The Morning Dispatch: The Latest on the Coronavirus Relief Package

Happy Monday! Between the new Taylor Swift album and three straight days of baseball, pretty good weekend for your Morning Dispatchers. Let’s keep it rolling.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• The United States confirmed 55,910 new cases of COVID-19 yesterday, with 6.5 percent of the 855,811 tests reported coming back positive. An additional 474 deaths were attributed to the virus on Sunday, bringing the pandemic’s American death toll to 146,934.

• Hurricane Hanna—the first of the season—was downgraded to a “tropical depression” on Sunday after making landfall along the Gulf Coast of Texas a day prior. Most of southern Texas has seen between four and six inches of rain, but some areas received up to a foot.

• China ordered the U.S. consulate in Chengdu to close in retaliation for the U.S.’s closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston a few days earlier. The Chengdu consulate officially suspended operations Monday morning. 

• President Trump signed four executive orders Friday aimed at lowering prescription drug prices, including one to prevent pharmaceutical companies from charging Medicare more for drugs than buyers in other countries. It’s unclear, however, when the measures will go into effect.

• Three entertainment legends passed away over the weekend. Iconic television host Regis Philbin died at the age of 88 on Friday night, and Peter Green—co-founder of Fleetwood Mac—passed away on Saturday at the age of 73. Olivia de Havilland, star of Gone With the Wind, died Sunday at the age of 104.

The Latest on the Coronavirus Relief Package

After delays and then more delays, the GOP coronavirus relief package is finally beginning to take shape. Trump administration officials made the rounds on Sunday shows yesterday, describing $1 trillion legislation that will offer $1,200 direct payments to Americans, liability protections for schools and small businesses, an extension to eviction moratoriums, and an increase in state funding for testing and school reopening strategies. The package would reduce the CARES Act’s $600-per-week unemployment boost that a University of Chicago study found resulted in 68 percent of recipients making more money than they would by returning to work.

The relief bill was originally slated for release last Thursday, but negotiations stalled as Senate Republicans and the White House quarreled over several key provisions. White House officials spent the weekend hammering out these differences with Senate leadership staff and finalizing the package, which is reportedly set to be released later today. Then negotiations with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic leadership can begin.

“We’ve been anxious to negotiate for two months and 10 days,” Pelosi said on Face The Nation yesterday, referencing the House’s passing of its $3 trillion HEROES Act in mid-May. Asked about opportunities to compromise with her colleagues across the aisle, Pelosi said “you don’t go into a negotiation with a red line, but you do go in with your values.”

Republicans have long warned that continuing the $600-per-week boost in unemployment insurance (UI) will stall economic recovery. But they recognize pulling the rug out from under people entirely is not feasible either, both economically and politically. “We want to make sure we can extend UI but have the technical fix and not pay people more to stay home, that’s obviously a ridiculous concept,” Mnuchin said after Saturday’s meeting with Senate leadership staff. “We were always on the same page, this is a technical fix.”

Mnuchin put some numbers to that technical fix on Sunday. “We want to have something which pays people about 70 percent wage replacement, which I think is a very fair level,” he told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. “So it’s not a fixed number. It’s something that pays you a percentage of your wages that are lost.”

Democrats aren’t sure state unemployment systems are capable of doling out benefits in this more targeted manner. “The reason we had $600 was its simplicity,” Pelosi said. “Figuring out 70 percent of somebody’s wages—people don’t all make a salary. Maybe they do. They make wages and they sometimes have it vary. So why don’t we just keep it simple?”

The enhanced unemployment benefits is just one of several provisions on which Republicans and Democrats will have to come to a compromise—and the GOP itself still remains divided. “Half the Republicans are going to vote no to any Phase 4 package, that’s just a fact,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said on Sunday Morning Futures.

The eviction moratorium on renters with government-backed mortgages expired over the weekend (but requires landlords to provide renters 30 days’ notice). Enhanced unemployment benefits expire July 31.

If Republicans can’t achieve consensus on the full package, they may try to take a more issue-by-issue approach. “Honestly, I see us being able to provide unemployment insurance, maybe a retention credit to keep people from being displaced or brought back into the workplace, helping with our schools,” White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “If we can do that along with liability protection, perhaps we put that forward and get that passed as we can negotiate on the rest of the bill in the weeks to come.”

“When you talk about piecemeal, this will be the fifth set of legislation,” Mnuchin said yesterday. “So there’s no reason why we can’t have number five, six, and seven as we need to deal with issues.”

But Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was clear back in May that the next coronavirus bill would be the “final” one. Pelosi may not agree with that, but she isn’t in favor of the issue-by-issue approach, either. “This is a package,” she told reporters last week. “We cannot piecemeal this.” 

The Senate, as of now, is still scheduled to go on recess August 7. The House was originally scheduled to leave D.C. at the end of this week, but they’ve put that on hold for now. “We can’t go home without [a deal being negotiated],” Pelosi said.

Foreign Interference In U.S. Elections Persists

Four years ago, the U.S. got its first major taste of what a coordinated and crafty campaign to meddle in our elections looked like. Russian actors facilitated the hack of incendiary emails from the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee, gamed social media to whip up American political discord, and made attempts to sabotage voter databases and software systems across the country.

Today, the threat of foreign election interference is as pressing as ever. In a statement last Friday, the National Counterintelligence and Security Center shared its current threat assessment for the upcoming election, now less than 100 days away.

First, the good news: While multiple foreign actors continue to “seek to compromise our election infrastructure,” there’s little reason to believe Russia or any other adversary will be more successful with any direct forms of “election hacking”—meddling with voter rolls, changing vote tallies, that sort of thing—than they were last time around.

“The diversity of election systems among the states, multiple checks and redundancies in those systems, and post-election auditing all make it extraordinarily difficult for foreign adversaries to broadly disrupt or change vote tallies without detection,” NCSC Director William Evanina said.

But Evanina cautioned that foreign nations remain hard at work with more subtle forms of interference, including the same sort of disinformation campaigns Russia made use of last time around. Evanina made specific reference to China, Russia, and Iran, accusing the latter two of ongoing attempts to spread disinformation online “that is designed to undermine confidence in our democratic process” while accusing China of “expanding its influence efforts to shape the policy environment in the United States.”

“The coronavirus pandemic and recent protests, for instance, continue to serve as fodder for foreign influence and disinformation efforts in America,” he said.

It’s no surprise to hear that our adversaries’ efforts to interfere with our elections have not slowed since 2016, particularly considering the remarkable return Russia got on its last round of mischief. Somehow, Russia’s meddling managed both to stoke paranoia that President Trump was a stooge of Vladimir Putin and to make Trump so mad that anyone would suggest he hadn’t won fair and square that he actually became more sympathetic to Putin and Russia as a result.  

So far this year, the White House has largely chosen to ignore the threat. Earlier this year, President Trump ousted his acting director of national intelligence, Joseph Maguire, after Maguire permitted one of his staffers to brief a House committee that Russia was again warming up efforts to meddle again.

Coming Today: A New Dispatch Newsletter!

This will be old news to those of you who tuned in to last Thursday’s Dispatch Live. But for the rest of you: The Dispatch is launching another newsletter!

There are officially less than 100 days until Election Day 2020, and Sarah will be breaking down the latest campaign developments in The Sweep, a weekly newsletter that draws its name from the curling analogy she outlined in a piece last week. The first edition will be going out to everyone—but Morning Dispatch readers get a sneak peek.

Team Biden released two new ads last week with a $15 million buy across six states Trump won in 2016: Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, North Carolina, and Florida.

The first one, titled “Truth,” is all about the virus. Joe Biden appears repeatedly in a mask with his own voice-over: “Numbers don’t lie. Infection rates are now going up in more states than they are going down … We need a president who will level with the American people, a president who will tell us the unvarnished truth. A president who will take responsibility instead of always blaming others.” Two things stood out to me: First, this ad is not aimed at young progressives who voted for Warren or Sanders. Indeed, Biden’s entire campaign strategy seems to be a repudiation of the notion that the “woke left” will be the key to winning this race–even as his enthusiasm numbers flag a little. (“USA Today/Suffolk poll finds that half of President Trump’s voters are very enthusiastic about their candidate, while only 27 percent of Biden supporters feel the same way.”) 

What gave it away? The church scene. The ad makers presumably had endless footage of Biden and b-roll of mask-wearing citizens to choose from. They chose a church. Not a protest. Think about it this way: The Sanders folks are angry and they wanted that anger validated in the primary (hence Sanders) but the young couple on the zoom hangout in this ad is cutesy and happy. They clearly aren’t discussing universal health care or systemic racism. They’re more likely admiring their friends’ new puppy or sourdough starter.

Keep an eye on your inbox for the full newsletter, which explains why the veep selection is like a Jane Austen novel and even incorporates its own version of Quick Hits! Be sure to update your Dispatch account settings here to opt in to receive The Sweep.

Worth Your Time

• In the New York Times, Charlie Warzel argues that our public discourse would be much better served if we spent less time engaging with grifters and attention-seekers debating what are largely symbolic issues, and more time focusing on the material problems of import that our society is currently facing. “Our greatest weapon is our attention and how we choose to wield it,” he writes. What if we spent less time giving oxygen to the loudest, most toxic participants in our national politics, and more time trying to focus on the problems that have real significance for peoples’ lives?

• “The circular firing squads are forming already,” writes Noah Rothman in Commentary, referring to the House Freedom Caucus’s broadside against Liz Cheney last week. Citing Steve’s recent reporting, Rothman takes a thorough, step-by-step approach to documenting the silliness of the intra-Republican attacks on Cheney, which he argues are little more than attempts by GOP politicians to position themselves so as not to be blamed for Trump’s increasingly likely defeat in November. “Scapegoating the few Republicans willing to criticize the president on principled grounds is a desperate attempt to stave off the inevitable,” Rothman writes. And if Trump is defeated by the margin that many of the polls predict, and therefore takes the GOP with him, “no one will be spared reproach, least of all the president who engineered the party’s dilemma.”

• The Washington Free Beacon’s latest investigative report on Robin DiAngelo—the anti-bias thinker and bestselling author of White Fragility—is a staggering indictment of the gap between DiAngelo’s professed public ideology and her luxurious personal life. Diangelo, who is white, has made a career out of writing and speaking about white privilege and the moral duty white Americans have to work to reduce it. But DiAngelo’s own wealth, largely funded by her ubiquitous advocacy for fighting inequality, presents a massive contradiction. “The eye popping numbers,” the Free Beacon writes, “underscore how she has turned her academic theories about white racism into a multimillion-dollar empire of anti-imperialism.”

Something Fun

Regis Philbin’s hosting of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire was the stuff of legend. This might have been the show’s best moment.

Presented Without Comment

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Maryland governor Larry Hogan dropped by the Dispatch Podcast with Sarah and Steve on Friday to talk about the state of our national coronavirus response, his feelings about the president, and the future of the GOP. Hogan, one of the most popular governors in America, even made some news at around the 17:30 mark.

• “This week a friend of mine died, and people across the country celebrated his death.” Thus begins David’s latest French Press, a heartfelt remembrance of former UNC Wilmington professor Mike Adams that zooms out on a culture in which people are eager to define one another by their worst moments. “If I had to come up with a single sentence to sum up all too much of our current political and cultural combat, it would be this—we are a nation of bruised reeds, busy breaking each other.”

• In a time when dissent serves as the ultimate social currency, is there anyone left to rebel against? To Jonah, “everyone’s a dog on a mission to catch a car, but no one knows how to drive.” Check out his latest G-File for a look into the bellicose dynamic created when an entire nation (composed of diverse political and cultural identities) views itself as the oppressed and its opponents as the oppressors. He then marinates on these ideas—and much more—in his Saturday Ruminant podcast.

• On the site today, Michael McShane has one solution for going back to school in the fall, whether in-person or online. Wondering how to handle the stress on teachers, or how to maintain continuity if in-person classes need to move to remote learning? “As it turns out, there are dozens of online learning curricula that already exist, ready to roll right now,” he writes.

Let Us Know

Yesterday marked 100 days until the election. Give us one or both of the following:

• The craziest thing you can feasibly see happening between now and November;

• Something that would change who you are planning to vote for.

  Leave a comment

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Sarah Isgur (@whignewtons), Charlotte Lawson (@charlotteUVA), Audrey Fahlberg (@FahlOutBerg), Nate Hochman (@njhochman), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).

Photograph of Nancy Pelosi by Michael A. McCoy/Getty Images.