•Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen testifies before the British Parliament today, as new revelations show that the social media platform “meticulously” tracked international harms while ignoring warnings by its own employees about the way poor design decisions affected vulnerable communities around the world (WaPo).
•Democrats are looking to wrap up negotiations on the budget reconciliation bill and move its framework along while passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill Wednesday, and finally deliver it to President Biden’s desk before he departs for a trip to Rome on Thursday (The Hill and Punchbowl News.) Details below…
•Sudan’s top general has arrested the nation’s prime minister and other top officials in a military coup Monday, the AP reports. Thousands of citizens are reported to have flooded the streets of the capital Khartoum, and its twin city of Omdurman, as Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan dissolved the government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok.
Delivering Budget Reconciliation on Time? – Medicare expansion and taxes on billionaires are among the key remaining issues Democrats must figure out before moving forward a compromise of President Biden’s Build Back Better budget reconciliation, now expected to come in at $1.75 trillion.
“In terms of where we are, I have already said we have 90% of the bill agreed to and written,” House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, said on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday. “We just have some of the last decisions to be made.”
A key swing vote, Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-WV, is amenable to new taxes on billionaires and certain corporations to pay for the pared down social service and climate change programs, the Associated Press reports, after meeting at Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware home with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY.
Democrats already had missed its latest self-imposed deadline Friday for the budget reconciliation framework and worked through the weekend to get to that 90%.
Note: Congressional Democrats also are crashing against the end-of-the-month expiration of highway funding (already extended by a month), and Biden’s planned appearance at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. Biden will have much less to show at that conference, with his Build Back Better program having been cut in half. But wait, there’s more. Virginia’s gubernatorial election is November 2 – one week from tomorrow (early voting has already begun) – and Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe needs a Biden legislative victory to give his campaign against Republican candidate Glenn Younkin a bump. Polls say the two Virginia candidates are in a dead heat, but with momentum on the Republican’s side.
Doing the Math: The numbers behind “trillions of dollars” of White House budget proposals have been thrown around, sometimes willy nilly, in the past half year or so. President Biden had initially proposed $3.5 trillion in spending for 10 years in his Build Back Better budget reconciliation proposal. Sen. Manchin had set an upper limit of $1.5 trillion for the bill, but the latest intel from the AP suggests he will accept up to $1.75 trillion. The bipartisan infrastructure bill – the one the Senate already passed and is sitting in the House waiting for the budget reconciliation bill, is about $1.2 trillion total, though it’s actually just $550 billion in new spending above programs already funded.
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Members of Congress Involved in January 6 Planning? — Two planners of the January 6 rallies in Washington are alleging “that multiple members of Congress were intimately involved in planning both Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the January 6 events that turned violent,” according to a story in Rolling Stone by Hunter Walker. Walker also writes, “Along with [Marjorie Taylor] Greene, the conspiratorial pro-Trump Republican from Georgia who took office earlier this year, the pair both say the members who participated in these conversations or had top staffers join in included Rep. Paul Gosar, R-AZ, Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-CO, Rep. Mo Brooks, R-AL, Rep. Madison Cawthorn, R-NC, Rep. Andy Biggs, R-AZ, and Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-TX.”
Also, Walker writes that the sources say Gosar “dangled the possibility of a ‘blanket pardon’ in an unrelated ongoing investigation to plan the protests.”
Note: If this is even partially true, isn’t this a description of a conspiracy to overthrow the Constitution? Party of law and order?
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Charlottesville Civil Trial Begins – Jury selection is set to begin today in the civil trial filed by nine local residents against organizers of the deadly 2017 rally by white supremacists and militia members in Charlottesville, Virginia, per The Washington Post. Defendants include neo-Nazi Jason Kessler, who was a main organizer, and Richard Spencer, a featured speaker. The jury will decide whether the organized rally amounted to a conspiracy to engage in racially motivated violence. The trial is expected to run through November 19.
Note: Recall that Charlottesville’s rally is perhaps most notorious for the comments of then-President Trump, who said there were “very fine people, on both sides,” which he followed up with several dog-whistle comments through the rest of his administration.
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Pediatric Vaccinations Coming Next Month – A Food and Drug Administration advisory committee meets Tuesday to discuss a request by Pfizer and BioNTech to allow pediatric COVID-19 vaccinations for five- to 11-year-olds, The Washington Post reports. The advisory committee will inform the FDA’s decision on the request, which then will go on to the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention, which could approve the vaccine for children in that age group, Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said on ABC News’ This Week Sunday.
--Edited by Todd Lassa, Gary S. Vasilash and Nic Woods