The House is back to a will they/won’t they situation, trying to determine whether the chamber can pass both the bipartisan infrastructure and reconciliation bills by the end of this week.
It’ll require some intense marshaling of members. Of the House progressives, Rep. Pramilia Jayapal (D-WA) said she wants a promise from President Joe Biden that he has all 50 senators committed to voting for reconciliation before they vote on the bipartisan bill; other members of the caucus want a full Senate reconciliation vote first. A group of moderates including Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-NY) wants 72 hours to read the completed reconciliation bill, and a CBO or a JCT score before the House votes on the package.
Meanwhile, the Senate is stuck in a weird limbo, tying up the last remaining policy loose ends while generally moving at the speed of Manchin.
It’s a predictable move for the red state governor with 2024 aspirations and one who has built his national profile on, essentially, pretending that COVID is just Not A Thing in Florida, despite the state’s staggering death rates from the virus.
Just hours after the White House’s new vaccine mandate officially went into effect – formalizing the Biden administration’s earlier promises to require that employers with 100 or more workers must mandate vaccines or ensure their workers undergo weekly COVID testing – Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his intention to sue over the new rule. The vaccination and weekly negative testing rules for 100-plus employee workplaces will be enforced by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and will impact about 84 million employees around the U.S., according to the White House.
All in all, things went well in court today for the Jan. 6 committee as it tries to enforce a subpoena for Trump presidential records. But there was one moment when the judge missed the significance of scope of the document requests, and the House lawyer didn’t bail her out. Josh Kovensky explains why the committee’s inquiry needs to start with what Trump was doing back in April 2020. Super important.
The Department of Justice on Thursday sued the state of Texas over some of its new voting restrictions, alleging they violate the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act.
Midway through Thursday’s hearing on whether former President Trump can block a subpoena issued by the House Jan. 6 Committee for records from his administration, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan had a question: Why was the panel asking for records going all the way back to April 2020?
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) wants a new, specialty election crimes office to allow police to chase imaginary election fraud cases around the Sunshine State, the latest in months of crackdowns on voting rights in the wake of Donald Trump’s lies about election theft.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate work through Democrats’ loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race and what it means for reconciliation.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
This article was originally published in ProPublica, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom.
As a member of Congress, Jared Polis was one of the loudest Democrats demanding President Donald Trump release his tax returns.
At a rally in Denver in 2017, he warned the crowd that Trump “might have something to hide.” That same year, on the floor of the House, he introduced a resolution to force the president to release the records, calling them an “important baseline disclosure.”
But during Polis’ successful run for governor of Colorado in 2018, his calls for transparency faded. The dot-com tycoon turned investor broke with recent precedent and refused to disclose his returns, blaming his Republican opponent, who wasn’t disclosing his.
Polis may have had other reasons for denying requests to release the records.
In a flurry of statements following Senate Democrats’ lunch this afternoon, we finally saw some substantial movement on reconciliation negotiations — more tangible movement toward an actual deal than we’ve seen in months at this point.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced that members had reached an agreement on the drug pricing provision in the bill, a puzzle piece that has been a sticking point for not just the typical holdouts, Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), but also a few other members of Schumer’s caucus.
Within minutes of that announcement, Sinema released a rather snarky statement confirming she did in fact support the plan. As Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) put it, just minutes before Sinema released her statement of support, all eyes on are now on Manchin.
“Is this the last piece of the puzzle? Ask Manchin,” he said.
Yesterday CNN headlined that President Biden returned to a Democratic “nightmare”. The Times Peter Baker said Biden was returning to a “different country”. There’s no doubt Democrats had a rough night. They lost a close governor’s race in Virginia, a state they have come to see increasingly as home turf. They also narrowly lost control of the state House of Delegates which they first took control of in 2019. And while Democrat Phil Murphy won in New Jersey, Republicans made a very close race of it, in large part by a big drop off in Democrats showing up to vote.
As I wrote Tuesday night, this isn’t a surprising result. The President’s popularity is underwater. Polls say the public sees the country going in the wrong direction – a reality regardless of whether you or I think it is an accurate perception. But let’s also get real: the incumbent President’s party has consistently lost these two governorships every cycle for more than 30 years. The one exception was Terry McAuliffe in 2013. Murphy’s victory in New Jersey sees the first Democrat reelected governor in that state in 44 years.
