency measure to keep the economy afloat until next year, when the new Congress could pass more legislation.

“We advance this bill today as a first step,” Pelosi said in a letter to members. “We have new hope which springs from the vaccine and from the commitment President-elect Biden has to following science. We are ready for the next step.”

Biden praised the legislation but added that its passage is “just the beginning.”

“Our work is far from over,” he said in a statement.

It’s not at all clear, though, that Republicans—provided they maintain control of the Senate—will agree to pursue a new relief bill next year. GOP senators have raised concerns about massive government spending, and the two sides fought bitterly over what to include in the bill for months prior to any progress happening on the package.

Key disagreements over a future bill, like whether to send money to state and local governments and whether to include liability protections for businesses, still remain.

Do We Need to Worry About New COVID-19 Mutations?

Just as the world finally got some good news on the COVID-19 front with the approval of safe and effective vaccines, the United Kingdom is now dealing with a highly transmissible new variant of the virus. Scientists estimate that the mutation, which first appeared in southern England and has since migrated across the United Kingdom and into continental Europe, spreads about 70 percent faster than other strains. 

“This news about the new variant has been an incredibly difficult end to frankly an awful year,” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said in an interview with BBC. 

Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded swiftly by tightening restrictions across the United Kingdom. Several regions, including the entire city of London, were moved from Tier 3 to Tier 4 lockdown, meaning all non-essential retail, leisure, entertainment, and personal care providers were mandated to close. Exceptions to the “stay at home” alert level include essential work, education, child care, and outdoor exercise.

The news is also limiting travel and trade with continental Europe. More than 40 countries have instituted travel bans on U.K. arrivals, including France, Britain’s neighbor and close trade partner. In response, people have begun to worry about broken supply chains, plunging Britain into a second round of “panic buying.”

In an effort to minimize the effect of these trade disruptions on the public, Johnson emphasized in a Downing Street briefing that the delays would affect only “human-handled freight”—about 20 percent of the total shipments arriving from and departing to Europe.

The United States is among the countries still conducting flights to Britain. When asked on ABC News if a travel ban was necessary, Adm. Brett Giroir, U.S. assistant secretary for health at the Department of Health and Human Services, said such a step would be premature. But Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, told The Dispatch the opposite: A travel ban at this point is probably too late to prevent the new coronavirus strain from reaching the United States.

“It’s already spread to continental Europe, and so it could very well have arrived on our shores. It will require people to remain very alert to detect this virus,” Schaffner said. “I generally think travel bans are only modestly effective at best, because there are ways around them and because, before they’re absolutely put in place, there’s usually a period of time where people scramble to get where they’re going.”

Cases of the mutation have been reported in Denmark, the Netherlands, and Australia. Although the strain is fast-spreading, preliminary findings suggest it is neither more lethal than earlier variants of the virus nor resistant to available vaccinations. 

“Viruses mutate. We’ve seen almost 4,000 different mutations among this virus,” Giroir said. “We don’t know that it’s more dangerous. And very importantly, we have not seen a single mutation yet that would make it evade the vaccine. Can’t say that won’t happen in the future. But right now, it looks like the vaccine should cover everything that we see.”

Operation Warp Speed chief Moncef Slaoui echoed Giroir on CNN. “The spike protein requires really very, very specific three-dimensional structure that makes it hard for it to mutate too much,” he said, referring to the virus. “So, up to now, I don’t think there has been a single variant that would be resistant to the vaccine.”

“There could be at some point something that comes up that helps the virus escape,” he continued. “But, because the vaccines are inducing antibodies against many different parts of the spike protein, the chances that all of them change, I think, are low. But they are not [nonexistent].”

That’s good news. But until the vaccine is readily available to large swaths of the population, a more easily transmissible strain of the virus means more patients in hospital rooms and more coronavirus-related deaths. 

“More people will become sick faster and more people will wind up in the hospital,” Schaffner said. “It’s not that the virus is more severe. It’s just that the more people you infect, the more likely you’ll run into someone who’s older and frail and will require hospitalization.”

Worth Your Time

• In the months since the coronavirus pandemic began, a few simplistic phrases have come to dominate our collective lexicon: Trust the science, listen to the scientists. On some questions—like “is the coronavirus a big deal?”—deferring to subject-matter experts makes complete sense. But as Ross Douthat argues in his latest New York Times column, the “science” on many issues is far from clear-cut, and many elected officials throw the phrase around aimlessly as a way to punt on difficult public policy tradeoffs. “On the libertarian and populist right, that failure usually involved a recourse to ‘freedom’ as a conversation-stopper, a way to deny that even a deadly disease required any compromises with normal life at all,” Douthat writes. “But for liberals, especially blue-state politicians and officials, the failure has more often involved invoking capital-S Science to evade their own responsibilities: pretending that a certain kind of scientific knowledge, ideally backed by impeccable credentials, can substitute for prudential and moral judgments that we are all qualified to argue over, and that our elected leaders, not our scientists, have the final responsibility to make.”

• Bellingcat is a website that focuses on open-source investigative journalism, and its work has become invaluable in the years since it was founded in 2014. Yesterday, investigators for the site published a recorded conversation in which a member of Russia’s FSB poison squad admitted his role in the attempted murder of opposition leader Alexey Navalny. “The inadvertent confession was made during a phone call with a person who the officer believed was a high-ranking security official,” the post reads. “In fact, the FSB officer did not recognize the voice of the person to whom he was reporting details of the failed mission: Alexey Navalny himself.”

• In his latest piece for The Bulwark, Tim Miller tries to unpack the political realignment both major-party coalitions have undergone in the Trump era. Over the past four years, Miller writes, Republicans have made gains with rural and exurban white voters, culturally conservative Latinos, and what he calls the “very online contrarians.” Democrats, meanwhile, have picked up the “Red Dogs,” or the “college-educated, largely white suburbanites in major metropolitan areas who used to be Republicans or swing voters” that were driven from the party by Trump. Miller notes that not everybody is happy with the trade: Progressive Democrats are wary of their newfound conservative bedfellows, and the Red Dogs aren’t fully committed to their new team just yet. But “how people feel about the trade doesn’t really matter—it already happened,” he writes. And he argues that—while there are very real differences between mainstream Democrats and the Red Dogs on tax policy, education policy, etc.—Red Dogs agree with Democrats on “basically all of the animating issues of our time.”

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Toeing the Company Line

• On Monday’s holiday mailbag edition of the Advisory Opinions podcast, David and Sarah answer a series of listener questions ranging from legal history to college football. Do you have to admit guilt to accept a pardon? Are there any wrongfully decided Supreme Court cases that are still on the books? What are the best books of the year? What is the constitutionality of factoring race into vaccine distribution? And more! 

Let Us Know

If you could bury your own preferred provision into a 5,000+ page piece of legislation that no one will read the entirety of before voting on, what would it be?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Haley Byrd Wilt (@byrdinator), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).