Daily Political Briefing
Aug. 10, 2021, 1:29 p.m. ET
Aug. 10, 2021, 1:29 p.m. ET
The Senate on Tuesday passed a sweeping $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package, capping weeks of intense negotiations and debate over the largest federal investment in the nation’s aging public works system in more than a decade.
The final tally was 69 to 30, and Vice President Kamala Harris gaveled the vote closed.
The legislation, which still must pass the House, would touch nearly every facet of the American economy and fortify the nation’s response to the warming of the planet.
It would greatly increase funding to modernize the nation’s power grid and finance projects to better manage climate risks, and it would devote hundreds of billions of dollars to repair and replace aging public works projects. The legislation was largely negotiated by a group of 10 Senate Republicans and Democrats and White House officials.
Shortly after the vote, President Biden celebrated the news on Twitter.
Big news, folks: The Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal has officially passed the Senate. I hope Congress will send it to my desk as soon as possible so we can continue our work of building back better.
— President Biden (@POTUS) August 10, 2021
Ahead of the final passage, at least three Republicans who had been tangentially involved with negotiations of the bill announced their opposition. One, Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota, was absent for the vote, but he registered his concerns early Tuesday.
Yet despite criticism from former President Donald J. Trump, many Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, embraced federal aid for their states.
Mr. Trump, who blew up infrastructure talks during his administration, issued another missive early Tuesday, declaring Mr. McConnell “the most overrated man in politics,” in part for allowing the bill to advance.
Democrats immediately after took up a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that will unlock their ability to muscle through an expansive social policy package over unanimous Republican objections.
Under the fast-track budget reconciliation process, that blueprint, if passed with a simple majority, will dictate the parameters of a transformative package expected to provide funding for health care, climate change, education and child care, and to increase taxes on wealthy people and corporations.
The budget can pass, however, only after a marathon of rapid-fire votes, known as a vote-a-rama, that is expected to stretch at least through midnight Wednesday. Mr. McConnell, speaking on the Senate floor Tuesday, said hundreds of amendments had been prepared, centered on national security funding, federal funding for abortions, tax increases and immigration.
“Republicans do not currently have the votes to spare American families this nightmare,” Mr. McConnell said. “But we will debate. We will vote. We will stand up and be counted, and the people of this country will know exactly which senators fought for them.”
Progressive Democrats warned the House leadership that a majority of their members will withhold their support for a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a second, far larger package containing their spending priorities.
The warning came in a letter to the speaker, obtained by The New York Times, in which left-leaning members drew a line in the sand, putting them at odds with moderate Democrats who have been pushing for an immediate, stand-alone vote on the infrastructure bill.
In the letter, leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus said a poll of their 96 members had confirmed a majority would withhold their support for the infrastructure legislation until the Senate passes a $3.5 trillion package with funding for climate programs, health care, education and child care.
Senate Democrats have moved to advance a budget blueprint for the $3.5 trillion in spending, but the actual legislation is unlikely to materialize until the fall, and that is the vote that progressives want to see approved.
Together, the two measures encompass President Biden’s entire economic agenda. The speaker, Nancy Pelosi of California, has repeatedly said she will not take up the bipartisan legislation until the Senate passes the larger spending package, causing some consternation among her moderate members.
“Whatever you can achieve in a bipartisan way — bravo, we salute it,” Ms. Pelosi said on Friday. “But at the same time, we’re not going forward with leaving people behind.”
The letter was signed by the chairwoman of the Progressive Caucus, Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and two of her deputies, Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Representative Katie Porter of California.
In their letter, the three leaders told Ms. Pelosi that a majority of their caucus would commit to withholding their votes until they get what they want in the larger spending package, which would be passed using a legislative maneuver known as “reconciliation” that circumvents the Senate’s filibuster rule. That is a significant tranche of members in a narrowly divided House, where Democrats hold a razor-thin majority.
The letter encouraged Ms. Pelosi to work to ensure “the reconciliation framework reflects our shared and longstanding investment priorities, and that the Senate first adopts this reconciliation package before House consideration of any bipartisan infrastructure legislation.”
A half-dozen moderate House Democrats, in their own letter, urged Ms. Pelosi to give the bipartisan infrastructure package its own vote without linking it to the other package of measures.
Some senators have tried to ban the process. Others simply say it’s the worst part of their jobs.
Even former Senator Robert C. Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat who created and fortified some of the chamber’s most complex rules before his death, warned the so-called vote-a-rama process could “send some old men to their deaths.”
Still on Tuesday, as the Senate turned to a $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that begins the Democrats’ push to expand the social safety net, the tradition of considering hours upon hours of nonbinding budget amendments once again got underway — with senators forcing politically sensitive votes on their rivals as campaign operatives compile a record for possible attack ads.
Only one vote really matters: If all 50 Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents give final approval to the blueprint, Senate committees can begin work this fall on the most significant expansion of the safety net since the 1960s, knowing that legislation cannot be filibustered under the Senate’s complicated budget rules.
But before that final vote, which could come at the crack of dawn Wednesday, senators will have to deal with a blizzard of advisory amendments, and like every vote-a-rama that preceded it, it will be painful.
“It’s a little bit like an extended visit to a dentist,” said Ross K. Baker, a professor of political science at Rutgers University. “The whole process is an exercise in ‘gotchas.’”
In practice, any senator can prolong the process by offering new amendments for votes until he or she runs out of steam. The result is a procedural food fight with a silly name that does little other than keep Capitol denizens up past their bedtimes and cause twinges of political pain. (Vote-a-RAHM-a? Vote-a-RAM-a? Depends on the senator.)
Both parties have historically lamented the vote-a-rama process, but neither wants to give it up. Typically, the party in the minority — in this case, the Republicans — revel in the uncomfortable votes it can force upon the majority party that typically controls the chamber, its floor time and what gets voted on.
Every one of the Senate Democrats voted in favor of the $1 trillion infrastructure bill, which passed on Tuesday with support from Republicans. The passage came after weeks of negotiations between a group of 10 Republican and Democratic senators. In the end, 19 Republicans — including the minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky — joined 50 Democrats and independents to vote in favor of the legislation.
Here are the Republicans who voted with Mr. McConnell to approve the bill:
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Roy Blunt of Missouri
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Richard Burr of North Carolina
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Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia
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Bill Cassidy of Louisiana
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Susan Collins of Maine
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Kevin Cramer of North Dakota
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Michael D. Crapo of Idaho
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Deb Fischer of Nebraska
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Lindsey Graham of South Carolina
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Charles E. Grassley of Iowa
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John Hoeven of North Dakota
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Lisa Murkowski of Alaska
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Rob Portman of Ohio
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James Risch of Idaho
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Mitt Romney of Utah
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Dan Sullivan of Alaska
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Thom Tillis of North Carolina
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Roger Wicker of Mississippi
The expansive $1 trillion infrastructure bill that the Senate passed on Tuesday — a 2,702-page bipartisan deal that is the product of months of negotiating and years of pent-up ambitions to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure — would amount to the most substantial government expenditure on the aging public works system since 2009. The bill — which passed 69-30, and goes next to the House — is also stuffed with pet projects and priorities that touch on nearly every facet of American life. Here are some of the major provisions.
About $110 billion will go to roads, bridges and transportation programs.
Much of the legislation is directed toward roads and bridges, devoting billions of dollars to address an expansive backlog of repairs across the country and shoring up the nation’s highways and other infrastructure to withstand the toll of climate change.
The bill also increases funding for programs intended to provide safe commutes for pedestrians, and creates a $350 million pilot program for projects that reduce collisions between vehicles and wildlife. And the legislation formally establishes a federal program intended to encourage children to walk or bike to school.
Transportation experts say the $110 billion is just a fraction of what is needed to address the nation’s unaddressed repair needs, with the latest estimate from the American Society of Civil Engineers estimating a $786 billion backlog for roads and bridges alone.
The measure also includes $66 billion in new funding for rail to address Amtrak’s maintenance backlog, along with upgrading the high-traffic Northeast Corridor from Washington to Boston. For President Biden, an Amtrak devotee who has taken an estimated 8,000 round trips on the line, it is a step toward fulfilling his promise to inject billions into rail.
For climate, a substantial investment that falls short of the administration’s goals.
The measure includes billions of dollars to better prepare the country for the effects of global warming and the single largest federal investment in power transmission in history.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers would get an additional $11.6 billion in construction funds for projects like flood control and river dredging. The Forest Service would get billions of dollars to remove flammable vegetation from the lands it manages, in an effort to make wildfires less damaging.
The bill would also include money for “next-generation water modeling activities” and flood mapping at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which would also receive funds to predict wildfires.
The legislation also includes $73 billion to modernize the nation’s electricity grid to allow it to carry renewable energy, $7.5 billion for clean buses and ferries and $7.5 billion to develop electric vehicle charging stations across the country.
The bill would provide $15 billion for removing lead service lines across the nation, short of the $45 billion Mr. Biden had called for and the $60 billion that water sector leaders say is needed to get the job done.
The legislation also includes more than $300 million to develop technology to capture and store carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, and $6 billion to support struggling nuclear reactors. It directs the secretary of energy to conduct a study on job losses associated with Mr. Biden’s decision to cancel the Keystone XL Pipeline.
New resources for underserved communities — but far fewer than the president wanted.
The legislation creates a new $2 billion grant program to expand surface transportation projects in rural areas.
It would also increase support for tribal governments and Native American communities, creating an office within the Department of Transportation intended to respond to their needs. It would provide $216 million to the Bureau of Indian Affairs for climate resilience and adaptation for tribal nations, which have been disproportionately hurt by climate change. More than half of that money, $130 million, would go toward “community relocation” — helping some Native communities move away from vulnerable areas.
It would also help improve access to running water and other sanitation needs in tribal communities and Alaska Native villages.
A major investment in closing the digital divide.
Senators have also included $65 billion meant to connect hard-to-reach rural communities to high-speed internet and help sign up low-income city dwellers who cannot afford it. Other legal changes seek to stoke competition and transparency among service providers that could help drive down prices.
Mr. Biden had initially proposed $100 billion toward closing the digital divide, but he agreed to lower the price to strike a compromise with Republicans.
Nicholas Fandos, Lisa Friedman, Madeleine Ngo, Luke Broadwater and Stacy Cowley contributed reporting.
breaking
ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York said on Tuesday he would resign from office, succumbing to a ballooning sexual harassment scandal that fueled an astonishing reversal of fortune for one of the nation’s best-known leaders.
Mr. Cuomo said his resignation would be effective in 14 days. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, will be sworn in to replace him. She will become the first female governor of New York.
The governor framed his resignation as a necessary step given the firestorm of controversy surrounding his continued leadership, including an impeachment inquiry that he referred to as a “distraction” from pressing issues as the state recovers from the pandemic. “Given the circumstances, the best way I can help now is if I step aside and let government get back to governing,” Mr. Cuomo said. “And therefore that’s what I’ll do.”
Twitter on Tuesday suspended Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, from its service for seven days after she posted that the Food and Drug Administration should not approve the coronavirus vaccines and that the vaccines were “failing.”
The company said that this was Ms. Greene’s fourth “strike,” which means that under the company’s rules she could be permanently barred if she violated Twitter’s coronavirus misinformation policy again. The company issued Ms. Greene’s third strike less than a month ago.
On Monday evening, Ms. Greene said on Twitter, “The FDA should not approve the covid vaccines.” She said there were too many reports of infection and spread of the coronavirus among vaccinated people, and added that the vaccines were “failing” and “do not reduce the spread of the virus & neither do masks.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s current guidance states, “Covid-19 vaccines are effective at protecting you from getting sick.”
In late July, the agency also revised its indoor mask policy, advising that people wear a mask in public indoor spaces in parts of the country where the virus is surging to maximize protection from the Delta variant and prevent possibly spreading the coronavirus. A recent report by two Duke University researchers who reviewed data from March to June in 100 school districts and 14 charter schools in North Carolina concluded that wearing masks was an effective measure for preventing the transmission of the virus, even without six feet of physical distancing.
Ms. Greene’s tweet was “labeled in line with our Covid-19 misleading information policy,” Trenton Kennedy, a Twitter spokesman, said in an emailed statement. “The account will be in read-only mode for a week due to repeated violations of the Twitter Rules.”
In a statement circulated online, Ms. Greene said: “I have vaccinated family who are sick with Covid. Studies and news reports show vaccinated people are still getting Covid and spreading Covid.”
Data from the C.D.C. shows that of the so-called breakthrough infections that have been reported among the fully vaccinated, serious cases are extremely rare.
Twitter has picked up enforcement against accounts posting coronavirus misinformation as cases have risen across the United States because of the highly contagious Delta variant. In Ms. Greene’s home state, new cases have increased by 171 percent in the past two weeks, while 39 percent of the state’s population has been fully vaccinated against the virus.
In March, Andy Slavitt, then a top pandemic adviser for President Biden, called Nick Clegg, Facebook’s vice president for global affairs, and delivered an ominous warning.
For many weeks, Mr. Slavitt and other White House officials had been meeting with Facebook to urge the company to stop the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines.
Many Americans who declined to get vaccinated were citing false articles that they had read on Facebook, including theories that the shots could lead to infertility, stillborn babies and autism.
“In eight weeks’ time,” Mr. Slavitt told Mr. Clegg, “Facebook will be the No. 1 story of the pandemic.”
Mr. Slavitt’s prediction was not far off. Roughly three months later, with cases from the Delta variant surging, Mr. Biden said Facebook was “killing people.”
Mr. Biden’s comment, which he later walked back slightly, was the culmination of increasingly combative meetings with the company about the spread of misinformation.
The meetings have involved the top ranks on both sides. In March, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, called Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, and discussed health misinformation. The White House grew so frustrated by Facebook’s answers in the internal meetings that at one point it demanded to hear from the data scientists at the company instead of lobbyists.
Talks between the White House and Facebook continue. But the rift has complicated an already tumultuous relationship just as Mr. Biden faces a setback on tackling the virus. The White House missed its goal of having 70 percent of American adults with at least one vaccination shot by July 4, and the highly contagious Delta variant has fueled a rise in cases since then.
Facebook has pushed back strongly against the White House’s criticism, accusing the administration in public of scapegoating the company for the administration’s failure to reach its vaccination goals. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Facebook, said the White House hadn’t given the company enough credit for promoting the vaccines.
Message discipline. Focus on local issues. Find ways to work with Republicans. And show up. Everywhere.
That is some of the advice offered to swing-district Democrats for winning in conservative areas in a new report written by Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois, a former leader of the House Democrats’ campaign arm.
The report comes as Democrats in competitive districts are growing increasingly anxious about holding onto their seats. Many point to falling polling numbers and argue that the party must sharpen its economic and public health messaging around the pandemic.
Ms. Bustos interviewed 25 national and local Democratic lawmakers who won areas carried by former President Donald J. Trump in 2020. She had help from a longtime adviser — Robin Johnson, a political scientist at Monmouth College, which is in Ms. Bustos’s district.
Democrats who won districts where Mr. Trump got a majority of votes are a distinct minority in Congress: There are only seven in the House.
Most of the advice in the report revolves around an intense focus on local issues, as a way of aggressively differentiating the political profile of members representing redder areas from the Democrats’ national brand, which Ms. Bustos argues can be “toxic” among rural and working-class voters.
Representative Cindy Axne became the first Democrat to win her seat in southwestern Iowa in 2018, beating out David Young, and then she won a rematch last year.
“Even when every ounce of you wants to stray from the messaging, especially when you’re in a safe Democratic room, DON’T,” Ms. Axne advised. “Everything is on the record and can be used against you by the other side.”
Some of the advice is based on the Democrats’ experiences in 2020, an election that started with confident predictions of increasing their ranks but ended with the loss of 13 House seats and the slimmest majority in decades.
Ms. Bustos blames the losses on the constraints of the pandemic, which prompted most Democrats to abstain from door-to-door campaigning out of concern about public safety. That hampered the ability of swing-district Democrats to counter messaging from the progressive wing of the party — slogans like “defund the police” — that remain unpopular in conservative areas, Ms. Bustos argues.
“We were responsible from a health perspective but from a political perspective it hurt us,” she said. “Some of these attacks that were thrown up there, they took hold and we were not able to fight back.”
The defeats were an embarrassment for Ms. Bustos, who had been considered particularly skilled at devising strategies for Democrats running in conservative-leaning districts, and kicked off a round of recrimination between the moderates and progressives in the party.
“Take any of us away and the majority is shot,” said Ms. Bustos. “I do not want to pick an intraparty fight but it has to be a whole party approach to serving in the majority.”
The gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety plans to spend $3 million to recruit and train its volunteers to run for office, with a goal of having 200 enter races in the next election cycle.
The program is the latest step in a yearslong effort by groups that support stricter gun laws to become politically competitive with the National Rifle Association, which has kept a powerful hold on American politics as mass shootings have multiplied.
That dynamic has begun to shift, with the N.R.A. losing influence among moderate Democrats and more gun restrictions being passed by state legislatures. But even proposals with broad bipartisan support among voters, like universal background checks and red-flag laws, have languished in Congress.
Everytown’s new program, called Demand a Seat, will begin this fall and will involve training in the nuts and bolts of running a campaign, as well as instruction from advocates-turned-legislators such as Representative Lucy McBath, Democrat of Georgia. It is aimed at members of Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, two arms of Everytown, which is backed by Michael R. Bloomberg.
“Our volunteers have fought for those people sitting at the table to listen to them, and some wouldn’t, so now our volunteers and gun violence survivors will fight to fill those seats,” said Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action.
According to Everytown, more than 100 of its volunteers ran for office last year and 43 won.
The group said that more than 50 former volunteers have been elected to state legislatures, 18 to city or county councils, eight to school boards and two to Congress: Ms. McBath and Marie Newman, Democrat of Illinois.
Ms. McBath, who was first elected in 2018, said in an interview on Monday that as an advocate with Moms Demand Action she had learned about organizing people, giving speeches and talking about policy with different audiences. But, she said, “I had no idea how to run a campaign.”
“I’d never run for office before,” said Ms. McBath, who got involved with Moms Demand Action after her son, Jordan Davis, was fatally shot. “I got a little bit of help from people around me and went to a boot-camp training over a weekend, but I wish I had this kind of structure in place, an ongoing structure I could tie into the entire time.”
State Representative Jo Ella Hoye, a Democrat, was elected to the Kansas Legislature in November after leading Moms Demand Action’s Kansas chapter for about three years. She said she had staffed her campaign mostly with fellow volunteers, who made more than 10,000 phone calls for her.
“You have this light bulb moment: I used this database for our organizing, and that’s what I’m going to use for our campaign. We take training on messaging and social media,” Ms. Hoye said. “Formalizing it is just going to make that light bulb click a little sooner.”
She and Ms. McBath will advise the program’s participants, as will, among others, Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, a Democrat; former Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans, a Democrat; and former Representative David Jolly of Florida, who was a Republican while in office but has since left the party.
The summer began with the promise that vaccinated Americans could largely go maskless, and travel swelled over the Fourth of July weekend to prepandemic levels. But the celebrations have turned out to be short-lived as the Delta variant of the coronavirus surges across the United States and momentum gains for mandating Covid-19 vaccines and, once again, masks.
The United States is averaging more than 124,000 new virus cases each day, more than double the levels of two weeks ago and the highest rate since early February, according to a New York Times database. Hospitals in hot spots around the country are approaching capacity.
With all of this at play, President Biden has urged the private sector and state and local governments to ramp up pressure on the nearly one-third of eligible people in the country who remain unvaccinated. He has also ordered all civilian federal employees to be vaccinated or submit to regular testing and other restrictions.
And on Monday, the Pentagon said that it would require the country’s 1.3 million active-duty military troops to be vaccinated “no later” than next month. About 64 percent of active-duty service members are fully vaccinated — a rate that is low enough to have national security implications, because it could make it difficult to deploy troops to countries with strict requirements.
Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III said in a memo that he would seek to speed up the mandate if the Food and Drug Administration grants full approval to the Pfizer vaccine before mid-September, which the agency aims to do. More mandates in the private sector are also expected after the F.D.A. approval.
New requirements are also being brought in at the state and local level.
In Washington State, Gov. Jay Inslee said that most state employees and all health care workers must be fully vaccinated against the virus by Oct. 18 or risk losing their jobs.
More than two million health care workers in California also have to get vaccinated, largely without the option to submit to regular coronavirus testing. State employees who do not work in health care will still have the option to be tested if they are not vaccinated.
State and county employees in Hawaii will be required to provide their vaccination status by Aug. 16 or face regular testing, the governor said recently.
And even as several Republican-led states have barred businesses from requiring consumers to provide proof of vaccination, about a quarter of all U.S. hospitals are requiring staff members to be vaccinated, a spokesman for the American Hospital Association told CNN. Hospitalizations are soaring in areas with low vaccination rates.
Inoculations have picked up again in the country, but public health experts note that it takes weeks for the vaccines’ full effect to kick in. They say that more immediate measures, like mask mandates, are needed.
Ethan Hauser and