The Morning Dispatch: Dems in Disarray?

Congressional Democrats struggle with a legislative agenda tangled by party gridlock, a looming government shutdown, and an impending debt ceiling crisis, while Republicans sit and watch.

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.”
  • Amb. 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

(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images.)

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.

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.”

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.

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).