• Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell faces grilling on inflation by the House Financial Services Committee today.
Reconcile This – Senate Democrats have announced plans for a $3.5-trillion budget package using reconciliation to extend Medicare and advance other Biden social program priorities once tied to his initial $2.3-trillion infrastructure proposal, The Washington Post says. The package also is a compromise of Sen. Bernie Sanders’, I-VT, $6-trillion proposal, and is designed to placate “progressive” Democrats who feel the party’s thin advantage in the House of Representatives and tie-breaker margin in the Senate should be enough for a full reversal of 40 years of Reaganomics.
The proposal announced by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, Tuesday, would expand Medicare benefits, boost federal safety net programs and combat climate change, using tricky and arcane reconciliation rules. While Senate Democrats hope to get a bi-partisan infrastructure plan worth as much as $1.2-trillion passed before the summer recess in August, reconciliation on the big budget package would likely take up most of autumn. [
Note: The objective is that the $3.5-billion reconciliation bill gets passed in time to give Democrats a chance to fight off Republican challenges in the House and in Senate seats up for re-election next year.
Note II: Support appears to be slipping for the infrastructure bill even among the Republican senators who helped negotiate it. Democrats must face the possibility that they won’t have the support of 10 Republicans necessary for cloture to pass this bill, if GOP senators exert leverage to push back against the larger budget package.
•••
Bush Criticizes Biden’s Afghanistan Withdrawal Plan – Former President George W. Bush criticized President Biden’s plan to withdraw U.S. troops from Afghanistan by August 31, amidst gains in control the Taliban has already made.
“I think it is,” a mistake, “yeah. Because I think the consequences are going to be unbelievably bad and sad,” Bush 43 told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, in an interview (per Politico). Bush launched the U.S. military’s invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
•••
Biden Nominates Never-Trumper Republican to be Ambassador to Turkey – President Biden has reached across the aisle, sort of, to nominate former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, of Arizona, to become U.S. ambassador to Turkey. If confirmed by the Senate, Flake will face critical issues with the U.S. ally, including Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 missile defense system, the country’s opposition to U.S. support for Kurdish fighters in Syria and Biden’s recognition last April of the Armenian Genocide of a century ago, The Wall Street Journal notes.
Note: Flake declined to run for re-election to the Senate in 2018 and said in his 2017 retirement speech that President Trump was “dangerous to democracy.” We can guess which current Republican senators will vote against this nomination.
•••
Biden Blasts ‘Big Lie’ in Philly – As Democratic Texas lawmakers huddled in Washington, D.C., to deny their state’s quest for a quorum to pass strict voting laws, President Biden traveled to Philadelphia Tuesday to give his most direct response to date to Donald Trump’s unwillingness to admit defeat.
“The ‘Big Lie’ is just that – a Big Lie,” Biden began. “You don’t call facts fake and then try to bring down the [American] experiment because you’re unhappy.”
Denying citizens the vote is “the most un-American thing,” but not unprecedented, Biden continued, citing post-Reconstruction voter suppression of Black people and other minorities. Biden said that at the recent G-7 Summit other leaders asked him “if the citadel of Democracy in the world was going to be okay,” in light of the January 6 insurrection.
Biden has directed vice president Kamala Harris to lead the fight to pass both HR 1, the For the People Act, “the bill [that] would help to end voter suppression in the states,” end dark money, and stem gerrymandering, as well as the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would remedy the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby v. Holder that removed Section 5 from the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Note: As Republican legislators in such states as Texas work quickly to tighten voting rules (or suppress voting among minorities) and potentially grab for themselves the ability to overturn Electoral College votes, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act is probably more important to Democrats than the For the People Act. Neither bill is likely to get a hearing in the Senate as long as the legislative filibuster remains intact.
Biden called states’ restrictive voting bills “21st Century Jim Crow. … It’s real, it’s unrelenting. But we’re going to fight it,” referring to potential court fights.
Negotiating a Filibuster Carve-Out? – Vice President Harris told NPR she has spoken with Democratic senators about carving out exceptions to the legislative filibuster, as proposed by Rep. James Clyburn, D-SC, that would allow a simple majority vote on the two bills described above.
“I believe that of all the issues the United State Congress can take up, the right to vote is the right to unlock all the other rights,” Harris told NPR. She declined to “negotiate in public” by revealing which Democratic senators are involved in the negotiations, though Joe Manchin III of West Virginia, Krysten Sinema of Arizona, Gary Peters of Michigan, and others worried about a filibuster-free Senate if Republicans gain the majority after next year’s midterms, are likely suspects.
•••
EU Announces Aggressive Emission Reductions – After two years of tough negotiations with industry, 27 countries and the European Union parliament, the EU set a goal Wednesday to reduce carbon emissions 55% by 2030, The New York Times reports. The plan is substantially tougher than U.S. goals of a 40-43% reduction in carbon emissions by 2030.
•••
Tennessee to Stop All Adolescent Vaccine Outreach Programs –The Tennessee Department of Health will halt all adolescent vaccine outreach – not simply for COVID-19, but for all diseases – amid pressure from GOP lawmakers, according to an internal report and emails obtained by Nashville’s Tennesseean. Health department staff are instructed to strip the agency’s logo off documents in case the department must issue any information on vaccines, according to the report, and must also stop COVID-19 mitigation events on schools’ property. The directive came from Tennessee Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercy.
Note: If the Tennessee GOP’s plan is to defeat President Biden’s effort to vaccinate all Americans aged 12 and up, it appears to be succeeding. Thanks to more infectious strains of the coronavirus, cases of COVID-19 across the U.S. have more than doubled, from under 10,000 per day in late June to more than 26,000 on Tuesday alone, The Hill reports, citing the Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 tracker. Good thing polio has been eradicated.
•••
Boeing’s Q2 Problem — Boeing announced that it has a bit of a problem with the production of its 787 fuselages, with the consequence the aircraft manufacturer must perform “additional rework” on undelivered 787s. According to the company it will deliver fewer than half the 787s currently in inventory this year. Its production rate will be fewer than five per month. In the second quarter it produced 12 of the Dreamliners. Given that the year-to-date rate is 14, it had quite a bounce-back from the anemic Q1.
Note: 1.) Boeing is one of the largest U.S. exporters, so if it has issues with the integrity of fuselages, presumably those in other countries might go check out what Europe’s Airbus has on offer; 2.) Boeing is a huge U.S. Defense Department contractor (it builds the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the CH-47 Chinook helicopter, the F-15 and F/A-18 fighters, among other aircraft), so build problems are certainly not good, as one assumes that Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman lobbyists probably have a few things to say over expensive dinners.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash