The Senate is scheduled to take a two-week July 4 holiday break beginning this Thursday, while the House of Representatives works through next week, then takes a break to July 19. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, wants to vote on an infrastructure package before the holiday break.
New York City’s ranked-choice primary election is Tuesday. According to The New York Times we’re not likely to learn the Democratic Party’s choice – who is assumed to be the likely winner against the Republican candidate in November – earlier than the week of July 12.
Compromise and Angst Over Infrastructure – Infrastructure is coming down to a better-than-nothing prospect, with the White House eyeing a package offered by a bi-partisan group of 20 senators that would offer $580 billion in new spending. The package has enough Republican support to avoid a filibuster, though the Biden administration must garner sufficient votes from progressive Democrats, who don’t like its lack of green energy and clean water funding. The Biden administration also wants to drop the bi-partisan group’s funding provisions that would raise the gasoline/diesel fuel tax and place a tax on electric vehicles for miles traveled by identifying other funding sources, Punchbowl News says. A White House deal with the group is doable “and even likely,” according to the Capitol Hill news website.
The White House and the group of senators is looking at a two-track approach, Roll Call reports, with the $580 billion package for nuts-and-bolts infrastructure to be passed with cloture, first, and then Democrat senators spiking the legislative filibuster to work on sustainable energy and social program elements of President Biden’s original package in order to satisfy such senators as Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and Elizabeth Warren, D-MA.
Note: Biden’s quest for bi-partisanship on infrastructure is allowing McConnell Republicans to create a schism between the White House and progressive Senate Democrats. If the deal goes forward as described above, the president is putting a lot of trust in moderate Republicans at the potential expense of his own party’s always-precarious unity, a unity that will be key in getting anything done as we approach the 2022 midterms and the threat ahead of next November of ex-President Trump’s primary candidates running against “disloyal” Republicans in the House and Senate.
But that’s next year. Even at roughly one-fourth the price tag of the White House’s original infrastructure proposal, the bi-partisan deal would give Biden a plan that Trump was never even able to launch during his four years in office.
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Iranian President-Elect Takes Hard-Line on Negotiations Over Nukes -- Ebrahim Raisi, the hardline president-elect of Iran, says he will not meet with President Biden, nor will he negotiate over Tehran’s ballistic missile program and its regional militia, following his “landslide” victory last week, Politico reports. The Biden White House had planned to re-negotiate and re-instate the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on restricting the nation’s nuclear arms development, which was signed during the Obama administration and dismantled under the Trump administration.
The ultra-conservative Raisi won 17.9-million votes, 62% of the ballots cast, though with a low voter turnout in apparent protest of the candidates offered to Iranians. Another 3.7-million ballots were voided in the election for being filled out improperly, either deliberately or accidentally.
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Royal Caribbean Tests the Waters – Royal Caribbean’s cruise ship, Freedom of the Seas left PortMiami Sunday evening with 600 employee volunteers on board, CNN reports. All of the people on board are vaccinated and are joined by a representative of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control.
Note: Cruise ships in the U.S. have been docked since March 2020. One of the issues that occurred as the pandemic broke out was that when there were infected people on board a cruise ship, ports did not want them to dock. Which led to more infections. And in some cases, deaths. The CDC developed a set of rules for cruise ship companies. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) filed suit against the rules and on Friday a federal judge ruled in DeSantis’s favor, The Washington Post reports.
The CDC had ordered that 95% of the passengers and crew be vaccinated, something that the DeSantis administration considered to be “burdensome.”
Days before the test cruise Royal Caribbean had postponed the sailing of Odyssey of the Seas out for Fort Lauderdale because eight members of the crew tested positive for COVID-19.
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Trump Announces Support for Murkowski Challenger – From the office of the former president: “Lisa Murkowski is bad for Alaska. Her vote to confirm Biden’s interior secretary was a vote to kill a long sought for, and approved, ANWR, and Alaska jobs. Murkowski has got to go!” Donald Trump is formally supporting Kelly Tshibaka, challenger to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-AK, in the 2022 midterm elections, though Murkowski has not indicated whether she will seek a fourth term. Tshibaka is former head of Alaska’s Department of Administration.
Note: There’s an assumption among pundits of all stripes that Republicans will take back the Senate and probably the House of Representatives next year in the midterms, but there’s some confusion on whether Trump’s hold on the GOP is slipping or whether his congressional candidates will prevail next year. The answers may ultimately come down to success of new, restrictive voting laws being promulgated in Georgia, Iowa, Texas, Arizona and potentially several other states. It will be up to the Liz Cheney wing of the GOP, and a hard-line Democratic effort, which so far has not surfaced publicly, to prevent a pro-Trump majority in Congress to take over after November 2022.
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Pandemic Restrictions for Tokyo Olympics Announced – The Tokyo Olympics will allow up to 50% of each sport stadium’s capacity, up to 10,000 spectators, The New York Times reports, as Japan deals with a big spike in coronavirus cases. No foreign spectators will be allowed into the sporting events, which are scheduled for July 23 to August 8. According to The Washington Post, a member of the Ugandan Olympic team tested positive for COVID-19 after arriving in Tokyo on Saturday.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash