Thursday News & Notes
SEPTEMBER 30, 2021 -- FIRST NUCLEAR SUBMARINE, USS NAUTILUS COMMISSIONED, 1954
•Should Gen. Mark Milley resign as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Our pundits debate in the left and right columns. Join the debate with comments emailed to editors@thehustings.news.
•’Round Midnight: If Congress doesn’t pass a continuing resolution by then, the government runs out of money and a partial shutdown begins at the first ring of Friday. More on the budget, bipartisan infrastructure and $3.5 trillion worth of budget reconciliation social and green programs, below.
Schumer’s Hail Mary – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, began a process this morning to fund the government through December 3 with a continuing resolution, Punchbowl News says, that has been detached from raising the debt ceiling. Republicans refused cloture on the debt ceiling part of the bill twice this week, but the CR is considered a sure thing with both sides supporting an avoidance of economic calamity.
If for some reason Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY, doesn’t go along, mark your calendars for October 18, the day that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellin says the federal government would likely begin defaulting on its obligations.
Note: Said economic calamity would mean downgrading the federal government’s credit rating and a subsequent hike in the cost of borrowing money, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average slides and we plunge into a deep, potentially global, recession while still suffering the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic, Democrats and Republicans living together … No, wait, strike that last part.
Infrastructure and Budget Reconciliation – Progressive House members appear ready to torpedo the bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure program, up until now the surest thing in President Biden’s agenda. Word on The Hill is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi won’t bring infrastructure to the floor of the House, as is her established practice, if she doesn’t have the votes necessary for passage.
Word in The Hill is that Sens. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, Krysten Sinema, D-AZ and Joe Manchin III, D-WV, each have their “proxies” in the House who are pushing their agendas on how to negotiate a passable budget reconciliation that would have support from progressive and moderate Democrats in the House while satisfying these three and securing 51 votes in the Senate.
Only Half of Manchema the Sticking Point? – One progressive House Democrat, Ro Khanna of California, told NPR’s Morning Edition Thursday that Manchin is not the problem, that the senator from West Virginia is willing to compromise on the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better program, but that Sinema won’t negotiate, won’t make statements or talk to the press and won’t even make an offer that is south of the package’s sticker price.
Stephen Colbert told The Late Show audience Wednesday night that whichever Washington pundit mashed up Manchin and Sinema’s names missed the opportunity to go with “Sineman.”
Or Perhaps it IS Manchema: Manchin told the conservative National Review that he would not support a Medicaid-like program that’s part of the budget reconciliation bill that does not keep the Hyde Amendment intact. Hyde for decades has banned federal dollars from going to abortion providers.
Don’t Forget K Street: Lurking in the background of all of this are the lobbyists, The Wall Street Journal reminds us. “Drug makers, oil and gas firms, tobacco companies and other U.S. industries are complicating President Biden’s efforts to move along his domestic agenda as intraparty divisions threaten its path in a narrowly divided Congress,” it asserts.
These include business groups trying to gut measures to raise billions in taxes from their industries, the energy industry lobbying Rep. Henry Cuellar of Texas and other Democrats from oil-producing states, trade group The American Petroleum Institute fighting tax hikes, The Business Roundtable pushing back against corporate tax measures to pay the bill, and a business coalition that includes AT&T, Home Depot and CVS running commercials in Arizona, New Hampshire and Virginia calling on Democrats not to raise the corporate tax rate.
This backs arguments by progressives, chiefly Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, that moderates beholden to corporate lobbyists are the ones holding up the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which is why they’re making the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill contingent on it.
The Meaning of All of This: If Schumer’s continuing resolution manages to suck all the air out of the Capitol through the day Thursday, infrastructure and the budget resolution could slip into October as Congress lets out a sigh of relief over not having to shutter the federal government’s doors. Unless, of course, Pelosi pulls a rabbit trick.
•••
Not All White Men – The House select committee investigating the 1/6 pro-Trump insurrection at the Capitol has issued its second wave of subpoenas to 11 individuals involved in planning and organizing prior to the riots, Roll Call reports. Prominent among them are Amy Kremer and Kylie Kremer, founders of Women for America First, which organized the January 6 rally on the Ellipse preceding the move to Capitol Hill, and Cynthia Chafian, who submitted the application for the group. Chafian is also founder of the Eighty Percent Coalition, whose website describes the organization as “a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to eradicating the socialist policies that harm all families, businesses, schools, and churches.”
Women for America First also organized rallies at Freedom Plaza in Washington, D.C., November 14 and December 12, according to Roll Call, as well as “March for Trump” bus tours across the nation, “which garnered interest for the D.C. rallies, according to the committee.”
The 11 subpoenaed are required to produce documents and testify in depositions.
•••
Pot to Kettle: ‘You’re Fired!” — Corey Lewandowski, who had been overseeing Make America Great Again Action, the leading pro-Trump super PAC, has been removed from his position, presumably because of a Politico report that Lewandowski “pursued a female donor, Trashelle Odom, during a charity event in Las Vegas” Sunday evening, including, according to Ms. Odom, “touching her repeatedly, including on her leg and buttocks, talking about his genitalia and sexual performance,” Politico reports today. Mrs. Odom and her husband, John Odom, had donated $100,000 to the super PAC prior to the evening event.
Taylor Budowich, a Trump spokesperson, Tweeted Lewandowski’s removal: “Corey Lewandowski will be going on to other endeavors and we very much want to thank him for his service. He will no longer be associated with Trump World.”
Note: This could be a sign that there are fissures forming in the crust of “Trump World” (really: do they call it that?). This isn’t, Politico points out, the first time that Lewandowski has been alleged to touch women who weren’t at all interested in the 48-year-old’s advances (creepy advances, if Mrs. Odom’s reported comments about what Lewandowski said are accurate). Yet Lewandowski, who had previously been released from the gravitational pull of Trump World, had been brought back. But now, again, exiled.
Clearly the denizens of Trump World realize that while the Access Hollywood tape was one thing at one point in time, it is too perilous to keep someone who is accused of sexual misconduct on the payroll, especially when the accuser is the wife of a prominent contributor.
Another associated crack in the surface of Trump World is a report in a conservative website, American Greatness, that Republican South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem “is having an extramarital affair with Corey Lewandowski,” The Washington Postreports.
Gov. Noem, a conservative, denied the allegation in a Tweet.
It seems that there are some minor seismic tremors rumbling in Trump World.
--Edited by Todd Lassa, Gary S. Vasilash and Nic Woods