•Will anybody – moderate, progressive, conservative – be happy with compromises being made to the social program budget reconciliation bill (now $1.75-trillion), particularly as it continues to hold up the bipartisan infrastructure bill? Go to https://thehustings.news for a debate on the issue.
•Joe Biden met with Pope Francis today, his first as president, though they had met three times before. Officially on the agenda: The coronavirus pandemic, climate change and caring for the poor (WaPo).
•On Saturday, Biden attends a Group of 20 meeting before flying to Glasgow, Scotland, for the UN climate change summit. He also meets with French President Emmanuel Macron to try and smooth over the nuclear submarine deal made with Great Britain and Australia earlier this year.
Treats, Not Tricks – The ever-pending bipartisan infrastructure bill has stalled again in the House of Representatives, as progressive Democrats wait to see what Sens. Joe Manchin III, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-AZ, do in the other chamber. The House progressives don’t want to pass both the $550-billion infrastructure bill and the $1.75-trillion Build Back Better social infrastructure reconciliation budget and watch the latter languish in the Senate after it passes in the House. The hostage-holding continues after President Biden made a special appearance on Capitol Hill Thursday to announce his new Build Back Better social infrastructure proposal slightly delaying his flight to Europe.
Note: Who are the hostage-holders? Sinema messaged support for the framework but was not explicit that she would vote for it, Roll Call reports, while Manchin was non-committal before he tweeted out support for the framework. Politico, which calls Biden’s Thursday release of his budget reconciliation framework a “victory,” [GV1] for the president’s agenda noted that Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, initially balked, citing “gaps” in the bill and signaling the House they should hold off on a vote.
Punchbowl News points to the failure of the House to quickly pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill and the social program reconciliation budget framework because progressives want to see Senate support first. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-WA, who might have been thinking of Ronald Reagan’s mantra “trust, but verify,” let it be known that the Congressional Progressive Caucus she leads was not ready. That forced House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, to quickly introduce an extension to December 3 of the 2015 Surface Transportation law that would be otherwise covered by bipartisan infrastructure. It passed in the House, 358-59, and in the Senate by unanimous consent.
Bottom line: Capitol Hill Republicans are giddy over Biden’s inability to convince progressives to pass the infrastructure bill before he flew off to Rome, and the biggest loser is probably Democratic Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe, who is in a dead heat with Republican candidate Glenn Younkin in most polls (except a Fox News poll, which gives Youngkin a big lead) going into next Tuesday’s election.
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What’s in Biden’s $1.75-trillion Budget Plan – President Biden’s moderate- and progressive-friendly social infrastructure program budget reconciliation framework features the “biggest climate investment in U.S. history,” according to The Washington Post, which outlines …
•$555 billion to cut emissions, including tax credits for business and consumers to switch to sustainable energy sources.
•Expansion of health care coverage to 7 million people.
•Free pre-kindergarten.
•New taxes on those making over $10 million per year.
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Representatives of Oil Companies Testify — Executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce testified yesterday to the House Committee on Oversight and Reform. The questioning was largely driven by Democratic lawmakers who claimed the petroleum industry was playing a “role in spreading disinformation about the science of climate change,” The Washington Post reports. WaPo also writes that the execs were questioned about “whether the companies’ current commitments to clean up their acts were enough to forestall dangerous global warming.”
Note: Odds are that the members of Congress who were at Capitol Hill for the hearing drove there. Odds are that few of them were in electric vehicles. This means that they probably drove there in vehicles with internal combustion engines — with the engines combusting gasoline, not diesel fuel. So given that, here is what happens in the combustion process, as there seems to be a concern with “science”:
2C8H18 + 25O2 → 16CO2 + 18H2O
As you can see, there’s lots of carbon dioxide. Remember: Gasoline is a hydrocarbon.
While there were accusations that tried to make an equivalence between “Big Oil” and “Big Tobacco” (are there small versions of either?), there is a significant difference: Anyone can go to a chemistry book and see what happens when gasoline is burned. The link between cancer and smoking was not so obvious.
Have oil companies participated in greenwashing? No doubt.
But it would be interesting to know that the lawmakers have in mind regarding how there can be a significant change. There are some 282 million vehicles rolling on U.S. roads right now, the vast majority of which are powered by gasoline.
This is not to say that pollution is a good thing.
But solutions are far more important than rhetoric.
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Ex-Gov. Cuomo Charged with Sexual Misconduct Complaint – Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D, was charged on Thursday with a criminal misdemeanor complaint charging he groped a female aide inside the executive mansion “for purposes of degrading and gratifying his sexual desires,” reports The New York Times. The complaint was based on the account of one of about one dozen women whose accusations of sexual harassment were the basis of a state attorney general’s report that led to Cuomo’s resignation in August.
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Collins Hits 8,000 in Senate Voting Streak – Sen. Susan Collins, D-ME, cast her 8,000 consecutive vote yesterday. Her vote was to confirm Elizabeth Prelogar as U.S. solicitor general. Collins has not missed a vote since her first in the Senate on January 22, 1997, Roll Call reports, making her the “Cal Ripken of the Senate,” according to Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-KY. She received accolades from both sides of the aisle, and the floor vote was temporarily stopped as confetti flew.
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA, had voted 8,927 times between July 14, 1993 and November 16, 2020, when his streak ended because he had to quarantine when he contracted COVID-19, according to Roll Call. The late Sen. Bill Proxmire, D-WI, holds the record at 10,252 consecutive votes between April 20, 1966 and October 18, 1988.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Gary S. Vasilash
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2021
•Will anyone – progressive Democrats, moderate Democrats, moderate Republicans – be satisfied with President Biden’s social infrastructure program? No doubt Trumpist Republicans are reveling in Democrats’ lack of discipline. Read our debate by scrolling down to the next item in the three columns, by Jim McCraw in the left column and Stephen Macaulay in the right column, and email your comments to editors@thehustings.news
Disappointment Expected, Delivered – Real gross domestic product (GDP) rose at an annual rate of just 2.0% in the third quarter of the year, according to an advanced estimate by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis. That’s a severe drop from the second quarter’s 6.7% annual rate and is being blamed on reduced retail sales and services due to the Delta variant of the coronavirus and to supply chain bottlenecks. Economists are expecting healthy GDP growth for the remaining months of the year. Nevertheless, third-quarter GDP growth was low enough to add urgency to the White House’s bipartisan infrastructure bill languishing in the House of Representatives …
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I’ve Gotta Fly; Let’s Pass These Bills – President Biden stopped by the Capitol Thursday morning before flying off for Rome with a new $1.75-trillion social spending budget reconciliation bill he expects all Democrats in the House of Representatives to pass, The Washington Post reports. The new social bill framework includes expanded Medicare benefits, clean energy initiatives (just ahead of his attendance Monday at the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland), free pre-kindergarten, child care aid and an extension of the child tax credit. It cuts more extensive Medicare expansion and paid leave for new mothers, WaPo outlines.
The cut for paid leave had gone from 12 weeks initially proposed in the White House’s $3.5-trillion Build Back Better program, to four weeks, before getting spiked altogether.
Presumably, Biden’s latest and maybe final proposal accounts for the ever-shifting demands of Sens. Joe Manchin III, D-WV, and Krysten Sinema, D-AZ. If Biden can get the House to pass both the social spending bill and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill ($550 billion in new spending), the infrastructure bill would be ready to deliver to his desk for signing.
The social program budget reconciliation framework would be completely offset by taxes on multinational corporations’ overseas profits, a minimum tax on the nation’s largest corporations, a surcharge on the highest-income households and new IRS enforcement, Roll Call reports.
Biden is on Air Force One today headed for Rome to meet with Pope Francis. He is also scheduled to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron before heading to Glasgow[CD1] Sunday for the UN climate conference.
Note: The White House really needs a win on bipartisan infrastructure, coming between today’s poor Commerce Department numbers on third-quarter GDP growth and next week’s Virginia elections.
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Report: U.S. Intel Failed to Predict Swift Taliban Takeover – Leading U.S. intelligence agencies failed to predict the Taliban’s rapid takeover of Afghanistan following U.S. military withdrawal, according to a review of nearly two dozen documents from four agencies reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Summaries of classified documents reviewed by the newspaper’s reporters tracked Taliban advances from Spring 2020 to July 2021.
A key example of the documents dated May 17 of this year, a month after President Biden announced the September 11 withdrawal deadline, was titled; “Government at risk of collapse following U.S. withdrawal.”
Note: This recalls U.S. intelligence failures accusing Saddam Hussein of harboring weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, a couple of years into our nearly 20-year commitment to Afghanistan. It seems we’ve learned nothing and done nothing about the shortcomings of our intelligence agencies in the last 18 or so years.
--Edited by Todd Lassa and Charles Dervarics