The Morning Dispatch: A Flicker of Congressional Movement

Happy Wednesday! On this day 66 years ago, the United States Senate voted 65-22 to condemn Sen. Joseph McCarthy for conduct “unbecoming a Member of the United States Senate” that “tends to bring the Senate into disrepute.”

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• Attorney General Bill Barr undermined President Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, telling The Associated Press on Tuesday that “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

• A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) panel voted overwhelmingly yesterday to recommend that the first doses of any approved COVID-19 vaccines be given to health care providers and residents and staff of long-term care facilities. If CDC Director Robert Redfield accepts the recommendation, the guidance will be formally issued to the states.

• The European Union’s chief medicines regulator announced Tuesday that Moderna and Pfizer partner BioNTech have both applied for vaccine approval in the EU. The European Medicines Agency is expected to make a decision on BioNTech’s vaccine by December 29 and Moderna’s vaccine by January 12.

• The United Kingdom approved the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine for widespread use. 

• Salesforce announced Tuesday that the company will acquire Slack, the workplace communications platform, for $27.7 billion.

• A bipartisan coalition of senators on Tuesday proposed a $908 billion coronavirus relief package after months of stalled stimulus negotiations.

• Attorney General Bill Barr told lawmakers yesterday that he appointed U.S. Attorney John Durham as a special counsel in October to provide him and his team “the assurance that they could complete their work, without regard to the outcome of the election.” Durham will likely now conclude his investigation into the origins of the FBI’s 2016 Russia probe during the Biden administration.

• The United States confirmed 177,808 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 13.7 percent of the 1,294,940 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 2,545 deaths were attributed to the virus on Tuesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 270,532. According to the COVID Tracking Project, 98,691 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19.

Lawmakers Push COVID Relief Compromise

Lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle have been calling for another coronavirus relief measure since key components of the CARES Act expired in July and August. Negotiations between House Democrats, Senate Republicans, and the White House hobbled along from late summer into early autumn, but things have been quiet on the relief front since last month’s election. Until yesterday, that is.

A bipartisan collection of senators and members of the House Problem Solvers Caucus are seeking to resurrect coronavirus stimulus negotiations this week as time runs short to pass relief before the end of the year. 

The group rolled out a new coronavirus stimulus framework on Tuesday that attempts to strike a balance they say both parties could accept—but it faces steep odds to become law and has yet to earn approval from Democratic or Republican leaders. 

Still, it represents a good-faith attempt to find common ground and to make progress in talks that have been at an impasse for months. It also reflects a growing sense of urgency among some members to take action during the waning lame duck session.

“It’s inexcusable for us to leave town and not have an agreement,” Sen. Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat, said Tuesday. “It’s not the time for political brinkmanship.”

He told reporters the group will finalize the text of the bill “very soon.” 

Manchin, along with fellow Democrats Mark Warner, Jeanne Shaheen, Maggie Hassan and independent Angus King, joined GOP Sens. Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, Bill Cassidy and Lisa Murkowski to introduce the compromise legislation alongside the 50-member Problem Solvers Caucus in the House.

Supporters of the $908 billion plan described it as an emergency measure intended to keep the economy afloat for the first quarter as coronavirus cases skyrocket and millions of Americans continue to struggle with unemployment. 

“While this will perhaps offend some folks on both sides, we think it is a good framework,” Warner said.

The compromise deal offers $288 billion for small businesses and $160 billion for state, local, and tribal governments. It would provide $180 billion for federal unemployment insurance benefits, granting recipients $300 per week for 18 weeks. The plan also involves $45 billion for the transportation sector, including funding for airlines, airports, buses, and Amtrak. Another $16 billion would go toward vaccine development and distribution, as well as COVID-19 testing and tracing needs. The legislation also includes $82 billion for education, $25 billion for rent assistance, and $26 billion for nutrition and agriculture, among other provisions.

“I happen to be a deficit hawk,” Romney said at a press conference Tuesday. “I don’t like borrowing money. I don’t like spending money that we don’t have. But the time to borrow money—maybe the only time to borrow money—is when there’s a crisis. And this is a crisis. We want to help people at this particular time.”

The measure would not send a new round of direct stimulus checks to Americans. It would, however, include a longtime GOP priority that has been fiercely opposed by top Democrats: Federal liability provisions to temporarily block pandemic-related lawsuits. 

Over the past six months, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has demanded more than $2 trillion in spending for the next relief package—an amount Republicans in the Senate view as too costly. Republicans, meanwhile, have repeatedly failed to reach agreement among themselves over how to proceed. President Donald Trump has expressed a willingness to accept a higher price tag in aid talks with Democratic leaders, only to face stiff resistance from GOP members of Congress. The two parties have also differed on the substance of the legislation, clashing over funding for state and local governments and other issues.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell appeared to dismiss the compromise effort on Tuesday, saying Congress doesn’t “have time to waste time.” The Kentucky Republican rolled out a more limited plan shortly after his remarks. McConnell’s measure—similar to one Senate Democrats have previously blocked—is heavy on GOP priorities and is again unlikely to garner support from Democrats.

In a more auspicious sign for stimulus talks, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin spoke on Tuesday for the first time since October. Pelosi said she and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer presented a new offer to Mnuchin on Monday night, although the two refused to share details with reporters.

After the call, Pelosi said Mnuchin agreed to review her proposal as well as the bipartisan $908 billion plan.

“Additional COVID relief is long overdue and must be passed in this lame duck session,” she said in a statement.

A Reminder Why This Matters

While members of Congress hammer out the specifics in Washington, it’s important to remember why—despite months of congressional gridlock and apathy—the need for further relief is so urgent. 

In many ways, the economy has rebounded from the pandemic-induced depression faster than many experts projected back in the spring. The November jobs report pegged the unemployment rate at 6.9 percent—down from a peak of 14.7 percent in April—and gross domestic product grew 7.4 percent from the second quarter to the third of this year.

But the road to recovery has not been paved evenly across the economy, and the recent coronavirus surge is leading to more restrictions around the country that reverse some of these trends. The number of initial jobless claims filed, for example, has decreased almost every week since the statistic peaked at the end of March. But the last two Labor Department reports show the figure slowly ticking in the wrong direction.

Eight months after the $2.2 trillion CARES Act provided relief to Americans reeling from the economic fallout of COVID-19, many businesses and workers are still in urgent need of financial assistance. Several of the stimulus bill’s key provisions—including the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance Program, which provides unemployment benefits for freelancers, the self-employed, and gig workers—are set to expire at the end of this month.

For small business owners who’ve felt the brunt of the pandemic’s economic ramifications, new COVID-driven restrictions from state and local governments—without corresponding aid from the federal government—threaten permanent damage to their livelihoods.

Francisco Lira, the owner of two small shoe stores in the San Diego area, told The Dispatch he fears California Gov. Gavin Newsom will close retail businesses again in the near future. Newsom told reporters earlier this week that California “will need to take drastic action” if hospitalization numbers continue their upward trend.

“Business is down because so many people are unemployed or uncertain about their job security. We took [Paycheck Protection Program] money and that helped, but there hasn’t been any more support since then,” Lira told us. “It really feels like we have been forgotten by Washington and Sacramento. In Washington, they let political games get in the way of really helping small businesses, and in Sacramento, they focus only on restrictions.”

According to Labor Department data, 20.5 million Americans were receiving some form of unemployment benefits in the week ending November 7, compared to 1.5 million during the same week in 2019. Around 13.6 million people were enrolled specifically in the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Compensation or Pandemic Unemployment Assistance programs that provide supplementary jobless assistance to workers who don’t qualify for state unemployment benefits.

When Noel Garcia’s employer—a hotel in San Francisco—reduced its payroll from 200 employees to around 50 last spring, filing for unemployment proved difficult. “Because I had moved to [California] within a year of being laid off, I could not apply for unemployment online,” Garcia said. “Between March 20 and April 20, one million Californians became unemployed—so calling into the unemployment center was impossible. I was on hold for hours on multiple days before I found a fax machine I could use.”

When the unemployment claim expired in late July, Garcia filed for an extension until October. “I lost my appeal for extension, so I haven’t had assistance since then.”

Jeff Mayhugh, the owner of an embroidery and screen-printing company in Northern Virginia, had to reduce his staff to just 10 people at the outset of the pandemic. Although he doesn’t consider a second stimulus package vital, Mayhugh thinks some government assistance in the form of access to COVID testing would help small businesses like his recover. 

“It would be nice if small business owners had access to large amounts of rapid testing like the NFL and other large businesses. This would allow our employees the ability to test themselves whenever they come in close contact with a positive case,” Mayhugh said. “As you can imagine, when you only have 10 employees, it’s hard to have one out for a week or longer.”

The Paycheck Protection Program, which expired in August, helped keep many businesses afloat through the initial downturn by providing loans that became forgivable if certain criteria were met. Now that owners are no longer eligible to apply, many small businesses have shuttered in the months since. A recent report found that the number of small businesses open in Massachusetts, for example, decreased 37 percent from January to November.

David Dear, who along with his wife makes keepsake ornaments for national parks and museum stores, told The Dispatch that he had to get a part-time job and mortgage forbearance to make ends meet.

“Once this is over, we will be digging out from the [Small Business Administration] debt and mortgage hit for the rest of our lives,” Dear said. “And many have it much worse. It’s insane that there hasn’t been another round of PPP for businesses like ours, that there’s no second stimulus checks either. Washington is broken. We are all paying the price.”

Bill Barr, Cautionary Tale

Despite every key battleground state certifying their presidential election results already and the Trump campaign and its allies batting .025 in post-election litigation, shockingly few elected Republicans have (publicly) accepted reality and acknowledged definitively that Joe Biden will be the next president. Yesterday, Attorney General Bill Barr demonstrated why—almost one month after the election—that remains the case.

On November 9, Barr authorized federal prosecutors to investigate “substantial allegations” of voter fraud that “if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.”

“While serious allegations should be handled with great care,” the memo read, “Specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”

Sixteen of those prosecutors returned to Barr with a letter saying they had not seen any evidence of significant irregularities. And in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, Barr appeared to align himself with them. He noted that U.S. Attorneys are still following up on certain tips they are receiving, but said that, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

Within minutes, the Trump campaign was out with a statement from Rudy Giuliani chiding Barr for not looking hard enough. “With all due respect to the Attorney General, there hasn’t been any semblance of a Department of Justice investigation,” Giuliani said. “We have many witnesses swearing under oath they saw crimes being committed in connection with voter fraud. As far as we know, not a single one has been interviewed by the DOJ. … Again, with the greatest respect to the Attorney General, his opinion appears to be without any knowledge or investigation of the substantial irregularities and evidence of systemic fraud.”

Sen. Ron Johnson said Barr should “show everybody” his evidence of a lack of fraud because “there’s enough suspicions” and “irregularities” there. MAGA media figures were quick to jump on the attorney general as well. Seb Gorka called him a “coward.” Pro-Trump conspiracy site  Gateway Pundit lambasted him as a “card-carrying swamp rat.” Lou Dobbs said Barr is “either a liar or a fool or both” and speculated that he may be “compromised” or “ill.”

Never mind that Barr has been cheered by many of these very same individuals for years; his reluctance to endorse the latest set of conspiracy theories has rendered him useless to the cause. Fox News’ Tucker Carlson faced similar blowback (read the replies) when he pushed back ever so gently on Sidney Powell’s evidence-free claims about millions of votes being fraudulently switched via software. Trump has in recent days directed his wrath at otherwise loyal Republican Govs. Brian Kemp in Georgia and Doug Ducey in Arizona as their states certified Biden’s victory. 

Privately, many GOP elected officials are grateful for Barr’s statement. One House Republican told The Dispatch that Barr’s statement is important because he’s a well-known Trump loyalist casting doubt on the president’s claims.  Sen. Lindsey Graham ventured out and told reporters yesterday he has “a lot of confidence” in Barr, adding that, “if they haven’t found anything yet that tells me that one they’ve looked, they haven’t found anything.” But many others remain wary of inching too far out ahead of Trump, knowing that almost none of them have more street cred with the president’s base than Barr or Carlson.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t important for them to do so. Gabriel Sterling—the voting system implementation manager who works under Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—said an election official in the state received “death threats and a noose put out, saying he should be hung for treason.” Sterling, a self-described conservative, condemned President Trump and other GOP lawmakers during a press conference on Tuesday for refusing to denounce these threats, and, in some cases, egging them on. “This has to stop. We need you to step up. And if you’re going to take a position of leadership, show some,” Sterling said. “This is elections. This is the backbone of democracy. And all of you who have not said a damn word are complicit in this.”

Worth Your Time

• The pandemic has ushered in a period of unprecedented social isolation, taking a toll on many friendships in the process. But some argue that this year has had a disproportionate effect on male friendships, given their often in-person, sports-centric nature. “Male friendships are often rooted in ‘shoulder-to-shoulder’ interactions, such as watching a football game or playing video games, while women’s interactions are more face-to-face, such as grabbing a coffee or getting together for a glass of wine,” writes Samantha Schmidt in the Washington Post. Schmidt explains how men have learned to adapt to remote friendships during the pandemic through “Zoom poker games, backyard cigar nights, neighborhood-dad WhatsApp chains, Dungeons & Dragons groups and Fantasy Football leagues.”

• In a 5-4 per curiam decision last week, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s coronavirus-related restrictions in high-risk orange and red zones treated religious institutions differently than comparable secular institutions. In a New York Times opinion piece, law professors Michael McConnell and Max Raskin defend the court’s decision. “During a public health emergency, individual freedoms can be curtailed where necessary to protect against the spread of disease,” they write. “But when public health measures intrude on civil liberties—not just religious exercise, but other constitutional rights—judges will insist that the measures be nonarbitrary, nondiscriminatory and no more restrictive than the facts and evidence demand.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Now that the dust has settled, Sarah is ready to pick through election data—without citing any exit polls! In Tuesday’s Sweep newsletter (🔒), she uses seven graphics to break down seven electoral trends that help explain key shifts in party realignment, polling errors, landslide counties, money in politics, and more. “Democrats under Biden have an opportunity to gobble up more of the ‘center’ but they risk losing enthusiasm from the progressive left,” Sarah writes. “Republicans are seeing new places to build support, too—the economically ‘left behind.’”

• David took a break from politics in Tuesday’s French Press (🔒) to discuss Hillbilly Elegy, one of Netflix’s newest releases that is based on the memoir by J.D. Vance about growing up in a broken home in Appalachia. Only 26 percent of critics compiled by Rotten Tomatoes liked the movie, but 81 percent of general audience members did. What accounts for this divide? “Critics can’t seem to extricate the movie from the politics of Vance’s book or the toxic politics of our time,” David argues.

• In 2020, some states still require hair braiders, fitness gurus, and even florists to jump over steep regulatory hurdles before they are legally allowed to work. In Tuesday’s Capitolism newsletter (🔒), Scott Lincicome explains how these occupational licensing laws are having a particularly adverse effect on mobility this year, with the pandemic-induced recession rendering millions unemployed and searching for alternative sources of income. “Licensing laws supposedly intended to benefit consumer health and safety often end up creating—through testing, training, and fees—onerous barriers to employment for workers who don’t actually pose a risk to consumer health and safety,” he argues.

• On the latest Remnant Podcast, Jonah is joined by Virginia Postrel—the former editor-in-chief of Reason Magazine—for a conversation about … textile manufacturing! Virginia discusses how the un-guilded spinners of Europe were like the Luddites before it was cool, why textile-making would be one of the most laborious processes in the world without advanced technologies, and what made cotton fabric from India so special that “the French treated it much the same as the American government treats cocaine.”

Let Us Know

We shudder to even ask, but: In today’s political reality, what would a senator have to do to—like McCarthy—be formally condemned by every member of the opposing party and more than 20 members of his or her own? Could it be done?

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

Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images.