Many people believed that Joe Biden would never be able to get 10 Republicans to agree to a bipartisan mini-bill deal without also agreeing to jettison most of the rest of his fiscal/infrastructure/climate agenda. They figured that these efforts would eventually fail. Once it had failed, Biden would then go to the bipartisanists and say, “Look, we tried. It didn’t work. Now we pour everything into the reconciliation bill.”
That wasn’t a bad plan. It was just another way to get to passing the agenda. In any case, that’s what many people believed. I was one of them. I was wrong.
This is what I mean by Biden having his cake and eating it too.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t think it was impossible, just unlikely. But they both get you to the same end goal.
Most of us have understandably and rightly been focused on the new House select committee as the investigation that will get to the heart of the January 6th insurrection and the coup plot that preceded and created it. We’re right to. Indeed, before the new committee was impanelled I’d gotten used to hearing about this and that one-off hearing, most focused on security lapses on January 6th itself, and had been semi-tuning them out. But as I’ve learned from my colleagues in recent days, there’s more going on in the Senate than I realized.
You’ve probably noticed we’re making more use of our new live blog feature in recent weeks. That’s along with a number of other changes and fine-tunings we’ve introduced in recent months as we try to evolve and improve TPM – evolve with the news environment, technology and how people most want to consume news. There’s no final state, no best way to do things that doesn’t change. This is our effort to constantly improve how we bring you the news and that’s possible because of your membership. That’s how we finance all of this. And that’s why this month I’m encouraging all Prime members to try the two week free trial we’re offering of Prime Ad Free (AF).
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Former White House chief-of-staff Mark Meadows was one of Trump’s top henchmen pushing the DOJ to buy into his conspiracy theory of a stolen election — that is, when Trump wasn’t doing the dirty work himself.
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One of the most interesting and clarifying discussions I’ve read in recent weeks is Dr. Monica Gandhi’s discussion of the difference between ‘colonization’ and ‘infection’ in thinking about what counts as a case of COVID. It’s conceptually interesting but also highly relevant both for the choices we make balancing risk as individuals as well as how we approach the vaccine phase of the pandemic in policy terms.
As Gandhi tells it, in many cases a vaccinated individual will be exposed to COVID and have the pathogen briefly colonize their nasal passages. But vaccine-induced immunity will fight and defeat the virus there. Is that an infection or a case? If you take a PCR test, you’ll test positive. But Gandhi says we’re confusing things by treating it as one.
Gandhi is an infectious disease specialist and we spoke with her this morning in an Inside Briefing about this and related topics.
If you’re a TPM member you can watch our full interview after the jump.
JoinThis is perhaps a minor point. But I want to return to it. A key reason we’re experiencing the fourth COVID wave in the US – albeit one that has far less hospitalizations and deaths thanks to vaccines – is that way too many people still haven’t gotten vaccinated. From an epidemiological perspective we’re not nearly where we want to be. But as we talk about the political polarization over vaccines, things are a bit different.
Among Americans over the age of 18 fully 71% have gotten at least one vaccine dose.
Missouri senator and presidential aspirant Josh Hawley, best known for giving a thumbs up to the January 6 rioters and trying to overturn the November election, has now joined Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and Texas Governor Greg Abbott in furthering the spread of the pandemic. Hawley is sponsoring an amendment to the infrastructure bill that would restrict federal funding for K-12 schools that mandate Covid-19 vaccines for students or require students to wear masks.
We did a fascinating Inside Briefing this morning with Dr. Monica Gandhi discussing vaccines, different layers of the human immune system and what really counts as an infection. It’s really critical information when thinking about personal decisions about risk and about policies for society at large. Thanks to the Inside members who joined for the discussion. We’ll be publishing the full interview for all members either later today or at latest tomorrow. Don’t miss it.
At TPM, we’ve been harping on the fact that the whole bipartisan back-and-forth that unfolded over the last two months — and that might conclude early tomorrow morning — doesn’t really matter that much. It’s the reconciliation package that matters. If it passes in a form similar to what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer outlined this morning, it would be the most significant progressive legislation in at least a decade.
It might also be the last significant progressive legislation for at least a decade.
As we’ve been discussing there is a paucity of information on the precise effectiveness of vaccines vs the Delta variant and the contours of the pandemic in the new circumstances of the last eight weeks or so. We know in general that vaccines continue to be highly effective at preventing severe illness. But the details are not as easy as they should be to come by. This seems to be both the product of very new facts which studies are only catching up with and a continued paucity of good national data from the CDC. That vacuum is filled by anecdotal information.