Monday Wake Up Call – Infrastructure Edition, March 15, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Ruby Beach Overlook, Olympic NP, WA – 2021 photo by Erwin Buske

Back in pre-history or as Wrongo likes to call it, 2004, John Edwards said that there were two Americas. He was talking about social stratification and its pernicious impact on social cohesion in America.

Biden and Congress have just passed the American Recovery Plan into law. It provides a temporary assistance to many Americans, particularly for those in the two Americas who are struggling in our economy. As Wrongo said yesterday, although total wages are now at the level they were before the Covid recession, almost 10 million fewer Americans are working! If we are to be a healthy society, these people need jobs.

Listening to Republicans, there’s no money left in the piggy bank to fund the rest of what America needs to do. They say our debt is too high, and that it would be a terrible mistake to raise taxes on corporations or the wealthy to fund our needs.

Yet, something must be done about the disaster that is America’s infrastructure. Biden has said that improving and modernizing our infrastructure is a high priority for his administration. He campaigned on a $2 trillion infrastructure plan to create a:

“modern, sustainable infrastructure and an equitable clean energy future.”

But there is a huge chasm between where we are and where we need to go. From the WaPo: (parenthesis by Wrongo)

“America can put a rover on Mars, but it can’t keep the lights on and water running in the city that birthed the modern space program (Houston). It can develop vaccines….to combat a world-altering illness but suffers one of the developed world’s highest death rates due to lack of prevention and care.”

America’s recent historic breakthroughs in science, medicine and technology coexist alongside monumental failures of infrastructure, public health, and education. More from the WaPo: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The disparities reflect a multitude of factors…but primarily stem from a few big ones: Compared with other well-to-do nations, the US has tended to prioritize private wealth over public resources, individualism over equity and the shiny new thing over the dull but necessary task of maintaining its infrastructure, much of which is fast becoming a 20th century relic.”

One of our two Americas pays a heavier price for our politicians’ unwillingness to build new infrastructure. Yet politicians kick the can down the road, since higher taxes to fix things is rarely a winning political strategy.

From highways to airports, from internet access to schools, to the electric grid, our infrastructure isn’t distributed equally. Even in richer zip codes, infrastructure quality is uneven. The myth that America treats everyone equally regardless of race, color, or creed is as decrepit as our bridges and highways.

Americans used to be proud of their infrastructure. But since Reagan, Republicans have believed that government spending is a problem. Loving new roads, bridges and tunnels changed to outright suspicion when austerity became the Republican religion.

They are always willing to cut taxes by $trillions to further enrich wealthy people. But they scoff at building a high-speed rail network, a high-speed internet network, or an integrated electric grid. If you’ve ever traveled through a Chinese airport, or traveled by rail in Europe, you have experienced awesome infrastructure projects, things that are normal in most developed nations.

Yet in America, we’re far behind, mostly because Republicans put growing personal wealth ahead of supporting the public good. Much of this hurts the bottom half of the US population more than the top half. It hurts rural America more than urban and suburban America. Most suburbs are as modern and safe as any major city in Europe or Asia. Their public schools are modern and largely well-equipped.

None of these are true in rural or inner-city America.

The time has come to address infrastructure. At least some of it must be paid for by new taxes, even if that means zero Republican political support.

Time to wake up America! We can do better for both Americas by investing in education, infrastructure, and people. And we can give some of those 10 million long-term unemployed workers a new opportunity to succeed in a growing US economy.

To help you wake up, let’s go back to the 1980s, and listen to the Eurythmics do a live version of “Would I Lie to You”. High energy and lots of fun:

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HR 1 Must Pass in the Senate

The Daily Escape:

Florida Beach – photo by Wrongo. Most years, we’re in FL looking at the ocean this week. That’s another thing cancelled by Covid.

The House passed HR 1, the “For the People Act,” an omnibus voting rights, and ethics and campaign finance bill. If passed by the Senate and signed by Biden, the legislation would set national standards for federal elections, require nonpartisan redistricting, and put the brakes on hundreds of bills introduced by Republican legislatures across the country to limit ballot access in the wake of Democrats gaining control of Congress and the White House.

Jonathan Last says that Senate Democrats now must make three calculations as they decide whether to take up the legislation:

  1. Do they have the votes to pass it?
  2. Do they have the votes to break the filibuster?
  3. If the answers to (1) and (2) are yes, should they move forward?

Let’s assume for the sake of this discussion that the answers to (1) and (2) are yes. Then, of course they should move forward! Last observes that:

  • We have one party with a small—but clear, and durable—majority.
  • We have another party that has given up on trying to create a majority and instead has retreated into attempts to use systemic leverage—of both geography and anti-democratic gerrymandering — to preserve power for their minority.

Last says the only counter to the Republican’s efforts to game the system is to use the system to create more democracy — to lessen the points of leverage available to Republicans.

So, the Senate must pass HR 1. That expands voting. It moves the leverage away from politics and for the first time in America, towards the people. Last brings up a NY Magazine interview with David Shor, where he says:

“Since the maps in the House of Representatives are so biased against us, if we don’t pass a redistricting reform, our chance of keeping the House is very low. And then the Senate is even more biased against us than the House. So, it’s also very important that we add as many states as we can.”

So, if Democrats can kill the filibuster and pass HR 1, a next step is to bring up statehood for DC and Puerto Rico. Republicans will howl, but as Last says, if the Dems have learned anything in the last four years it’s that there are only two relevant questions when Congress acts:

  • Are you explicitly forbidden from doing something by the black letter of the law?
  • Do you have the votes to do it?

If the answer is No to the first and Yes to the second, then you can do it. That is exactly what Republicans did every time in the Trump era. Remember Merrick Garland, and Amy Coney Barrett? Remember that members of the Trump administration refused to testify in front of House committees?

Remember too that the Constitution allows Congress to add states by simple majority vote. If Democrats have the votes, then they can also do that. Republicans aren’t the only Party who can use the political leverage available in our system.

The difference would be that Republicans have used that leverage to empower electoral minorities, while the Democrats in this case, could use that leverage to empower electoral majorities.

Vote suppression is the Republican’s default position. They have become truly authoritarian, despite continuing to give lip service to the Constitution and to democratic principles. January 6 taught us that the only election reform Republicans will unanimously accept is one that declares its candidates the winners regardless of the election’s results.

To do any of this, the Senate Democrats need to be united, and that is the most important test for new Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) laid out the case for getting rid of the filibuster:

“We have a raw exercise of political power going on where people are making it harder to vote and you just can’t let that happen in a democracy because of some old rules in the Senate…”

Schumer’s task is to corral Democrats Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ). Surely, they see the Republican Party’s antidemocratic bad faith. The Republican Party is no longer republican.

As Wrongo has said before, Jan. 6 should have shattered any illusions about the intentions, not just of Trump and his dead enders, but about the Republican Party’s allegiance to our Constitutional republic.

Democrats must act accordingly. And as soon as possible.

The course of action available to them won’t be an option in 2022 after the GOP passes all the voter suppression legislation that they now have pending.

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Monday Wake Up Call – February 15, 2021

The Daily Escape:

Nauset Light, Cape Cod, MA  – February 2021 photo by Michael Blanchette photography

The impeachment trial is behind us, but the Big Lie of the 2020 election, that there was massive voting fraud, remains with us. That Lie is propelling Republicans in many states to try to minimize, or end entirely, mail-in voting.

Republicans have reason to worry. Mail-in voting alone constituted nearly half the votes cast in the 2020 election, a significant increase from previous years. This chart from 538 shows the remarkable decline in same-day voting in America:

Traditional same day, in-person voting has dropped from more than 90% of ballots cast in the 1990s to 60% in 2016, to just 28% in 2020. Early in-person and vote-by-mail now accounts for 71% of total voting.

Overall, despite the Big Lie, early and by mail voting was a remarkable success. It was less prone to errors than expected, and had almost zero documented fraud. As expected, 538 reports that absentee votes broke blue, Election Day votes, red. They only have data for 15 of the 50 states, but it is consistent:

“Biden won the absentee vote in 14 out of the 15 states (all but Texas), and Trump won the Election Day vote in 14 out of the 15 as well (all but Connecticut).”

Trump used this historic change in voting patterns to claim that Democrats used mail ballots to steal the election. Now, in a backlash to the historic trends in voter turnout, Republicans are again looking to make it more difficult to vote.

A new report by the Brennan Center for Justice shows that legislators in 33 states have introduced 165 bills to restrict voting rights. The proposals primarily seek to: a) limit mail voting access; b) impose stricter voter ID requirements; c) slash voter registration opportunities; and d) enable more aggressive voter roll purges.

Many of these bills parrot the same lies Trump used to claim the election was stolen. And they’re sponsored by the same state officials who backed Trump’s efforts to reverse the results of the election.

Remember how narrow the Biden win was: he won three states by a combined margin of 43,560 votes: Arizona (10,457 votes), Georgia (12,636 votes), and Wisconsin (20,467 votes). These three states have 37 electoral votes, and had Trump won all three, the Electoral College would have been tied, 269 to 269. Then the House would have determined the winner, with each state delegation getting one vote. Since the Republicans hold a majority of state delegations, Trump would have won a second term.

It was worse. The WaPo reports that

“Republicans came, at most, 43,000 votes from winning each of the three levers of power.”

Just 32,000 votes would have flipped control of the House to Republicans, while 14,000 votes would have kept control of the Senate in Republican hands. The Republicans have a built-in structural advantage in all three political levers of power: In the House it’s gerrymandering; in the Senate it’s the population imbalance favoring rural states; and in the White House, it’s the Electoral College.

So, beating back voting restrictions has to be a top priority.

Republicans have been restricting voting for years. We were lucky that state and local election officials acted in the best interests of the people and the country. That may not happen next time, so these anti-democratic pieces of legislation must be highlighted publicly and fought tooth-and-nail.

Think for a minute about last week’s impeachment trial: 34 GOP senators representing just 14.5% of the US population can block the conviction of an impeached president. Said another way, the 57 senators who voted to convict Trump represent 76.7 million more Americans than the 43 senators who voted to acquit him.

We should also remember that every state sets its own rules when it comes to voting and counting the votes. And we’ll soon see the impact of Republican gerrymandering, once the 2020 census is complete. The long-term solution is a Constitutional amendment that finally establishes that all citizens have the right to vote, and describes the approved methods of voting.

Time to wake up America! Voting reform must be a top priority just behind beating the Coronavirus and getting kids back in school. To help you wake up, listen to John Fogerty perform his newest, “Weeping In The Promised Land“, released this January:

Partial Lyrics:

Forked-tongued pharaoh, behold he comes to speak

Weeping in the Promised Land

Hissing and spewing, it’s power that he seeks

Weeping in the Promised Land

With dread in their eyes, all the nurses are crying

So much sorrow, so much dying

Pharaoh keep a-preaching but he never had a plan

Weeping in the Promised Land

Weeping in the Promised Land

This is another very powerful video, a must-watch.

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How Will The Senate Operate When It’s 50/50?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Cranberry Peak, ME – 2021 photo by njhcomposer

The secret to happiness is freedom… And the secret to freedom is courage.” – Thucydides

Why can’t Republicans just say “Biden won”?

Wednesday night’s Trump video didn’t include the only sentence that might matter to the health of our democracy. He should have said: Joe Biden won the presidential election legitimately, and I congratulate him; he will be our president now.

Even Congressional Republicans are having a tough time saying the words.

What has happened to the GOP? Are they so afraid of their voters? The 10 GOP votes to impeach Trump for a second time was the largest bipartisan impeachment vote in history. In 1999, only five House Democrats voted to impeach Clinton, and three of them later became Republicans. No Democrat in the Senate voted to convict Clinton.

Back in the 1860s, all of Andrew Johnson’s fellow Democrats stood by him during his impeachment and kept him from conviction.

So impeachment #2 was a small but significant break with the near-total support Trump enjoyed exactly one year ago at his first impeachment. Back then, only Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted to convict him. What House impeachment manager Adam Schiff (D-CA) did was prophetic. He asked Republicans to look to the future:

“…you know you can’t trust this President to do what’s right for this country. You can trust he will do what’s right for Donald Trump. He’ll do it now. He’s done it before. He’ll do it for the next several months. He’ll do it in the election if he’s allowed to.”

Why so few GOP House votes for impeachment? Many Republicans lacked moral courage, while a few actually said they feared for their lives if they voted to impeach. OTOH, no one should harbor the illusion that only Republicans receive death threats.

So think about what Thucydides says above: courage is the secret to preserving freedom.

If America is ever to be free of Trump, if America is ever going to free itself from fearing Trump’s armed and dangerous followers, our lawmakers need to be courageous.

All eyes now turn to the Senate, where Republicans will have the majority until inauguration day. After Jan. 20, Kamala Harris will become president of the Senate, while Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will be Majority Leader with the responsibility of guiding the Democratic agenda through what will be a 50/50 Party division of Senators.

This is a rare event; it’s only the fourth time in history that the Senate has been evenly divided.

That means Schumer and outgoing Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell will first have to agree on a set of rules, known as an organizing resolution, which will govern how the Senate will operate. The organizing resolution determines everything from committee assignments and staff budgets, to who gets the best office space.

The last time we had a 50/50 Senate was in 2001, and a lot has changed in the 20 years since then. That 2001 power sharing agreement was between Republican Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi and Democrat Sen. Tom Daschle of South Dakota. Their power-sharing agreement lasted for about five months, until Sen. Jim Jeffords, (then R-VT) became an independent, and caucused with the Democrats. At that point, the Democrats had a clear majority.

The Lott/Daschle agreement will be the starting point in the negotiations between Schumer and McConnell. The 2001 agreement provided for equal numbers of members on Senate committees, with a process for discharging bills and nominations that were deadlocked. From Trent Lott:

“If there was a tie vote in committee, either one of us could take it to the floor,”

At the time, that gave the Republicans a narrow advantage on setting the agenda.

This time, the same rule could be advantageous for Democrats. The 2001 agreement also provided for equal levels of staffing as well as office space, which may be less complicated in 2021, given the extent of remote work by Senate staff during the Covid pandemic.

The negotiation on an organizing resolution is complicated by the looming Senate impeachment trial.

Biden is rightly concerned about his agenda being stalled or slowed by the trial. He has said that he would like to see a “bifurcated” process on the Senate floor:

“Can we go half-day on dealing with impeachment, and half-day getting my people nominated and confirmed in the Senate…?”

Right now, Senate committees are still controlled by the GOP until the new organizing resolutions are adopted. Those Republican committee chairs are taking their time regarding scheduling hearings for Biden’s Cabinet picks.

We’ll see how far courage takes us in the new 117th Congress.

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Demographic Analysis of Pro-Trump Congressional Districts

The Daily Escape:

Three Sisters, Goblin Valley State Park, UT – photo by jonnyboy_wanderlust

As Wrongo writes this, the House has voted for a second Trump Impeachment. The process began with votes on rules and procedures. Most Republicans argued that impeachment would be divisive. That’s rich, given that for four years they have supported and encouraged the divisive lies and actions of Donald Trump.

But now, it’s suddenly critical that we “heal.” Of course it is.

A majority of House Republicans objected to the certification of Electoral College votes from the swing states of Arizona and Pennsylvania. Even more Republicans voted against the House motion to ask Mike Pence to begin the process required by the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.

Now it’s on to a second impeachment. A grand total of ten House Republicans (out of 211) voted along with all House Democrats to impeach Trump. According to the WaPo, McConnell has decided not to convene the Senate for an emergency trial, meaning the trial will fall to the newly Democrat-controlled Senate after January 20.

Back to the House Republicans: Jacob Whiton wrote an interesting demographic and economic analysis of the constituencies represented by the 139 House Republicans who objected to the certification of at least one state’s Electoral College results. His aim is to clarify the demographics of where right-wing authoritarianism has taken root. Overall he found that:

“The Republican Party’s most Pro-Trump House members have been elected by…white homeowners in the fast-growing exurban fringe. They feel the social status traditionally associated with their identity as white Christians is being degraded and that left wing political movements pose a threat to their livelihoods and political power. In reaction, they have lashed themselves to a movement within the Republican Party led by President Trump that seeks to defend the privileges of property-owning white Americans in our political system, economy, and public life.”

The districts represented by the most committed Pro-Trump Republicans are fast-growing, rapidly diversifying suburbs. Places where inequalities between white homeowners and their non-white neighbors have been shrinking, and where low voter turnout has helped deliver reliable Republican victories.

Residents of objectors’ districts are more than twice as likely as residents of other Republican districts to live in “sparse suburban areas.” These districts are among the fastest-growing districts in the country, with population growth outpacing that in districts represented by Democrats or other Republicans over the last 20 years.

Almost all of this growth has been among non-white groups, specifically Latinos and Asian Americans, resulting in a dramatic shift in the demographic composition of these districts:

In the objectors’ districts, residents under the age of 18 are 3.6 times more likely to be Hispanic and 1.6 times more likely to be Black or Asian American than those over the age of 65. This means that in these districts, debates about Social Security and Medicare, public education and housing are highly polarized.

District constituents of the Republican objectors tend to have the lowest levels of formal educational attainment. In their districts, on average, 68% of white homeowners do not have a four-year degree and their median home value is the lowest:

Whites in Republican objectors’ districts are considerably more likely to own their own home and earn higher incomes than other racial groups, except for Asian Americans. But White homeowners’ perception of loss of status relative to upwardly mobile Hispanic and Asian American households is a key social context which is driving Trumpism’s nativist politics.

White evangelical Christians have been Trump’s most unwavering base of support. In more than half of Republican objectors’ districts, evangelicals account for at least a fifth of constituents, making them far more likely to represent evangelicals in Congress than other Republicans or Democrats.

White evangelical Protestants stand far apart in their politics. The Public Religion Research Institute’s 2020 American Values survey found that they are the only group where a majority expresses a preference for living in a country “made up of people who follow the Christian faith”.

They are the only group for whom abortion and terrorism rank in their top three most important issues. They are also the least likely to agree that President Trump has encouraged white supremacist groups, although a majority of Americans overall do.

Whiton found that workers in the Republican objectors’ districts are more likely to be employed in sectors of the economy Trump has routinely identified as most threatened by the political left: mining and oil and natural gas extraction, heavy manufacturing, and law enforcement.

Whiton concludes with a note of optimism: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“The fact that Republican objectors command the least popular support among their own constituents of any congressional elected officials in the country is both a testament to their effectiveness in entrenching their own power and also the foundation on which we must ground our hopes for political change to end minority rule.”

Perhaps we should focus our voter turnout activities in these Republican objectors’ districts.

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Saturday Soother – December 12, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Cathedral Spires, Black Hills SD – 2020 photo by Max Foster

We’re stumbling into another December weekend without a bailout package for those who are still unemployed in the pandemic. The WaPo’s headline says it all: “More Americans are shoplifting food as aid runs out during the pandemic.” This is caused at least in part, by people going without jobs or unemployment insurance while waiting for the Senate and Mitch McConnell to come up with a bill that provides Americans the aid they need.

But the biggest news of the week was that the Supreme Court declined to hear the case brought by Texas asking the Court to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and declare Trump to be the winner. The Supreme Court wrote:

“The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot,”

In case you’re wondering, Trump’s three new appointments didn’t support hearing the case. Whoever talked Trump out of appointing his kids, Eric, Ivanka and Junior to the Court had better lay low for the next few days. The Supreme Court deserves credit for rejecting an attempt to destroy American democracy, but many of those Republicans who joined the lawsuit, deserve our harshest judgment.

Adam Sewer of The Atlantic tweeted:

People have argued that because Trump hasn’t overturned an election, that we can now relax: The “system worked”, there were no tanks in the streets. But Republicans chose sides this week. More than half (126) of the Republicans in the House of Representatives signed onto Texas’s failed lawsuit, along with 17 Republican attorneys-general. Republicans must own up to their anti-democratic actions.

Once this is over, and Trump is living in Florida and is acting as president-in-exile, we’ll need to hold all of his seditious minions accountable. Unsurprisingly, this failed lawsuit came from the Party that claims to oppose “judicial activism.”

But enough of all of this big news, Wrongo was attracted to an Ars Technica story that reported on researchers teaching lab rats to drive little electric cars. The research was aimed at learning what effect the environment a rat was raised in had on its ability to learn new tasks. The team, led by Richmond University professor Kelly Lambert, decided to teach them to drive not just navigate another maze.

But if you’re going to teach rats to drive, first you need to build them a car (an ROV or, Rat Operated Vehicle). The chassis and powertrain came from a robot car kit, and a transparent plastic food container provided the body:

The controls were three copper wires stretched across an opening cut out of the front, with an aluminum plate on the floor. When a rat stood on the plate and gripped a copper bar, a circuit was completed, and the motors engaged: one bar made the car turn to the left, one made it turn to the right, and the third made it go straight ahead. Sounds hard, but it didn’t take long for the rats to learn how to drive. Their goal was to drive the car to a food treat.

The rats had three five-minute training sessions a week for eight weeks, and they learned to drive!

The placement of the treat and the starting position and orientation of the car varied, so the rats had a different challenge each time. At the end of the experiment, each rat went through a series of trials, conducted a few days apart, where they were allowed to drive around the arena. One experiment had them driving without food treats, to see if they were only doing driving to get food.

Some who were quicker to start driving continued to be more interested in driving, even when there was no reward beyond the feel of moving without using their feet.

Uber is excited by this news and may try to replace human drivers. It’s their Holy Grail: drivers that do it for the love of driving and don’t ask for pay, benefits, or even treats.

On to the weekend! We’re finishing up the Christmas decorations in the Mansion of Wrong, although there will be very few visitors this time. So grab an ornament, and listen to the Dave Brubeck Quartet play “Take Five” from their 1959 ground-breaking album, “Time Out”. The tune was written by Paul Desmond, here on alto saxophone, Brubeck on piano, Teo Macero, drums and Eugene Wright on bass. Have a martini on the house:

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Will Congress Act on Funding Before Christmas?

The Daily Escape:

Turkey Pond, near Concord, NH – November 2020 photo by panasthropodism

The last time Congress passed a COVID relief bill was over seven months ago. This week, a bipartisan group of Senators revealed a new $908 billion stimulus proposal. This reflects a substantial cave-in by Democrats and House Speaker Pelosi, (D-CA) whose last offer was about $2.2 trillion.

Whether it goes forward depends on Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) finding agreement, and then getting Trump to sign off. Pelosi and McConnell talked on Thursday about how to find common ground on both a funding bill to keep the government’s doors open, and on another coronavirus relief package. Needless to say, they are still far apart.

Jeff Stein of WaPo tweeted about how different this Covid proposal is from the last two circulated by Mitch McConnell: (brackets by Wrongo)

Sept. 8: McConnell releases plan including $300/week in supplemental federal UI [unemployment insurance] for jobless Americans

Dec. 1: McConnell releases plan including $0/week in supplemental federal UI for jobless Americans https://t.co/GywLXGzOP9

According to the Century Foundation, 12 million people could see their Covid-related aid disappear the day after Christmas. This cliff is a major factor in pressuring Congress to pass a new bill before their 2020 recess. This funding need is separate from the need to fund the government past December 11. James Kwak of the Baseline Scenario says:

“One of Congress’s top priorities this week and next is to pass some kind of funding bill that will keep the federal government operating past December 11.”

Kwak points out that there are two ways this could happen: First, Congress could pass a continuing resolution that maintains funding at current levels for a period of time, until after Biden is inaugurated, and a new Congress is seated.

Second, the Parties could agree to pass an omnibus fiscal year 2021 spending bill that funds the government through the end of the current fiscal year on September 30, 2021. This is Trump’s preference.

This is a bit of inside baseball. Government funding measures are must-pass bills. No politician wants a government shutdown. Democrats have historically been able to pin most of the blame for a shutdown on Republicans, starting in 1995, when Bill Clinton successfully portrayed Newt Gingrich as a zealot who wanted to slash Medicare.

OTOH, an omnibus budget reconciliation bill could represent one of the Biden administration’s few real chances to pass anything big through Congress. This is true since bills passed via the reconciliation process are not subject to the Senate’s filibuster.

Biden probably doesn’t want to cede the omnibus bill win to Trump just as Trump is packing his bags.

But, if Dems linked the short-term funding bill to an omnibus budget reconciliation bill, they’d only need a bare majority of Senators to pass both. The gamble would be that in order to avert a government shutdown, a scant few Republican moderates might be pressured to join in an omnibus budget deal.

Part of the Dem’s reasoning for wanting to take only a short-term government funding deal is a bet that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock can both win in Georgia on January 5. Then, the Senate would be split 50/50, with VP Harris, as President of the Senate, in a position to cast the deciding vote(s) on the Democrat’s agenda.

If both Georgia candidates win, Democrats will control both Houses of Congress for the first time since 2010, but by a razor-thin margin. They would need to insure that the one Senate Democrat in name only, Joe Manchin (D-WVA) would agree with whatever bills they put forward. Manchin will be in a position to control much of the Democrats’ political agenda.

We’ll see how all of this plays out in real-time, since the Senate is planning to head for home on December 18. Kwak says:

“…Democratic leadership in Congress seems inclined to give up the potential chance to write their own appropriations bill in January in exchange for a bill that they have to negotiate with McConnell and…Donald J. Trump.”

Congress might pass something that is an extension of the CARES Act, stranger things have happened. It’s likely it will pass a government funding extension before leaving for the holidays.

For the CARES extension, it appears that Democrats will have to cave in to McConnell on the corporate liability shield he’s looking for as the price of a relief bill.

It’s doubtful that Dems can go home without having passed something for Covid relief and some way to fund the government until at least late January.

The challenge of limited time and limited trust will test a divided Congress’s ability to make a few deals after months of gridlock.

Good luck America.

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Trump’s Closing Argument? More Covid, Less Stimulus

The Daily Escape:

Littleton ME, October 2020 photo by Kim Smith-Williams. The trees were planted by her grandfather in 1942.

It was amazing to see Trump turn down an offer from the Democrats to inject $ trillions of stimulus into his weak economy just days before the election. Wouldn’t that have helped his chances?

And he did this the day after his “helicopter salute” ceremony that raised questions about his Covid strategy. Based on what he said, it sounds a lot like “Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine, it’s no worse than the flu”. Trump resurrected “Same as the Flu“, and killed the economic stimulus package on the same day.

Sadly, Covid is much worse than the flu. Trump says that the flu claims more than 100,000 lives some years. Maybe it did when he was a kid, but for the past 10 years, the seasonal flu has killed between 12,000 and 61,000 Americans a year. In fact, Covid has killed more Americans in the past 8 months than the flu has killed in the past 5 years combined.

So his Covid strategy is: “Grandma’s gotta die because people need to go to restaurants”. Not a winning message.

Let’s move to Trump saying he won’t pass a new stimulus until he’s reelected. Republicans have been divided on more money for states, individuals and businesses, with those in close races generally more amenable to a bigger stimulus package.

But the hard-core conservatives have been opposed to a bigger package, and Trump is particularly hostile to providing funds to state and local governments. OTOH, while negotiations weren’t going anywhere fast, they weren’t that far apart. The House had passed a $2.2 trillion bill, while Mnuchin’s offer was $1.6 trillion.

According to the WSJ, the trigger for Trump’s pulling out of a possible deal was an update from Mitch McConnell, who said that even if Mnuchin and Pelosi came to an agreement, he wasn’t likely to have enough Republican votes in the Senate. There would have been sufficient votes in the Senate to pass the bill, but it would have required Democratic Senators to put it over the top, an unacceptable look for Trump.

Somebody should have told Trump the master negotiator, that if you walk away from a deal, you don’t get anything you want, either.

The stock market didn’t like Trump’s bailing on another stimulus. And on Wednesday, Trump reversed course and talked instead about bailing out the airlines :

“The House & Senate should IMMEDIATELY Approve 25 Billion Dollars for Airline Payroll Support, & 135 Billion Dollars for Paycheck Protection Program for Small Business. Both of these will be fully paid for with unused funds from the Cares Act. Have this money. I will sign now!”

If seems likely that the CEO of Delta might have suggested to Trump that mass layoffs in Atlanta wouldn’t be helpful to his re-election. But Trump apparently hasn’t learned that when you’re dealing with people with actual leverage (instead of a contractor who can’t afford to sue you), you actually have to give up something to make a deal.

The CARES Act was the high-water mark of federal government response to the pandemic-caused economic disaster. That was six months ago, and nothing substantial has happened since. It’s hard for Trump or his Party to say, going into the last three weeks that they really care at all about those who have lost their jobs to the pandemic.

Through a series of bad decisions and foolish actions by Trump, America has been hit harder by the coronavirus than any other industrialized nation. The outbreak has killed 210,000 and caused large numbers of people to change how they live their lives.

And those changes have created enormous economic disruptions, everywhere.

There are just 27 days to go until the election. All of those people who are out of work have to make rent. And all of them, when they worked, supported other businesses with their spending. That’s all gone.

The only thing which will “fix” the economy are masks, physical distancing, and a vaccine. Nothing gets us back to “normal” until then.

The only question is whether or not the federal government will spend the money to keep as many people and businesses afloat as possible until a vaccine gets here.

Trump and the Republicans won’t work on either Covid or help those hurt by the pandemic. So no one should vote for them.

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Saturday Soother – August 15, 2020

The Daily Escape:

Buying stamps at the post office, Siren, WI – July 1941 photo by John Vachon for the Farm Security Administration, via Shorpy.

The Senate has adjourned until after Labor Day, despite not coming to an agreement on the much-needed next Coronavirus stimulus package. From CNBC:

“Congress and the White House have spent the past few weeks debating what to include in the package, but have been unable to come to an agreement. One of the biggest sticking points: Jobless benefits. Democrats want a continuation of the enhanced unemployment payment of $600 per week, while Republicans say that amount is too high. Democrats are also pushing for more than $900 billion for state and municipal aid, and $60 billion in food assistance, far higher than what Republicans have proposed.”

This means any deal could be weeks away. Meanwhile, around 28 million Americans remain unemployed and many of the relief provisions from the first stimulus package have dried up.

And Postal Service funding is also broken and lying in the weeds by the side of the road.

McConnell offered a new COVID economic aid bill (the HEALS Act) 10 weeks after the House had approved its version, called the HEROES Act. Then, Mitch dismissed the Senate for a month rather than allow Senators to negotiate with the House Dems about adding USPS funding to the HEALS Act, which included no funding for the USPS. The House’s HEROES Act passed in mid-May contains $25 billion for USPS.

There is no accountability for any of these birds except at the ballot box, and the GOP is making it very hard to remove them by voting. Only a very few Republicans, notably House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, (R-CA) and Sen. Roy Blunt, (R-MO) have broken with Trump on the need for funding the Postal Service.

We mentioned mail sorting machines on Friday. We now know that in May, the USPS planned to remove a total of 969 sorting machines (about 20%) out of the 4,926 it had in operation as of February. Most (746) of the sorting machines scheduled for removal were delivery bar code sorters (DBCS), the type that sort vote-by-mail ballots and other similarly sized pieces. You can view the USPS equipment removal presentation here.

WaPo reported that the USPS sent letters in July to 46 states and Washington DC warning that they may be unable to deliver mail-in election ballots by the deadlines set by the states for them to be counted. About 186 million voters are subject to the Postal Service’s heightened warning. The states that were not warned about potential issues were Oregon, Nevada, New Mexico and Rhode Island. The USPS letter was only released on Friday.

This is a huge and serious escalation in concerns that even if people follow all of their state’s election rules, the pace of Postal Service delivery may disqualify their votes.

There’s a big disconnect between the public and the government. They no longer really want to help you solve your problems. You can no longer rely on them to count your votes. You’re about to be kicked out of your apartment. You’ve got no money left in the bank, and after years of being told it’s your fault, you know nothing could be further from the truth.

Sorry, Republicans, this is what you have become. You’re now the Walrus: He is you and you are him.

Vote to flush the turds, November 3rd!

Sorry, no coffee for you this week, we’re already too jacked up by the prospect of losing our democracy. On the other hand, we still need a break from the steady beat of the Trumpian drums, so it’s time for our Saturday Soother.

We lost four large trees on the fields of Wrong last week during the half hour that TS Isaias was with us. The outcome was that we were without power for five days, and it took about a week to cut up and move all of the downed wood.

This week, we left our daily 14+ hours of summer sunlight behind. Today we have 13 hours and 53 minutes, and it, like our politics, will just get worse.

Time to settle back at an appropriate physical distance, and listen to two love themes composed by Dominic Frontiere that originally appeared in the TV series “The Outer Limits”. They are performed here on George Winston’s album “Summer”, recorded in 1991:

Those who read the Wrongologist in email can view the video here.

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Stimulus Bill Blocked By Rogue GOP Senators

The Daily Escape:

Late winter, NH – February 2020 photo by Betsy Zimmerli

Just when you think that the two Parties and the White House have found agreement on a massive stimulus bill, a few rogue Republicans decide that there’s too much welfare in it for them. From NBC News:

“A handful of Republican senators on Wednesday threatened to delay the $2 trillion coronavirus spending bill over a proposed increase to unemployment insurance.”

Sens. Tim Scott, (R-SC), Lindsey Graham, (R-SC), and Ben Sasse, (R-NE), said that the bill “could provide a strong incentive for employees to be laid off instead of going to work” because some people could theoretically make more by being unemployed. Senator Rick Scott (r-FL) jumped onto the obstructionist bandwagon as well.

More from the Senators’ statement:

“If the federal government accidentally incentivizes layoffs, we risk life-threatening shortages in sectors where doctors, nurses, and pharmacists are trying to care for the sick, and where growers and grocers, truckers and cooks are trying to get food to families’ tables.”

The fight is over an additional $600 per week payment to each recipient on top of their unemployment insurance payment. The proposed benefit also extends to workers who typically would not qualify, such as gig economy workers, furloughed employees, and freelancers.

Imagine! These Senators are so out of touch, they think you can receive unemployment payments if you quit your job.

This is hypocrisy in action: These Republicans obstructionists pretend to be suddenly concerned about either deficit spending, or about government fraud and abuse after they blew a trillion dollar hole in the our last budget to give unneeded money to their wealthy benefactors.

The bill was supposed to be voted on late yesterday, but the Senators who are objecting could hold up the bill by forcing votes on amendments. Sen. Chris Murphy, (D-CT), tweeted:

“Let’s not over-complicate this…several Republican Senators are holding up the bipartisan Coronavirus emergency bill because they think the bill is too good for laid off Americans. “

From Charlie Pierce:

“Right on cue, of course…Bernie Sanders threatened to block the bill unless the stooges dropped their opposition. Which, of course, is exactly what every Republican everywhere would like. The stooges are running a bluff. They don’t want to be the people who block this. They just want to talk about blocking it. If Sanders does them the incredible favor of blocking it himself, thereby pulling Mitch McConnell out of the ditch into which the Democratic minority has rolled him, they’ll all get re-elected.”

So the question is what is Majority Leader McConnell prepared to give up to pass the bill? And are Chuck and Nancy prepared to give up anything in order to move the bill on to the House?

It seems likely that McConnell wants to meet their demands with no real Democratic pushback. Is that likely to happen?

So, a few Republican supporters of our capitalist super heroes want to reduce the crumbs provided to ordinary workers. They have a small point about people not “earning” more from the government than they did on the job. The problem is that each state has its own unique unemployment insurance system, and it would be a nightmare to adjust each payment for each worker just to make Lindsay Graham feel good.

That’s the trouble with grifters. They simply can’t understand that there are people who aren’t always grifting.

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