House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on Sunday reiterated her criticism of Republicans’ brinksmanship on the debt ceiling amid their refusal to help their Democratic colleagues with suspending it, despite having voted to raise the debt ceiling throughout the Trump administration.
Continue reading “‘Irresponsible Beyond Words’: Pelosi Doubles Down On Slamming GOP’s Debt Ceiling Brinksmanship”Cheney Jabs Trump After Bizarre Photoshop Attack: ‘I Like Presidents Who Win Re-Election’
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) on Sunday hit back at former President Trump ahead of her upcoming fundraiser that former President George W. Bush will headline, following the Arizona sham election “audit” that unsurprisingly confirmed Joe Biden’s victory once again.
Continue reading “Cheney Jabs Trump After Bizarre Photoshop Attack: ‘I Like Presidents Who Win Re-Election’”Half Of Unvaccinated Workers Say They’d Rather Quit Than Get A Shot – But Real-World Data Suggest Few Are Following Through
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It first appeared at The Conversation.
Are workplace vaccine mandates prompting some employees to quit rather than get a shot?
A hospital in Lowville, New York, for example, had to shut down its maternity ward when dozens of staffers left their jobs rather than get vaccinated. At least 125 employees at Indiana University Health resigned after refusing to take the vaccine.
And several surveys have shown that as many as half of unvaccinated workers insist they would leave their jobs if forced to get the shot, which has raised alarms among some that more mandates could lead to an exodus of workers in many industries.
But how many will actually follow through?
Strong words
In June 2021, we conducted a nationwide survey, funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, that gave us a sample of 1,036 people who mirrored the diverse makeup of the U.S. We plan to publish the survey in October.
We asked respondents to tell us what they would do if “vaccines were required” by their employer. We prompted them with several possible actions, and they could check as many as they liked.
We found that 16% of employed respondents would quit, start looking for other employment or both if their employer instituted a mandate. Among those who said they were “vaccine hesitant” – almost a quarter of respondents – we found that 48% would quit or look for another job.
Other polls have shown similar results. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey put the share of workers who would quit at 50%.
Separately, we found in our survey that 63% of all workers said a vaccine mandate would make them feel safer.
Quieter actions
But while it is easy and cost-free to tell a pollster you’ll quit your job, actually doing so when it means losing a paycheck you and your family may depend upon is another matter.
And based on a sample of companies that already have vaccine mandates in place, the actual number who do resign rather than get the vaccine is much smaller than the survey data suggest.
Houston Methodist Hospital, for example, required its 25,000 workers to get a vaccine by June 7. Before the mandate, about 15% of its employees were unvaccinated. By mid-June, that percentage had dropped to 3% and hit 2% by late July. A total of 153 workers were fired or resigned, while another 285 were granted medical or religious exemptions and 332 were allowed to defer it.
At Jewish Home Family in Rockleigh, New Jersey, only five of its 527 workers quit following its vaccine mandate. Two out of 250 workers left Westminster Village in Bloomington, Illinois, and even in deeply conservative rural Alabama, a state with one of the lowest vaccine uptake rates, Hanceville Nursing & Rehab Center lost only six of its 260 employees.
Delta Airlines didn’t mandate a shot, but in August it did subject unvaccinated workers to a US$200 per month health insurance surcharge. Yet the airline said fewer than 2% of employees have quit over the policy.
And at Indiana University Health, the 125 workers who quit are out of 35,800 total employees, or 0.3%.
Making it easy
Past vaccine mandates, such as for the flu, have led to similar outcomes: Few people actually quit their jobs over them.
And our research suggests in public communications there are a few things employers can do to minimize the number of workers who quit over the policy.
It starts with building trust with employees. Companies should also make it as easy as possible to get vaccinated – such as by providing on-site vaccine drives, paid time off to get the shot and deal with side effects, and support for child care or transportation.
Finally, research shows it helps if companies engage trusted messengers including doctors, colleagues and family to share information on the vaccine.
In other words, vaccine mandates are unlikely to result in a wave of resignations – but they are likely to lead to a boost in vaccination rates.
Jack J. Barry is a postdoctoral research associate in Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida.
Ann Christiano is the director of the Center for Public Interest Communications at the University of Florida.
Annie Neimand is a research director and digital strategist for frank at the College of Journalism and Communications of the University of Florida.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Republicans Are Forcing Democrats To Deal With Debt Limit Alone. But Will Dems Be Able To Do It?
As a consequence of Republicans’ highly irresponsible game of chicken with the debt ceiling, it’s looking increasingly like Democrats will have to raise the debt limit on their own through reconciliation.
A bill temporarily suspending the debt ceiling and keeping the government funded will come to the floor Monday, but Republican senators have gleefully previewed their coming filibuster. The bill will almost certainly fail.
That leaves it to Democrats to be the only party responsible enough not to risk global economic catastrophe in favor of causing the opposing party a little political pain. And they won’t have long to do it. While it’s hard to pin down exactly when the Treasury will exhaust its “extraordinary measures” to keep paying our bills, experts estimate it will likely happen sometime in October.
Much of the way forward is uncharted, punctuated with the jagged rocks of bad Republican actors, procedural hurdles and an unelected parliamentarian-turned-king of the Senate.
The Procedural And The Political
The fundamental question — can Democrats raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation? — has separate procedural and political answers. Procedurally, experts gave TPM a resounding yes.
It comes down to the Congressional Budget Act, the law that created reconciliation. It determines that in one year, there can be up to three different reconciliation bills: one on taxes, one on spending and one on the debt limit. So Democrats could do their x-trillion dollar “infrastructure” bill and a separate one raising the debt limit.
This is distinctly different from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) attempt to eke out multiple reconciliation vehicles per year earlier in 2021.
“The problem with Schumer’s request earlier in the year is that he wanted to do spending on multiple reconciliation bills for the same year,” David Super, a professor at Georgetown Law School, told TPM. “That you can’t do.”
Similarly, if Democrats were to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, they couldn’t do another debt ceiling hike through the process this year. But as long as the bills fit into those different categories as governed by the Budget Act, they’re kosher.
“As an option, I don’t think its legal or procedural availability is controversial,” Super added.
Experts think Democrats could also tuck the debt ceiling lift into the current reconciliation package they’re working on, though that option may be politically more fraught.
Parliamentarian Is King
Just because it would procedurally work doesn’t mean Democrats like it. While there is robust precedent for raising the debt ceiling through reconciliation — it’s happened at least four times, Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown’s Government Affairs Institute, told TPM — there is none for suspending or abolishing it.
“Many folks think that Democrats could not suspend the debt limit to a date in the future via reconciliation and that they could only raise it by a fixed amount, though there is some uncertainty here,” Molly Reynolds, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, told TPM.
The attack ads write themselves — or so Democrats seem to fear. Vulnerable Democrats are loath to see their names tied to some scary number in the trillions, although raising the debt ceiling is not actually creating new debt, just covering what we’ve already spent.
Even if Democrats opt not to fight for suspending or abolishing the debt limit, just raising it won’t be easy. Because they didn’t include a debt ceiling hike in the budget resolution governing the reconciliation package, they would now need to go back and amend it.
The picture is further complicated by a ruling Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough made a few months ago. The opinion, which Georgetown’s Glassman called “extremely vague and controversial, with which a lot of people disagree” is that an amendment to the budget resolution can’t be auto-discharged out of the Senate Budget Committee.
In normal situations, the budget resolution gets automatically put on the Senate calendar if the committee hasn’t acted by a certain date. Without that mechanism, the Republicans on the evenly split committee could boycott it and deprive it of a quorum.
It wouldn’t make much sense for Republicans to interfere like that, since Democrats hiking the ceiling alone in reconciliation is what they profess to want. But they could.
The Clock Is Ticking
Then there’s also the matter of timing.
Rep. John Yarmuth (R-KY) said this week that there isn’t time for Democrats to include the debt ceiling hike in their reconciliation package before the United States hits its borrowing limit, a process which will involve amending the budget resolution and getting it through committee, getting instructions to various committees with the legislation to hike the debt ceiling, hours of debate and a vote-a-rama.
“We cannot be certain when the Treasury hits the absolute end of its ability to juggle,” Rich Arenberg, director of Brown University’s Taubman Center for Politics and Policy, told TPM. “There might very well be insufficient time to choreograph the necessary steps in the budget process to get it done in time.”
If any of those political or procedural hurdles stop Democrats from addressing the debt ceiling in reconciliation, an alarming problem becomes a full-blown crisis.
“If that route is truly shut off, what’s left?” Glassman asked. “Just nuking the filibuster, or having some kind of showdown with Republicans with the stock market ticker on the floor and daring them to filibuster it.”
Top Dems Keep Working To Put Out Fires Sparked By Centrists Over Reconciliation
Democratic leadership continues to grapple with the mess party moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) have made as they play politics with the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package containing President Joe Biden’s sweeping agenda for infrastructure.
The clock is ticking; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) promised to bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill to a vote on Monday, per centrists’ demands, and it’s extremely unlikely the reconciliation bill will be finished by then. As such, progressives are threatening to sink the bipartisan legislation if their moderate colleagues successfully derail Biden’s two-track approach with infrastructure reform.
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Wailing And Gnashing Of Teeth: Trumpers React To Draft ‘Audit’ Report Showing Biden Win
Trump supporters — particularly those with large platforms and, often, something to sell — spent months hyping up the sham “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona’s election results as the first domino to fall: First Arizona, then Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and so on would acknowledge that Trump, in fact, had been robbed of a second term in office. Perhaps, they mused, the audit would even result in a “decertification” of the election.
But, according to drafts of the final audit tally circulating Friday, the report offered little comfort: Biden won, according to the inexperienced and politically biased auditors’ work, by more votes than the official count.
That left the most fervent election truthers in a difficult position: What to say?
Some trashed the process as impossibly biased from the start.
“When the audit began, it was clear the boxes had a possibility of being compromised,” Liz Harris, a right-wing activist whose own door-to-door canvassing effort in Arizona was cited in the audit report, wrote on Telegram.
Many audit supporters gravitated towards sections of the report that claimed the number of “potential ballots impacted” by various problems numbered in the tens of thousands.
Peter Navarro, a former White House advisor who for months has claimed there was widespread election fraud in 2020, jumped on those figures to try to sell yet another book, “In Trump Time.”
“Results of the official Arizona audit confirm that there were over 50,000 potentially illegal ballots in Arizona’s Maricopa County alone,” he said — before bragging the numbers “closely match” theories espoused in his new book.
But even there, the report is weak on its own terms. The largest single number of in-question ballots, 15,035, comes from “mail-in votes from voters who moved within Maricopa County prior to the registration deadline.” In other words: Maricopa County voters who voted… in Maricopa County. The auditors also admitted to using “commercially available data” rather than the official county records to cross-check voters, a practice that one elections consultant told the Arizona Republic was sloppy.
Other efforts by Trump fans to dig up some MAGA-world positives in the report were similarly meager.
Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington, for example, noted that the report found 10,342 Arizona voters with the same names and birth years. She claimed, and the report implied, that this showed people who “voted in multiple counties.” But there’s a simpler explanation: Lots of people share names and ages. The Washington Post on Friday found four 43-year-old John Smiths living in Arizona, for instance. Maricopa County itself responded to the report in part by noting the 12 voters statewide with the name Maria Garcia who were born in 1980.
10,342 voters "with the same first, middle, last name and birth year" voted in multiple counties
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) September 24, 2021
Duplicate voters pic.twitter.com/AJHSRBOe3L
In this sense, the audit failed: Not only did it count Biden’s victory, but even its attempts to sow doubts about its own findings and the official results are fairly weak and rehearsed.
But for Trump supporters desperate to keep the fiction going — particularly those who’ve staked their political campaigns on the Big Lie — the show needed to go on.
Responding to the disappointing report, they ignored the bad news and acted as if it had affirmed their prior assumptions. And, therefore: Audits, forever and always.
“Now that the audit of Maricopa is wrapping up, we need to Audit Pima County – the 2nd largest county in AZ,” Mark Finchem, a member of the state legislature and the Trump-endorsed candidate for Arizona secretary of state tweeted. He urged readers to sign his “petition” for a Pima County audit — one that would give his campaign their personal information.
A state representative from Florida used the report to call for audits in every state in the country.
As did Eric Greitens, the disgraced former governor of Missouri now running for U.S. Senate.
Others, having exhausted their options for slicing and dicing the report, simply went the bumper sticker route. Christina Bobb, the One America News Network anchor, fundraised for the audit while covering it:
And Kelli Ward is the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party:
TPM’s Publisher Joe Ragazzo: Five Books That Changed How I Saw The World
We’re asking our fellow TPMers to share their own personal reading recommendations: books they love or that have shaped their lives. Comment below with some of your favorites! Also: You can always purchase any of the books by visiting our TPM Bookshop profile page.
Our publisher Joe Ragazzo is first up. Here are five books that changed how he sees the world. Continue reading “TPM’s Publisher Joe Ragazzo: Five Books That Changed How I Saw The World”
Meet The First Trump Cronies Subpoenaed By The Jan. 6 Committee
The House select committee investigating the Capitol insurrection has issued its first batch of subpoenas, homing in on further unearthing the White House’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on Congress.
The panel released the witness subpoenas last night, demanding documents from and interviews with Steve Bannon, Mark Meadows, Kash Patel, and Dan Scavino.
Continue reading “Meet The First Trump Cronies Subpoenaed By The Jan. 6 Committee”Audit Backfires! Trumpy Sham Election ‘Audit’ Counts More Votes For Biden, Drafts Show
After months of overdue ballot tallying and millions of dollars raised by right-wing influencers eager to prove that the 2020 election was stolen, the sham “audit” of Maricopa County, Arizona… asserted that Joe Biden earned more votes than the official result.
Poisoning The Well
We are now down to the crunch time on the Biden agenda. And we don’t know how it will turn out. But there are two aspects of the story which have been quite damaging for the Democrats. They’re worth discussing.
The first is one we’ve discussed before but in a different context. It’s largely a press failure. But it’s one Democrats could do more to fix. For months we’ve had this intra-party debate presented as one between “progressives” and “moderates.” Often that gets personalized as AOC and Bernie versus Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. This is demonstrably false. The overall package is supported overwhelmingly by Democrats in both chambers and pretty much across all factions. There are some quibbles about SALT taxes and the scope of the climate package. Some more middle-of-the-road Dems resist making some of the social programs permanent. Those are real and potentially consequential differences. But they’re all negotiable. The important point is that this package is the consensus position, supported by virtually everyone. It is after all the President’s agenda. Literally. And, as much as these labels confound more than they clarify, President Biden isn’t from AOC’s wing of the party.
Continue reading “Poisoning The Well”