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11 States Sue US Government Over Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors

Eleven U.S. states with Republican governors sued the Biden administration on Friday, seeking to block a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors and arguing it is unconstitutional and violates federal procurement law.

Saying they were necessary to fight COVID-19, President Joe Biden issued on September 9 a pair of executive orders requiring that all executive branch federal employees and federal contractors be vaccinated.

A joint lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri by 10 states: Arkansas, Alaska, Missouri, Iowa, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming. Texas filed a separate suit on the same issue, and Florida filed one on Thursday.

The lawsuits on Friday described the mandate as “sweeping in its scope” and “unconstitutional and unlawful,” citing a constitutional amendment on state powers and federal laws on government procurement.

The mandate “is an abuse of power and we won’t stand for it,” Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds said in a video on Twitter.

“It will only worsen the workforce shortage and supply chain issues that hinder our economic recovery, and it furthers the unprecedented government intrusion into our lives,” Reynolds said.

The White House set a December 8 deadline for employees of federal contractors to be vaccinated. However, it has signaled that contractors have flexibility in enforcing that deadline.

U.S. courts have largely upheld vaccination requirements imposed by employers, universities, states and cities.

About 58% of the U.S. population is fully vaccinated, and over 66% has received one dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 
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Climate Activists Praise Biden’s Bid for $555 Billion in Green Investment

U.S. President Joe Biden will arrive at COP 26, the United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Glasgow next week, with the promise, if not the guarantee, that the United States is about to commit to the largest single investment in combating climate change in history.

The White House and Democratic leaders in Congress on Thursday announced a scaled-back version of the president’s Build Back Better climate and social spending package. While less ambitious than earlier versions, the package contains $555 billion in spending directed at reducing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions to between 50% and 52% of 2005 levels by 2030.

That matches the Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) the U.S. committed to when the Biden administration rejoined the Paris climate change accord earlier this year. According to activists and experts, it considerably strengthens Biden’s ability to assert a leadership role for the U.S. in the global effort to slow climate change.

‘Show us first’

“Without this, I think it would have been tremendously hard for the U.S. delegation to appear with a credible claim that the U.S. is ‘back,’” said Michael Mehling, deputy director of the Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“It has an NDC of 50% to 52%, and it has the means to achieve that,” he told VOA. “Without it, I think people would have just said, ‘Yeah, show us first.’”

In a statement released Thursday, Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce congratulated the president and Democrats in Congress for “advancing a bold vision for historic climate action,” and urged lawmakers to finalize an agreement on the legislation as soon as possible.

“This is a bold vision for clean energy and climate action that the President can present at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland, to demonstrate that the United States is committed to taking the immediate and bold action necessary to tackle the climate crisis as a top priority,” Pierce said. “We urge Congress to immediately deliver a full Build Back Better Act that fulfills this promise, because we have no time to wait.”

No guarantees

The president and his allies are behaving as though they are on the cusp of a major legislative achievement. However, it remains possible that infighting and policy disagreements among Democrats on Capitol Hill could derail the deal as the final legislative language is being prepared.

The two wild cards are West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, neither of whom has said that they will definitely support the package.

Manchin has already forced his colleagues to remove some of the climate elements of the original package, which he saw as overly punitive toward existing fossil fuel companies. Manchin, whose state has a long history of coal mining and still relies on coal-fired power plants for much of its electricity, also has a financial stake in the coal industry.

He has also expressed hesitation over a non-climate-related part of the package that would deliver benefits to families with young children.

Sinema has shot down several versions of the package over disagreements about how to pay for it. She objected to raising tax rates and to changing the way investments are taxed at death. It is unclear whether she will support the current package, which contains income-tax surcharges on people earning more than $10 million per year, and on income that business owners receive on a “pass-through” basis.

Because the Democrats hold a razor-thin majority in the Senate, either Manchin or Sinema could torpedo Biden’s Build Back Better package – including the climate change provisions – by voting no.

Broad-based spending

The largest part of the climate spending in the bill is $320 billion in tax credits, spread over 10 years, aimed at making a wide array of green technologies cheaper and easier to implement.

Among other things, it would cut the price of installing home solar panels by about 30% and would offer rebates of up to $12,500 for the purchase of an electric vehicle, provided it is made in the U.S. with domestic parts and unionized labor. The package would also create financial incentives for the development of clean mass transit, buses and trucks.

The next-largest element of the package is $110 billion to incentivize the creation of a domestic supply chain for the delivery of products that will be key to broad electrification of the U.S., including batteries, solar cells and other technologies.

An additional $105 billion would go toward building resiliency in communities that are already feeling the drastic effects of climate change through extreme weather events. This includes funding for a Civilian Conservation Corps that the administration says will hire 300,000 Americans.

Rounding out the spending is $20 billion that would go toward government procurement of next-generation green technologies – essentially helping to create a market for the products and services that the other elements of the proposal will be subsidizing.

Looking on the bright side

Climate activists definitely didn’t get everything they wanted in the package currently before Congress. Among other things, Biden’s proposed Clean Energy Production Program, which would have rewarded electrical utilities that increase their use of renewable energy by 4% per year and punished those that did not, was scuttled after Manchin strongly objected to it.

But on Friday, with the possibility of the $555 billion package actually becoming law, environmentalist groups were focused on the positive side of things.

“I’ve been around Washington for 20 years, and I’ve worked on energy and environmental issues for over 20 years,” said Toby Short, associate vice president for federal affairs with the Environmental Defense Fund. “A half a trillion dollars in climate and energy investments? It’s incredible. From EDF’s perspective, we’re extremely excited about the transformational investments that can occur from this.” 

 
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White House Renews Bid to End ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy

The Biden administration launched a second bid Friday to end a Trump-era policy to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. immigration courts, while also reaffirming a commitment to reinstate it under court order. 

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the “Remain in Mexico” policy likely contributed to a drop in illegal border crossings in 2019 but with “substantial and unjustifiable human costs” to asylum-seekers who were exposed to violence while waiting in Mexico. 

The announcement came more than two months after a federal judge ordered that the policy be reinstated “in good faith,” while leaving an opening for the administration to try again to justify ending it. 

The administration said earlier this month that it expected to reinstate the policy, known officially as “Migrant Protection Protocols,” around mid-November, subject to Mexican government approval. Mexico wants cases to generally conclude within six months, timely and accurate access to case information, and better access to legal counsel for asylum-seekers.

Some of the administration’s most prominent pro-immigration allies say the time it took for Mayorkas to draft Friday’s opinion showed a lack of sense of urgency, which U.S. officials dispute. 

Many U.S.-based legal aid groups who have represented asylum-seekers waiting in Mexico say they will no longer take such cases, raising questions about how the U.S. can satisfy Mexico’s insistence on better access to counsel. Administration officials say they believe there are enough other lawyers who will represent asylum-seekers sent back to Mexico.

Begun in January 2019

About 70,000 asylum-seekers have been subject to the policy, which Republican President Donald Trump introduced in January 2019 and his successor, Joe Biden, a Democrat, suspended on his first day in office. Mayorkas ended the policy in June after an internal review, saying it achieved “mixed effectiveness.” 

Illegal border crossings fell sharply after Mexico, facing Trump’s threat of higher tariffs, acquiesced in 2019 to the policy’s rapid expansion. Many asylum-seekers were victims of major violence while waiting in Mexico and faced a slew of legal obstacles, such as access to attorneys and case information. 

Mayorkas said Friday that his second review assumed the policy caused a significant drop in border crossings, calling it the strongest argument to keep it. Still, he said benefits do not outweigh costs in terms of relations with Mexico, resources and risks associated with exposure to violence while waiting in Mexican border cities. 

“[There] are inherent problems with the program that no amount of resources can sufficiently fix,” he wrote. “Others cannot be addressed without detracting from key Administration priorities and more enduring solutions.” 

A three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is scheduled to hear arguments Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by the states of Texas and Missouri. The administration is expected to ask that the case be returned to U.S. District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump appointee in Amarillo, Texas, who ordered in August that the policy be reinstated. 

The administration is rebuilding tent courts in Texas border cities of Laredo and Brownsville to handle “Remain in Mexico” cases. 
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Biden Says Pope Supports His Holy Communion Rights

U.S. President Joe Biden met with Pope Francis at the Vatican on Friday, ahead of his meeting with G-20 leaders. Biden said the pope supported his receiving Holy Communion, while some U.S. bishops want to deny him the sacrament over his stance on abortion. With Anita Powell contributing, White House Bureau Chief Patsy Widakuswara has this report from Rome.
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Republican Lawmaker Who Voted to Impeach Trump Will Not Seek Re-Election

U.S. Representative Adam Kinzinger, one of the few Republican lawmakers who voted to impeach then-President Donald Trump, said Friday he would not seek re-election in 2022.

The Illinois congressman, who also bucked party leadership by joining a House of Representatives panel investigating the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot lamented national divisions in announcing his exit.

“I cannot focus on both a re-election to Congress and a broader fight nationwide,” Kinzinger said in a video posted on Twitter.

Kinzinger was the latest Republican lawmaker to decide not to seek re-election after 10 House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to impeach the Republican president for inciting supports in the deadly January 6 assault on the Capitol. Trump, the first president in history to be impeached twice, was subsequently acquitted by the U.S. Senate.
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Biden Cuts Social Safety Net Plan in Half

U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday unveiled a $1.75 trillion spending plan he said would provide the “most transformative” aid to American families in decades and at the same time set the United States on a path toward sharply cutting its greenhouse gas pollution.   

Biden laid out the plan — half the amount he had proposed weeks ago — in an early morning meeting with Democratic lawmakers in Congress, and then lobbied for it in a 23-minute White House address.

“Nobody got everything they wanted, including me,” Biden said. “It’s called compromise.” He described the spending proposals, even in their pared-down shape, as “historic investments in our nation and our people.” 

Shortly after speaking, Biden and first lady Jill Biden boarded Air Force One for a trip to Europe. Their agenda includes an audience with Pope Francis at the Vatican. The president in the coming days will meet elsewhere in Rome with world leaders about the global economy and then will head to Glasgow, Scotland, for a summit on sharply curbing climate pollution.

Negotiations with centrists

Biden told Democratic lawmakers that the shrunken plan was the product of intense negotiations with a broad swath of politically progressive and moderate Democrats in Congress.

Biden specifically cited his back-and-forth talks with two centrist lawmakers who had objected to the $3.5 trillion price tag and several provisions of his original proposal, Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.  

“President Biden is confident this is a framework that can pass both houses of Congress, and he looks forward to signing it into law,” the White House said.

It was not immediately clear whether the warring factions of Democrats in Congress were on board with the White House claim that the curtailed plan could pass, along with a separate $1.2 trillion infrastructure proposal to rebuild the country’s deteriorating roads and bridges and expand broadband service throughout the United States.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, was planning a vote later Thursday on the infrastructure legislation. But progressive Democrats have for weeks blocked passage of the measure, already approved by the Senate in a bipartisan vote, in order to retain leverage to include funding for their favored programs in the social safety net measure.

One of the progressives, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, called the latest Biden plan “a major step,” but added, “I want to see it improved.”

Even split in Senate

In the politically divided Senate, all Republicans oppose the Biden social safety net and pollution-control legislation. The Democrats will need all 50 of their lawmakers, along with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, to pass the measure. They can afford to lose only a handful of Democratic votes in the House of Representatives.  

The latest Biden plan would provide universal pre-kindergarten schooling for all 3- and 4-year-old children in the country, but an original Biden call for two years of tuition-free community college education for high school graduates was jettisoned as too costly. Scholarship grants for needy college students would be increased, however.

The White House said the plan would save “most working families more than half of their spending on childcare.”   

“For decades, childcare prices in the United States have risen faster than family incomes,” the White House said, “yet the United States still invests 28 times less than its competitors on helping families afford high-quality care for toddlers.” The White House also said the measure would extend for a year child tax credits for all but the wealthiest families in the U.S., but that was a cutback from Biden’s original proposal for extending the tax break until at least 2025.  

In addition, the White House said the government would increase spending for “affordable, high-quality care for older Americans and people with disabilities in their homes” and increase pay for caregivers. Health care benefits would be improved, to a degree, with spending for hearing aids for older Americans added to the country’s long-standing Medicare health insurance program, but not dental and vision care for elders that Biden originally wanted.   

On pollution, the White House called Biden’s plan “the largest effort to combat the climate crisis in American history.”  

It said $555 billion in new spending would cut a billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, at least 10 times more than in any previous legislation approved by Congress.   

Biden especially wanted this plank included in the proposal as he meets world leaders at the Glasgow climate summit early next week.   

The White House said the $1.75 trillion plan would be fully paid for with increased taxation on the wealthiest two-tenths of 1% of Americans – multi-millionaires and billionaires.

A 15% minimum tax on the profits would be levied on some of the largest companies in the U.S., those with $1 billion or more in profits, and there would be ramped up enforcement against tax cheats by agents at the country’s tax collection agency, the Internal Revenue Service.
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Virginia’s Gubernatorial Election Reflects US National Politics

The increasingly tight race for governor in Virginia has drawn national attention and is being seen as a referendum on President Joe Biden’s agenda. Republican Glenn Youngkin is gaining ground on Democrat Terry McAuliffe – as voters prepare to go the polls Tuesday in a state that has gone for Democrats in recent years. VOA’s Steve Redisch reports.
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US Senate Considers ‘Wealth Tax’ to Fund Biden’s Spending Proposals

As Democrats in Congress fight among themselves over how much of U.S. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better social and environmental spending package to enact, disagreements over other proposals to raise tax revenue have party members proposing a novel and highly controversial “wealth tax.” 

Put forward by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, the tax would force about 700 of the country’s wealthiest people to pay taxes on unrealized gains on their assets. For example, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos would be required to pay taxes on the increase in value of the shares he holds in his company, even if he never sells them. 

The tax would also be retroactive. If it were to pass, Bezos would owe a massive tax bill on the aggregate growth of his Amazon-based wealth dating to the company’s founding in 1994. The proposal would allow the accumulated taxes to be paid over a span of five years. Going forward, Bezos’ portfolio would be assessed annually, and the increase or decrease in its value would be the basis for an annual tax bill. 

While supporters of the idea praise the plan for making the ultrawealthy pay their “fair share” in taxes, critics say the plan would be difficult to implement and might even be illegal. 

Wealth taxes are generally rare, with only a handful of countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) levying them, primarily in Europe. Wyden’s plan is getting attention now because other Democrats have shot down more conventional methods of raising revenue. 

The Biden administration originally wanted to increase taxes on the wealthy by ending the practice of allowing investments to pass to a deceased person’s heirs without being taxed. When Democrats in Congress balked at that, the party’s leadership proposed a slate of tax rate increases. Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, however, said she would not vote for any tax rate increase, dooming that proposal and prompting Wyden to put his plan on the table. 

Major challenges remain 

As of Wednesday morning, some Democrats, including West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, were concerned about the plan. Manchin said he worried that “targeting” specific individuals with higher taxes could be “divisive.” With only 50 votes in the 100-member Senate and Vice President Kamala Harris available to break a tie, Democrats cannot afford to lose even a single one of their members, given that Republicans are expected to vote unanimously against the measure. 

Some experts warn that the Democrats could run into trouble because they are trying to attach this new tax toward the end of negotiations on the bill.

“This has been picked up pretty late,” said Garrett Watson, a senior policy analyst at the Tax Foundation, a Washington think tank. “They’re trying to develop the details, including the drafted legislative texts that we got this morning, in order to determine how this will be administered.” 

The details will be “tricky,” he said. “I think it still has a pretty arduous path forward, given concerns about how this may affect markets, about its complexity, about the fact that it is targeting a very narrow group of … individuals.” 

Constitutional question 

One legal challenge the proposal will almost certainly face is whether unrealized gains count as “income” under the 16th Amendment to the Constitution, which made federal income tax legal. 

If unrealized gains fail to meet the definition of income, the tax will not work. That’s because when the federal government imposes taxes other than the income tax, the burden must be “apportioned” so each state contributes a percentage commensurate with its share of the population. 

Because billionaires aren’t evenly distributed across the country, administering the tax would be practically impossible. 

Measurement problems 

Even those who broadly agree with requiring the ultrawealthy to pay taxes on unrealized gains aren’t sure Wyden’s proposal will work. 

“Finding a way to tax those investment profits is a good idea,” said Howard Gleckman, a senior fellow at the Tax Policy Center in Washington. However, he added, “I’m not sure that the proposal that’s circulating in Congress right now is the best way to do it.” 

A major problem, he said, is that not all wealth increases are as easily measured as a portfolio of public company stocks. Much of the wealth of America’s richest people is tied up in privately held companies, which are difficult to value, or in highly illiquid assets such as art collections, real estate and yachts.

Wyden’s proposal recognizes that and waits until those assets are sold to tax them. It adds a surcharge, meant to approximate years of tax payments, to the capital gains tax paid on the asset’s appreciation. 

‘Even more complicated’ 

“Now you have two separate systems for taxing very, very wealthy people, and that’s going to create a lot of additional complications,” Gleckman said. “The solution takes what was already going to be a very complex addition to the tax code and makes it even more complicated.” 

And the more complex the system gets, the more potential loopholes there are for wealthy Americans’ tax advisers to exploit. 

“When you impose a tax like this on billionaires, you’re trying to tax people who have unlimited resources to hire the smartest tax lawyers that exist on the planet, and they will find ways to avoid the tax,” Gleckman said. “Congress will try to anticipate all of the tricks that people will use, but they inevitably will miss some.” 

Rarely imposed 

Within the OECD, only five countries levy what the organization refers to as a “recurrent tax on net wealth.” They are Colombia, France, Norway, Switzerland and Spain.

As recently as 1990, a dozen OECD countries had some sort of wealth tax, but over the years, most of those programs were abandoned. 

“Wealth taxes have seen a pretty sharp decline in their use, particularly in Europe and the OECD over the last 20 or 30 years, because they have not been very workable,” said Watson of the Tax Foundation. “The reason is exactly the type of issues we’re running into now as it relates to valuation and liquidity. It just makes more sense to do it when (gains are) realized. And even in this proposal, we see that with non-publicly traded assets.” 

An OECD report found that “decisions to repeal net wealth taxes have often been justified by efficiency and administrative concerns and by the observation that net wealth taxes have frequently failed to meet their redistributive goals. The revenues collected from net wealth taxes have also, with a few exceptions, been very low.” 

‘Buy, borrow, die’ workaround 

The Wyden proposal attempts to fix a serious gap in the U.S. tax code that allows very wealthy Americans to pass vast wealth down through generations of heirs without paying significant taxes. 

In the current U.S. federal system, the ultrawealthy can easily avoid paying taxes on their assets, especially if they are held in investments, because the only taxable event is the sale of those assets. Crucially, when a wealthy investor dies, the assets are transferred to heirs at their present value, meaning that the gains that they may have accumulated over years and decades are never taxed. 

This results in many of the very wealthy using what tax experts call the “buy, borrow, die” method of funding their lifestyles. Instead of selling their assets to obtain cash, they take out large loans from banks, which offer them at low interest rates because the borrowers pledge their investment holdings as collateral. 

As long as their investment portfolio earns a return higher than the interest rate the bank is charging, they can continue to grow their wealth, even as they spend. When they die, their estate pays off the outstanding loans from the accumulated profit, leaving heirs a larger inheritance than would have been available to them had the underlying assets been sold to fund spending during the wealthy individual’s lifetime. 

 
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US Arresting Far Fewer Undocumented Immigrants Under Biden

Reports of dramatically reduced immigration enforcement inside the United States have prompted cheers from rights advocates and derision from critics of the Biden administration who are already incensed over record migration to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Washington Post reported Tuesday that arrests of undocumented immigrants inside the United States dropped significantly in fiscal 2021, which ended September 30. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data showed the total of 72,000 arrests to be the lowest number in more than a decade, according to the news outlet, and about “half the annual totals recorded” during the Trump administration.

By comparison, ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers made 104,000 administrative arrests during fiscal 2020 and an average of 148,000 annually from 2017 through 2019, according to the Post.

VOA asked ICE for confirmation and comments on the 2021 data, which have yet to be publicly released, but the agency did not reply.

The Washington-based National Immigration Forum hailed reduced ICE enforcement as “good progress” and “a sign of what happens when law enforcement focuses on public safety threats.

Republican Senator Bill Hagerty of Tennessee had a different take.

“By drastically reducing enforcement of immigration law within the U.S., despite record illegal immigration, the Biden Administration is elevating the interests of illegal aliens over the rights of Americans,” the senator tweeted.

Upon taking office in January, President Joe Biden, a Democrat, ordered a 100-day deportation freeze along with a request to review enforcement policies executed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Three days later, Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, sued to block the freeze. A federal judge temporarily paused Biden’s order, then indefinitely halted it in February.

Despite judicial intervention, interior arrests remained low for the remainder of the fiscal year, continuing a downward trajectory over much of the past decade, partly because of the pandemic but also the Biden administration’s push for a more “humane” approach to interior arrests.

The DHS recently announced new sensitive location enforcement guidance. Effective immediately, U.S. immigration agents are expected to avoid enforcement in places like rallies, religious ceremonies and places where children gather, among others.

ICE interior enforcement arrests topped out around 322,000 in 2011 during the former Obama administration, falling to about 110,000 in 2016 before rising to about 158,000 in 2018 under Trump.

In September, U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas announced that immigration agents would primarily target national security or public safety threats as well as recent border crossers.

“Enforcement priorities for apprehension and removal remain focused on noncitizens who are a threat to our national security, public safety, and border security,” a DHS memo stated.

Mayorkas said the guidelines, scheduled to go into effect November 29, would “enable our department to most effectively accomplish our law enforcement mission … [and] help us exercise our prosecutorial discretion to achieve justice.”

The Biden administration has also pledged to halt workplace ICE raids and shift agents’ focus to employers who are hiring and exploiting undocumented workers.

During the 2020 presidential campaign, Biden promised what he called a more humanitarian approach to U.S.-bound immigration. Under Trump, his Republican predecessor, no undocumented immigrants were exempted from immigration enforcement regardless of how long they had lived in the United States or whether they had clean criminal records. 
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Biden, Congressional Democrats Continue Tough Negotiations Over Massive Social Safety Net Bill

Democrats in the U.S. Congress continued to be mired in negotiations on President Joe Biden’s major social safety net and climate control spending plan, particularly which  programs to keep and which ones to remove as well as the means to pay for them.

The president held talks at the White House Tuesday night with Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, two moderate lawmakers in Biden’s own Democratic party who have staunchly opposed much of his original $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan that would provide the biggest expansion of government benefits to American families in five decades. 

Senate Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts unveiled a plan earlier Tuesday that would impose a new minimum tax on corporations, along with a new “billionaires tax” that would impose levies on individuals who own at least $1 billion in assets, or who receive $100 million in earnings for three consecutive years.  

The plan was conceived after Sinema came out against a much simpler plan to raise conventional tax rates on wealthy Americans and corporations. Sinema announced her support for the new minimum corporate tax as “a common-sense step,” but some House Democrats have raised concerns about the legality of the billionaires’ tax.  

For his part, Manchin has come out in opposition of an expansion of Medicare and Medicaid, the government’s health care programs for elderly and low-income Americans, respectively, as well as providing 12 weeks of paid family leave and making the new child tax credit permanent, criticizing them as either costly or unnecessary new government “entitlements.”

Manchin is also opposed to a proposed $150 billion clean electricity program that would replace the nation’s coal and gas-fired power plants with wind, solar and nuclear energy. The program is a pillar of the president’s strategy to combat climate change, but Manchin represents one of the largest coal-producing states in the nation. His opposition has left the administration scrambling to create an alternative strategy, such as grants and loans to help utilities switch to renewable energy.  

Biden has expressed hope that he can reach agreement this week on what he has acknowledged will be a more limited spending plan of about $2 trillion or less, with some provisions, such as two tuition-free years of community college, jettisoned from the final package.  

Representative Ro Khanna of California, a key member of the House Progressive Caucus, told the U.S. cable news television program “Fox News Sunday” that the president recently told a group of lawmakers that he needs passage of both the social safety net bill and a separate $1.2 trillion measure that funds key upgrades to the nation’s physical infrastructure before he travels to Glascow, Scotland later this week for the United Nations-sponsored COP26 climate conference.   

With the 100-member Senate equally split between Republicans and Democrats, the policy agreement and votes of Manchin and Sinema are key to passage of the legislation, along with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris. Currently, no Republicans support the legislation. 

The infrastructure spending plan drew the support of 19 Republicans in the Senate, along with that of all 50 Democrats, but progressive House Democrats blocked its passage there until agreement could be reached on the social safety net legislation. 

White House press secretary Jen Psaki acknowledged the high stakes involved in the difficult negotiations Tuesday. “The alternative to what is being negotiated is not the original package — it is nothing,” she told reporters.  

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters.
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Senate Confirms Cindy McCain, Jeff Flake to Ambassador Posts

The Senate confirmed two prominent anti-Trump Republicans to serve in the Biden administration on Tuesday with former Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona approved to serve as the ambassador to Turkey, and Cindy McCain, the wife of the late Senator John McCain, approved to serve as the ambassador to the United Nations Agencies for Food and Agriculture. 

The Senate also voted to confirm former Democratic Senator Tom Udall of New Mexico to serve as ambassador to New Zealand, and Victoria Reggie Kennedy of Massachusetts, the widow of former Senator Ted Kennedy, to serve as ambassador to Austria. 

The nominations were approved through voice vote, a process taking only minutes that can be used so long as no senators object. Republicans, led by Senator Ted Cruz, are requiring the vast majority of Biden’s other State Department nominees to go through a much more extensive and time-consuming process. 

Democratic Senator Chris Coons thanked senators for acting quickly on the four nominations but said he remains concerned about the overall pace of confirmations for the president’s diplomatic corps. 

“There are dozens of countries where there is no confirmed American ambassador, and I hope that this moment of progress will be a predictor of other progress to come soon,” Coons said. 

Flake was a rare critic of former President Donald Trump among Senate Republicans. He served just one term in the Senate, opting not to seek reelection in the face of what was certain to be a difficult GOP primary. 

McCain endorsed Biden in the presidential election, which at the time was viewed as possibly helping Biden broaden his appeal to Republicans and independents in Arizona, a crucial swing state that her husband had represented in Congress for 35 years. 
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