•The Hustings News & Notes on Substack is taking holiday recess along with Congress, and will return Wednesday, January 5, 2022. In the meantime, tune in to https://thehustings.news and join our debate on “Trump’s Coup Must be Stopped.” Leave a comment here, or on The Hustings comment section, or email us at editors@thehustings.news.
Obituary: Build Back Better – After the Senate finished up its business at 4 a.m. Saturday believing they would have to wait until next month to vote on President Biden’s $2 trillion-ish Build Back Better (BBB) program, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-WV) confirmed his position as Big Man on Capitol Hill when he told Fox News’ Bret Baier he simply cannot vote for the social infrastructure package over which he has been negotiating for months.
“I’ve always said this, Bret,” Manchin said on Fox News Sunday. “If I can’t go home and explain to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it. … And I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t. I’ve tried everything humanly possible. I can’t get there.”
This comes as a disappointment, though not as a surprise to Biden and progressive Democrats in the House – who had at one time made voting on the bipartisan infrastructure program contingent on voting on BBB along with it. Progressives, in particular thought they had conceded much to Manchin on a program that once had a price tag of $3.5 trillion, as the senator from West Virginia had demanded a ceiling of $1.5 trillion. The package was to cost somewhere in the $1.75- to $2-trillion neighborhood over 10 years after dust settled over these negotiations. The Congressional Budget Office scored it at $2.2 trillion without tax offsets.
White House response: The White House “unleashed a blistering 712-word written statement accusing [Manchin] of making a ‘sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position’ and calling his comments [on Fox News Sunday] ‘a breach of commitments to Biden and lawmakers,’” The Washington Post reports.
Note: Progressive Democrats were looking for a way to extend the Child Tax Credit from the coronavirus relief program after it expired last week. Build Back Better was to have extended the credit another year, with hopes its popularity would ensure that further legislation would codify it permanently – a bit like the Affordable Care Act/Obamacare. Eleven West Virginia mothers called in to Manchin’s office last Wednesday to impress the senator to tell him how the Child Tax Credit had “changed their lives,” according to WaPo. Now the prospects of reviving the credit, with BBB or separately, as well as voting rights legislation and any legislative filibuster reform are dead for the next 11 months leading up to the congressional midterm elections.
•••
Omicron Reaction -- According to The Jerusalem Post, the Israeli government is banning travel to “red” countries, including the United States. According to the publication, “Israelis are not allowed to travel to red countries unless they receive special permission from a governmental Exception Committee. In addition, if they return to Israel, they need to be quarantined for a minimum of seven days, even if they are fully vaccinated.” And according to the BBC: “German health minister Karl Lauterbach said he expected the omicron variant to unleash a ‘massive fifth wave’ of the pandemic. He said Germany had to prepare for a challenge ‘that we have never seen in this form before" and the ‘more we can push back... the better’.” Germany has restricted most travel from the U.K.
Note: The Biden Administration gets a knock for even trivial mitigation efforts while in other parts of the world COVID is being taken quite seriously. What would happen were Biden to institute things like this, again from the BBC: “A number of restrictions are currently in place in Germany, most of them affecting unvaccinated people who are barred from most public places.”?
•••
Obituary: Former Sen. Johnny Isakson – It’s unlikely that Johnny Isakson would have filled in for Sen. Joe Manchin’s vote on Build Back Better, but he served the Senate in the proverbial “another time,” known for his bipartisan comity. Isakson was Republican senator from Georgia from 2005 to December 31, 2019, when he stepped down after a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease and other “medical challenges,” according to Roll Call. He joined the House in 1999 after he won a special election to replace Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), then won an open Senate seat in 2004. For 11 years, Isakson hosted “the best bipartisan event of the year,” according to Roll Call; a Georgia-style barbecue for lawmakers, staff and members of the press corps. His Senate seat currently is held by Democrat Raphael Warnock, who is up for re-election in November.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash