The Morning Dispatch: Dems in Disarray?

Happy Friday! Our condolences to West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, who—citing the “hate” the Greenbrier County Board of Education has for him—withdrew his name from the Greenbrier East High School boys basketball coaching search this week.

Signing off the letter with his career .741 winning percent is a pretty baller move, though.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The Centers for Disease Control’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) voted Thursday to recommend booster shots to Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine recipients over the age of 65 or with underlying conditions that make them particularly susceptible to the virus. The Food and Drug Administration had also authorized booster shots for those with jobs that put them at heightened risk for contracting COVID-19, but the CDC panel voted against including that group in their guidance. In a rare move late on Thursday, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky overruled ACIP’s rejection and sided with the FDA, adding the jobs-based provision to her formal recommendation.

• The House voted 420-9 on Thursday to approve $1 billion in funding to help Israel replenish its Iron Dome missile defense system following heavy fire between Palestinian and Israeli forces this spring. The measure was broken out into standalone legislation earlier this week after a handful of progressive lawmakers protested its inclusion in a package suspending the debt limit and funding the federal government.

• The House also voted 316-113 on Thursday to advance a $768 billion National Defense Authorization Act funding the military for the coming fiscal year. The legislation would increase U.S. service member pay 2.7 percent and require women to register for the military draft, among many other provisions. The Senate will now work to pass its own version of the bill and smooth over any differences with the House’s legislation.

• Taliban co-founder Mullah Nooruddin Turabi told the Associated Press this week that the group will resume the executions and amputations it was known for in the late 1990s. “Cutting off of hands is very necessary for security,” he said. “No one will tell us what our laws should be. We will follow Islam and we will make our laws on the Quran.”

• Ambassador Daniel Foote, special envoy for Haiti, resigned his post yesterday due to what he deemed the Biden administration’s “inhumane, counterproductive decision to deport thousands of Haitian refugees and illegal immigrants to Haiti.” The White House pushed back on Foote’s assertions, with Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman saying some of his proposals “were harmful to our commitment to the promotion of democracy in Haiti.”

• New York Health Commissioner Howard Zucker—a key figure in former Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s COVID-19 nursing home policies—has submitted his resignation, new Gov. Kathy Hochul announced Thursday. He will remain in his role until Hochul finds a replacement.

• The January 6 Select Committee on Thursday issued its first set of subpoenas related to its investigation, demanding documents and testimony from four longtime aides to former President Donald Trump: Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, Steve Bannon, and Dan Scavino. Trump said in a statement that “We will fight the Subpoenas on Executive Privilege and other grounds, for the good of our Country.”

• Initial jobless claims increased by 16,000 week-over-week to 351,000 last week, the Labor Department reported on Thursday.

A Make or Break Week for Biden’s Agenda

When Joe Biden was running for president, one of his campaign’s key selling points was that, as a senator for nearly four decades and vice president for eight after that, he knew how to get things done in Washington. “I’ve been doing this my entire career,” Biden told Politico’s Michael Grunwald. “I’m going to say something outrageous: I don’t know anybody who counts votes better than me in the Senate.”

He expressed even more confidence once elected president, telling a group of newspaper columnists last December that he was more than ready to take on Republicans and progressive Democrats in Congress attempting to stymie his agenda. “I think I know what I’m doing, and I’ve been pretty damn good at being able to deal with the punchers,” he said. “I know how to block a straight left and do a right hook. I understand it.”

Fast forward nine months, and it’s his presidency that’s on the ropes, not his opponents. Democrats successfully approved a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief package into law back in March, but have accomplished little of note legislatively in the half-year since. The White House rolled out the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan back in March and April, respectively, and the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package they morphed into isn’t even fully written yet, let alone passed. The one win from the summer—the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure deal—is stalled in the House, in large part because Biden publicly linked it with the bigger, more audacious package. And now, as the fiscal year draws to a close, congressional inaction risks both defaulting on the United States’ debt and shutting down the federal government. Biden’s Office of Management and Budget began warning federal agencies yesterday to prepare for the latter.

The Dispatch’s Uphill team covered much of this in their newsletter on Tuesday, but a lot has transpired even since then. Let’s break down where each of the Democrats’ four priorities stand.

Raising the Debt Ceiling and Funding the Government

Most of the Democrats’ agenda is focused on authorizing enormous new levels of federal spending. But they’ve got another problem on their hands too: making sure the U.S. maintains its ability to keep doing even the amount of spending Congress has already committed to. That’s become an issue thanks to the recent expiration of a 2019 law that suspended the debt ceiling, the cap set by Congress on how much money the government is permitted to borrow to meet its spending obligations. Uphill covered the expiration last month: 

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2019 suspended the debt ceiling entirely for a period of two years—a move that proved fortuitous, given the titanic pile of pandemic spending that lurked just around the corner. Over the weekend, however, that provision expired—automatically snapping the debt ceiling to the current level of debt and putting Congress on a short clock to raise the ceiling again.

For weeks now, the U.S. has been limping along by means of “extraordinary measures”—essentially accounting tricks that allow the country to temporarily work around its debt ceiling limit. But these are only a stopgap solution: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that, without congressional action, the U.S. will lose its ability to borrow as soon as mid-October. 

Here’s how she describes the stakes (and previous Republican Treasury Secretaries have warned of similar fallout):

Failing to raise the debt limit would produce widespread economic catastrophe. In a matter of days, millions of Americans could be strapped for cash. We could see indefinite delays in critical payments. Nearly 50 million seniors could stop receiving Social Security checks for a time. Troops could go unpaid. Millions of families who rely on the monthly child tax credit could see delays. America, in short, would default on its obligations.

The U.S. has never defaulted. Not once. Doing so would likely precipitate a historic financial crisis that would compound the damage of the continuing public health emergency. Default could trigger a spike in interest rates, a steep drop in stock prices and other financial turmoil. Our current economic recovery would reverse into recession, with billions of dollars of growth and millions of jobs lost.

The House passed legislation along party lines on Tuesday that would avert this crisis by suspending the debt limit until December 2022—and would avert a government shutdown through December 2021 to boot. But the bill faces long odds in the Senate, where Republicans have been unshakeable for months in their decision not to assist. 

“This could not be simpler,” Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said yesterday. “If [Democrats] want to tax, borrow, and spend historic sums of money without our input, they’ll have to raise the debt limit without our help.”

Democrats are furious, arguing (correctly) that the debt limit is typically tackled on a bipartisan basis and that the bulk of the debt this ceiling suspension would address was accrued during the Trump administration. “When we talk about the debt ceiling, we’re not talking about future spending,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said at her press conference yesterday. “This is to pay the incurred cost. Last year, Democrats and Republicans together incurred costs for COVID that need to be paid for.”

But Republicans are adamant they are not going to budge and help Democrats get to the 60 votes they need in the Senate, and Democrats can do it alone. The provision would have to be included in their massive, filibuster-proof reconciliation package—which, again, is not even written yet. “This may be inconvenient for them, but it is totally possible,” McConnell said.

Late last night, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer teed up a Monday vote on the House-passed bill. “Every single member in this chamber is going on record as to whether they support keeping the government open and averting a default, or support shutting us down and careening our country towards a default,” he said. What happens next after Republicans block the package is anybody’s guess.

But congressional leaders will have to act fast, because the government is set to shut down at the end of the month—next Thursday. Unlike past government shutdowns, the content of the spending bill itself is not the main issue. McConnell and Sen. Richard Shelby introduced a competing bill earlier this week that would strip out the debt ceiling suspension, but otherwise address the short-term funding issue.

It’s likely that Democrats will ultimately end up settling for that proposal—or something similar. “I’m not going to let the government default,” Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said Thursday. “If [Republicans are] not going to be responsible, we still will be.”

Passing the Bipartisan Infrastructure Package and Very Partisan Reconciliation Package

If you thought that was thorny, wait until you get a load of this: Congressional Democrats are trying to usher two massive spending bills to President Biden’s desk, and they need essentially every single Democratic senator and House member on board to do it. But the party’s moderate flank prefers the $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure package while its progressive wing favors the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill. Several members on each side of this divide—enough to matter for final passage—have said they won’t vote for the others’ priority until their own is passed. It’s like a very, very expensive M.C. Escher sketch.

Pelosi thought she’d threaded the needle in August when she got the moderates to support a procedural reconciliation measure in exchange for a promise to vote on the smaller infrastructure package by September 27. But with Monday rapidly approaching, Democrats are more or less right back where they started.

Democratic Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, firmly in the moderate camp, told CNN this week he was holding Pelosi to her promise. “[The speaker] has said that she’ll help get the votes, she committed to that publicly,” he said. “There’s no one better [at] getting votes than Speaker Pelosi, so we’ll get this done.”

But Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal—chair of the Progressive Caucus—indicated this week that more than half of her 96 members stand ready to tank the bipartisan infrastructure bill if the reconciliation package—which expands the social safety net, establishes universal pre-school, invests heavily in green energy, and much more—is not ready. “At the end of the day, if we don’t have the reconciliation bill done, the infrastructure bill will not pass,” she warned. Asked if the progressives are bluffing, Jayapal replied with two words: “Try us.”

Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York is one of those progressives. “I’m going to vote yes for reconciliation, hopefully it will be ready to come to the floor for a vote [on Monday],” he told The Dispatch yesterday. “If the other one is brought to the floor for a vote I’m going to vote no.”

Pelosi was asked yesterday if she was confident she’d have enough support for the infrastructure bill by Monday—or if she will have to delay the vote. “We take it one day at a time,” she replied. “I’m confident that we will pass both bills.” 

Theoretically, a group of House Republicans could come to the infrastructure deal’s aid and cancel out the progressives’ opposition—but don’t count on it. Despite 19 Republicans voting for the package in the Senate, it has next to no GOP support in the House. Former President Donald Trump was sharply critical of Senate Republicans for helping advance the bill back in August, saying in a statement that “hopefully the House will be much stronger.”

“I think it’s naive to consider these bills separate or in isolation—they’re connected,” Rep. Mike Gallagher—who plans to vote against the infrastructure bill—told The Dispatch. “If anything, the infrastructure bill is a Trojan horse for the broader reconciliation package, which is both financially irresponsible and economically destructive.”

On this, Gallagher is taking the party line. House GOP Whip Steve Scalise formally began urging Republicans to oppose the legislation this week, arguing that “a vote for the infrastructure bill paves the way for passage of reconciliation” and that “Republicans should not aid in this destructive process.”

There are a few GOP holdouts—Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick, Adam Kinzinger, Tom Reed, Fred Upton, and Don Bacon—but far too few to matter. Bacon expressed frustration with Republican leadership’s position. “They should allow members to vote their conscience on the $1.2 trillion package,” he told The Dispatch on Wednesday. “It polls at almost 70 percent in my district. For them to whip against it would be a mistake.”

But if the progressives aren’t bluffing, until Democrats pass their reconciliation bill, the infrastructure deal isn’t going anywhere—no matter how popular it is. And the $3.5 trillion package is still very much in limbo, despite the brave face Schumer tried to present yesterday.

“The White House, the House and the Senate have reached agreement on a framework that will pay for any final negotiation,” the Senate Majority Leader said at Pelosi’s press conference on Thursday. “It’s a menu of options, and it will pay for whatever the agreement on the investments comes to.”

But when pressed for details, Schumer declined to “get into the specifics.” And his announcement caught some of his Democratic colleagues off guard. “I have an intuition about it, but it’s only an educated guess. I have not been briefed [on the framework],” Sen. Tim Kaine told The Dispatch Thursday afternoon. But he said it seems like negotiators are “making progress.”

“Making progress,” in this instance, essentially means trying to convince moderate Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema—whose support is needed to reach the 50-vote reconciliation threshold—to support the bill. President Biden invited both of them to the White House earlier this week for what Manchin described as a “very constructive meeting,” but it’s still far from clear that either are on board with the package as currently outlined.

“Instead of rushing to spend trillions on new government programs and additional stimulus funding, Congress should hit a strategic pause on the budget-reconciliation legislation,” Manchin wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month. “I have always said if I can’t explain it, I can’t vote for it, and I can’t explain why my Democratic colleagues are rushing to spend $3.5 trillion.”

After Wednesday’s meeting, Manchin said that Biden asked the West Virginian to “give me a number” and “tell me what you can live with and what you can’t.” Manchin has thus far not done so, at least publicly.

The House Budget Committee last night scheduled a markup for Saturday to, theoretically, begin actually assembling the bill that Manchin opposes. Until this point, a dozen different committees and subcommittees have been working on portions of the package independently. It’s possible the movement will be enough to convince progressives to support the infrastructure bill, but even House Budget Committee Chair John Yarmuth conceded the session is “more procedural than substantive.”

Buckle up!

Worth Your Time

• In a piece for Reason informed by former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb’s new book, Peter Suderman details the myriad ways that the Centers for Disease Control actively hindered the United States’ response to COVID-19, from failing to develop functional tests in the pandemic’s early days to stonewalling private entities that sought to help. “At nearly every stage of the pandemic, the CDC got things wrong and got in the way,” he writes. “Its failures almost certainly made America’s pandemic worse.”

Presented Without Comment

Also Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• On yesterday’s episode of Advisory Opinions, David and Sarah broke down a legal challenge to Texas’ new abortion law, a recently unearthed memo detailing former President Donald Trump’s efforts to stay in office after losing the 2020 election, a new congressional push to rein in presidential powers, and a complaint over critical race theory.

• The Remnant hit 400 episodes on Thursday, and Jonah celebrated by bringing on his longtime friend and colleague Kevin D. Williamson for a conversation about the morass that is modern American politics.

Let Us Know

We’ll be honest: Even we are feeling a little dizzy after trying to cram all the ins-and-outs of Congress’ week into one morning newsletter (with a word limit!). Did everything make sense?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).