•The full House of Representatives votes today on whether to charge former Trump advisor Stephen K. Bannon with contempt of Congress for failing to respond to the January 6 Select Committee investigating his alleged role in the Capitol insurrection. The House is expected to vote in favor of the charges mostly along party lines, plus committee members Reps Liz Cheney, R-WY, and Adam Kinzinger, R-IL.
•The FDA has authorized Johnson & Johnson and Moderna COVID-19 vaccine boosters, as well as mixing and matching of the coronavirus vaccines, including Pfizer-BioNTech. In other words, whatever you had as a vaccine, you can take a different booster shot.
Magazine: Manchin Considers Ditching Democratic Party – Sen. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia has told associates he is considering leaving the Democratic Party to become an “American Independent,” and has an exit plan if the $3.5-trillion Build Back Better budget reconciliation isn’t cut in half to $1.75 trillion, according to a scoop by Mother Jones Washington bureau chief David Corn. The revelation in the progressive magazine comes after President Biden appears to have convinced both factions of the party that the ceiling on the budget reconciliation bill will be no higher than $1.9 trillion, in part by reducing the length of key programs within the bill down from 10 years. More important to the coal country senator, the plan would seriously pare down a program to promote clean energy alternatives for powerplants.
Note: The Mother Jones scoop comes just as progressive and moderate Democrats appear to have made progress negotiating the reconciliation bill. Indications are that the White House had agreed to a target price of $1.75 trillion to $1.9 trillion after meeting with progs and moderates separately early this week. Agreeing to the lower price tag will be key to passing the reconciliation budget by the end of October as planned. Manchin can then wait until the end of the year to join independent Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and Angus King of Maine as officially without a party.
•••
Build Back Faster — President Joe Biden gave a speech yesterday at the Electric City Trolley Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania, a hometown speech meant to gin up support for the Build Back Better bills that are stalled in the Democratic meeting rooms on Capitol Hill. Biden has been criticized by many in his own party for being insufficiently vocal in support of the legislation. The speech ran for some 8,200 words. Gettysburg Address? About 270. Biden’s speech was about 30 times wordier.
Note: Biden talked about his parents, grandparents, siblings, neighbors, neighborhoods, riding the trolley, racking up miles on Amtrak, the space race, a school-age nickname, and a variety of other folksy topics. While he did hit on things from job creation to health care to child care, much of it was buried in the vignettes.
In his peroration Biden said, “I ran for President saying it was time to build the backbone of the nation. And by that, I was very precise: The middle class has been the backbone of this nation.”
Biden buried the lede.
•••
Cloture Fails, as Expected, in Freedom to Vote Act – The Senate on Wednesday rejected Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s, D-NY, cloture vote on S 2747, the Freedom to Vote Act, along party lines. The bill was Sen. Joe Manchin III’s, D-WV, proposal in September to pare down other bills that seek to counter several state Republican legislatures that are tightening their voting laws in the wake of President Biden’s “landslide” victory over incumbent Donald J. Trump last November.
Schumer promises to bring other such bills back before the Senate, where he doesn’t have 10 Republicans willing to overcome a filibuster. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, has kept his 49 fellow caucus members in line by objecting to federal laws that he says would usurp states’ rights on election laws.
Note: It’s the age-old struggle that goes to the question of whether we’re more a democracy or a republic, and entails filibusters, the electoral college, and representation in the Senate itself. Schumer & party are caught in a vicious loop in which filibusters on voting rights bills won’t be overcome without Democrats gaining 10 seats in the Senate, and that won’t happen so long as voting rights legislation continues to fail.
•••
Dead Heat in Virginia Gubernatorial Race – Less than two weeks before Virginia’s election day, with early voting ballots already flooding in, Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin has pulled up to a dead heat in the polls with Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Each has a 46% share of those polled by Monmouth University. McAuliffe, who served as Virginia’s governor from 2014 to 2018, previously had a 2- to 7-point lead in earlier polls.
Note: The gubernatorial election in purple Virginia will be a big indicator of Donald J. Trump’s influence over the GOP, and the electorate in general. While Youngkin, a former CEO of private equity firm The Carlyle Group, has tried to distance himself from the ex-president, Trump endorsed him last weekend, and former Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani put out a bizarre video Wednesday in which he dressed as Abraham Lincoln and criticized McAuliffe for “selling” the Lincoln Bedroom in the White House during the Clinton administration, when he was party chairman – a long-disproven scandal.
•••
Zuckerberg Added to Data Mining Lawsuit – Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been added to the District of Columbia’s lawsuit over the Cambridge Analytica data-mining scandal, Washington’s attorney general, Karl Racine announced on Twitter. Racine tweeted that his investigation, begun in 2018, has revealed that Zuckerberg was “personally involved in decisions related to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s failure to protect user data,” The Verge reports.
Note: Facebook coincidentally has announced it will change its name, though apparently Zuckerberg hasn’t decided, or at least said, what the new moniker will be. It will not be called Truth Social, which is the new social media platform designed as an alternative to big tech like Facebook, announced yesterday by Donald J. Trump.
--Edited by Todd Lassa, Gary S. Vasilash and Charles Dervarics