The Morning Dispatch: Biden Promotes Sweeping Agenda in Speech to Congress

Happy Thursday! This newsletter has the potential to be very, very cranky tomorrow morning depending on what Ryan Pace and the Bears do in the NFL draft tonight.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• In his first address to a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden unveiled his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, which would raise taxes on high-income Americans to pay for universal pre-K and community college, subsidized child care, family leave programs, and tax cuts for lower earners.

• Rep. Ted Budd became the latest North Carolina Republican to enter the race to replace Richard Burr in the U.S. Senate next year, joining former Gov. Pat McCrory and former Rep. Mark Walker.

• FBI agents executed a search warrant at Rudy Giuliani’s apartment yesterday, seizing cell phones and laptops from the former New York mayor and personal lawyer to Donald Trump as part of an investigation into Giuliani’s dealings in Ukraine. A similar raid was carried out at the home of Victoria Toensing, a Giuliani ally and former Justice Department official.

• The Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to keep interest rates close to zero, with Chairman Jerome Powell saying the country’s economic recovery is “uneven and far from complete.” Powell also downplayed concerns about inflation, saying “an episode of one-time price increases as the economy re-opens is not the same thing as, and is not likely to lead to, persistently higher year-over-year inflation.” 

• The Justice Department on Wednesday indicted three men on federal hate crime charges for their various roles in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old black man shot and killed while running through a residential neighborhood in Georgia.

• The Senate voted 68-26 Wednesday to confirm Samantha Power—former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations—as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. The chamber also voted 52-42 to undo a Trump-era policy and reimpose regulations on methane gas that is emitted during the oil and gas production process.

• Michael Collins, the third astronaut aboard Apollo 11, who piloted the craft while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon, died Wednesday at the age of 90.

• The United States confirmed 54,278 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday per the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Dashboard, with 5.5 percent of the 978,996 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 948 deaths were attributed to the virus on Wednesday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 574,326. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 36,579 Americans are currently hospitalized with COVID-19. Meanwhile, 2,231,745 COVID-19 vaccine doses were administered yesterday, with 142,692,987 Americans having now received at least one dose.

Biden Goes Big in First Speech to Congress

President Biden’s speech to a joint session of Congress last night had a very different look and feel than a typical State of the Union address, which makes sense because it technically wasn’t one. Although most political leaders in Washington have been vaccinated by now, COVID-19 restrictions on the event limited its audience to about 200 people masked and spread throughout the House chamber, which can hold approximately 1,100.

Nevertheless, Biden seemed to enjoy returning to the place he called “almost home,” speaking for nearly 65 minutes about the first 100 days of his presidency and what he envisions coming next. Biden currently boasts a +12 net approval rating from voters, significantly better than Trump’s -10 at this point in his presidency, but worse than Barack Obama and George W. Bush’s +28. Biden did not mention Trump once by name, but he did throw his predecessor under the bus early on to pump up his own accomplishments.

I “inherited a nation—we all did—that was in crisis,” he said. “The worst pandemic in a century. The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The worst attack on our democracy since the Civil War. Now, after just 100 days, I can report to the nation, America is on the move again. … After 100 days of rescue and renewal, America is ready for a takeoff.” He touted the 220 million vaccine doses administered nationwide since he took office, but did not mention the work Operation Warp Speed did last year to help make that possible.

Underlying the entire speech was a precarious logical balancing act. On the one hand, his first few months in office were a smashing success and the country has a bright future ahead of it. On the other, things are in dire enough straits to justify pumping an additional $4 trillion of federal spending into the economy, on top of the more than $5 trillion spent on COVID-19 relief over the past year.

“More jobs in the first 100 days than any president on record. The International Monetary Fund is now estimating our economy will grow at a rate of more than 6 percent this year; that will be the fastest pace of economic growth in this country in nearly four decades,” Biden said at one point. Minutes later, he was making the case for his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan and unveiling his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan.

“We’re at a great inflection point in history. We have to do more than just build back … We have to build back better,” he said. “Throughout our history, if you think about it, public investment in infrastructure has literally transformed America, our attitudes as well as our opportunities. The transcontinental railroad, interstate highways, united two oceans and brought a totally new age of progress to the United States of America. … These are investments we made together as one country. And investments that only the government was in a position to make.”

A few weeks back, we linked to Ross Douthat’s New York Times column about Biden “seizing the populist opportunity that Trump let slip away,” and last night’s speech only fortified his thesis. “There is simply no reason why the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing,” Biden argued, claiming that most of the jobs created by his “blue-collar” American Jobs Plan won’t require a college or associate’s degree. “American tax dollars are going to be used to buy American products, made in America, to create American jobs.”

The president’s remarks on ending the “forever war” in Afghanistan and his desire to “stand up to China’s unfair trade practices” were also pure Trump. Jason Miller, one of the former president’s top political advisers, claimed the speech was an “act of political plagiarism.”

But Trumpism does not equal conservatism. Republicans (even moderate ones) piled on the speech—and the past few months—for what they perceived as Biden’s hyperpartisan approach to governance. “As I sat and listened to the remarks tonight, I’m left with a strong concern at the lack of bipartisanship shown in the first 100 days,” Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski wrote.

This was a major theme of Republican Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal to Biden’s address, which aired just a few minutes after the president wrapped up. “Our president seems like a good man. His speech was full of good words,” Scott began. “But President Biden promised you a specific kind of leadership: He promised to unite a nation, to lower the temperature, to govern for all Americans, no matter how we voted. … Three months in, the actions of the president and his party are pulling us further and further apart.”

These rebuttals are perhaps the best distillation of how the GOP establishment wants to present itself to the country ahead of the next election. After last night, it’s easy to see why top Republicans in D.C. believe Scott to be the man to chart a post-Trump future. He has credibility with the base—he voted to acquit the former president in both impeachment trials, and Trump already endorsed him ahead of his reelection next year—but his speech last night was decidedly non-MAGA. 

After quickly running through his own background growing up in a poor, single-parent home in South Carolina, he transitioned to attacking Biden and the Democratic Party on school closures, the size of their various spending packages, the hyperbolic response to Georgia’s new voting law, and Biden’s reversals on taxpayer funding for abortion and Supreme Court packing. (Biden put together a commission to study the latter issue, but has refused to take a firm position one way or the other.)

But Scott also ticked through a series of Republican accomplishments during the previous administration in addition to criticizing Democratic proposals: Opportunity Zones, criminal justice reform, school choice, and tax cuts. A black man, he also tried to puncture some Democratic narratives on race. “I have experienced the pain of discrimination: I know what it feels like to be pulled over for no reason, to be followed around a store while I’m shopping,” Scott said. “I’ve also experienced a different kind of intolerance. I get called ‘Uncle Tom’ and the n-word by progressives, by liberals.”

At the same time, he maintained that America is not a racist country. “From colleges to corporations to our culture, people are making money and gaining power by pretending we haven’t made any progress at all, by doubling down on the divisions we’ve worked so hard to heal,” he said. “Our best future won’t come from Washington schemes or socialist dreams. It will come from you, the American people. Black, Hispanic, white, and Asian. Republican and Democrat. Brave police officers and black neighborhoods. We are not adversaries. We are family. We are all in this together.”

As America Gets the Pandemic Under Control, the Virus Surges in India

Here in the U.S., it’s safe to say we’re in the home stretch of the fight against coronavirus. New cases remain significantly down from winter highs (although still higher than we’d like), and vaccines are in plentiful supply from sea to shining sea. Around the world, however, the virus continues to spread with unsettling speed—more than 800,000 new cases are being reported per day, the most in the pandemic to date.

The lion’s share of these cases are being reported in India, which is being hammered by the virus on a massive scale and with a severity outstripping anything seen in the U.S. More than 200,000 have died of the virus across the nation of 1.4 billion people, with another 350,000 or more cases—and climbing rapidly—reported every day. Experts, citing excess death numbers, say there’s reason to believe the actual number of deaths could be several times higher.

We’ve long known that COVID-19 is a deadly disease that grows far deadlier when it starts to overwhelm hospital capacity, and the stories coming out of India are a grim reminder. With no place to put patients, hospitals in Delhi have been forced to turn away sick people. And the nation now faces dire shortages of basic and crucial medical supplies, including anti-COVID drugs and even oxygen.

Dr. Arnold Monto, an epidemiologist and global health expert at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, told The Dispatch that India is currently suffering from a perfect storm of COVID risk factors. Much of the country’s population lives in close quarters in multigenerational homes. Both Delhi and Mumbai have enormous slums, where disease can easily spread. Because the country did a reasonably good job keeping viral levels low last year, there’s a very low level of populational immunity. And the arrival of vaccines on the horizon—even before they’d actually been widely distributed—may have helped lure Indians back into a false sense of normalcy, one encouraged by the government of Prime Minister Narenda Modi, who has been criticized for holding massive political rallies in recent weeks.

Think of how bad things were a year ago in New York, with cases suddenly exploding out of nowhere overnight. The situation in India is somewhat comparable to that—except that in New York, the country was able to dramatically scale up its medical capacity by diverting resources from less hard-hit regions. India can’t do that; its outbreak is spiraling out of control pretty much everywhere at once. And to top it off, the virus they’re struggling under appears to be of the significantly more transmissible variant variety, which has further compounded the problem.

“You had a trifecta,” Dr. Monto said, “a combination of opening, a fairly susceptible population, because of the fact that there hadn’t been that much transmission before, plus probably variants—all three working at the same time.”

Back in the States, the Biden administration this week pledged to do more to help India, including helping the nation get access to more medical oxygen and helping to fund its  domestic vaccine manufacturing. The White House also said it plans to repurpose doses of the AstraZeneca vaccine currently pledged for U.S. domestic use to other countries that have approved them (the FDA so far has not), although actual shipments of the vaccine aren’t likely to go out for several weeks.

The move was a significant about-face for Biden, who has followed in former President Trump’s footsteps since taking office by using the Defense Production Act to compel vaccine manufacturers—and companies in their supply chains—to service domestic production orders first. Indian officials had lobbied Biden for months to reverse course, arguing the DPA orders functioned as a de facto export ban on crucial vaccine manufacturing materials.

Now that it’s becoming clear that U.S. vaccine supply far outstrips demand, it’s arguable that the U.S. would be acting against even its own interests by not supplying other countries’ vaccination efforts. Scott Lincicome summed up the situation in his Capitolism newsletter yesterday:

With the pandemic generally under control here and tens of millions of unused vaccine doses already floating around our system, none of these actions [ending restrictions on vaccine-related exports] is likely to harm the U.S. response to COVID-19 or materially harm our daily lives. By contrast, these efforts could provide significant benefits, beyond the obvious humanitarian ones in India and other struggling regions. As George Mason University’s Alex Tabarrok recently told Congress, for example, vaccinating most of the world (3 billion vaccine courses) is estimated to generate $17.4 trillion in global output, much of which would—like it or not—benefit the U.S. economy too (“even after the U.S. and other high-income countries are vaccinated the U.S. will continue to bear economic costs due to reduced exports, imports and supply-chain disruptions so there are pure economic reasons to vaccinate the world”). 

Ending the pandemic abroad also makes things safer here at home: “The unvaccinated are the biggest risk for generating mutations and new variants. You have heard of the South Africa and Brazilian variants—well, the best way to protect your constituents from these and other variants is to vaccinate South Africans and Brazilians.” Finally, very public U.S. efforts to help the world fight COVID-19 would also reap geopolitical benefits, countering early (and not-so-effective) efforts from China and Russia to gain influence via “vaccine diplomacy.”

Biden compared the move to a war effort in his speech last night. “There’s no wall high enough to keep any virus away,” he said. “As our own vaccine supply grows to meet our needs—and we are meeting them—we will become an arsenal of vaccines for other countries, just as America was the arsenal of democracy in World War II.”

“I’m not somebody who believes that we should put other nations ahead of our own people right now,” Dr. Howard Forman, a health policy professor at Yale University, told The Dispatch. “But I do think that we have to show the world that we’re not hoarders—that we’re not people that just hang onto vaccines for that sake alone.”

Worth Your Time

• Writing in Politico, National Review editor-in-chief Rich Lowry details how Republicans lost interest in fiscal conservatism and limiting spending. “In 2009, President Barack Obama created a spontaneous, hugely influential conservative grassroots movement on the basis of an $800 billion stimulus bill and a health care plan estimated to cost less than a trillion,” he notes. “In 2021, Biden is proposing to spend about $6 trillion in his first three big bills, and he can barely create more interest than the debate on wearing masks outdoors. … The party has changed and would much rather talk about the border than the budget, and cancellations than Congressional Budget Office scores. Of course, no Republicans will vote for Biden’s proposals and all will strenuously object, but that his plans won’t engender the fierce reaction they would have 10 years ago is yet another way in which the Overton window has shifted on deficit spending.”

• The further we get from January 6, the easier it becomes to forget how terrifying a situation it truly was. “It’s been very difficult seeing elected officials and other individuals kind of whitewash, you know, the events of that day or downplay what happened,” U.S. Capitol Police officer Michael Fanone told Don Lemon in an emotional 10-minute interview well worth your time. “I experienced the most brutal, savage, you know, hand to hand combat of my entire life, let alone my entire policing career which spans almost two decades. … I felt like they were trying to kill me.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• If you’re a news junkie, don’t you just get tired of feeling like you’re supposed to be pissed off all the time? Jonah does. “Whether it’s Black Lives Matter and their apologists throughout elite left-wing media or the constellation of MAGA propagandists and their apologists throughout elite right-wing media, the order of the day has gone forth: You must be pissed off,” he writes in his Wednesday G-File. “You must think the other side hates you and you must hate them for it. If the facts help in that effort, great. But if the facts aren’t readily available, then don’t worry. We’ll work around that or just invent them.”

• As we noted above, Scott’s Capitolism newsletter this week (🔒) concerns the Biden administration’s recent push to help vaccinate the developing world against COVID-19. Scott argues that, unfortunately, many of the measures the Biden administration is taking to help India will be slow to have much impact on the current crisis: “It’s a real shame that these efforts weren’t initiated weeks ago when folks were first starting to ring alarm bells.” But “the United States should be far more proactive about heading off ‘future Indias’ now, instead of waiting for them to explode and public outcry to reach a fever pitch.”

• If you would like to listen to Sarah, Steve, Jonah, and David discuss the news of the day for about 45 minutes, you have two different options to choose from: The Dispatch Podcast, where they discuss President Biden’s first 100 days, a leak from Iran, the Census, and more; and Dispatch Live (🔒), where they react to both Biden’s address and Sen. Tim Scott’s rebuttal.

• On the site today, Charlotte does a deep dive on the leaked interview with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. She looks at Zarif’s revelation that former Secretary of State John Kerry told him of Israeli covert operations and his feelings about Iranian Gen. Qassem Suleimani, whom the U.S. killed in an airstrike in Iraq last year. She also tries to unpack the various motivations for whomever leaked the video.

• The media love to give presidents report cards for their first 100 days. But it feels especially appropriate to do so for Biden’s educational policy so far. Frederick Hess gives the president a gentleman’s D.  

Let Us Know

Do you think Joe Biden’s speech last night accurately encapsulated the essence of today’s Democratic Party? Did Tim Scott’s do the same for the GOP?

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

Correction, April 29, 2021: An earlier version of this newsletter slightly mischaracterized part of Sen. Tim Scott’s speech as describing Republican policy proposals, rather than policy accomplishments. It also misspelled the name of former North Carolina governor Pat McCrory.