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Biden Says Bypassing Filibuster ‘Real Possibility’ to Raise Debt Limit

U.S. President Joe Biden indicated Tuesday senators from his Democratic Party could bypass a supermajority voting rule in order to increase the nation’s debt limit without Republican votes. 

“It’s a real possibility,” Biden told reporters outside the White House. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said the government will likely reach its borrowing limit by October 18 unless Congress acts. 

Coming too close to the borrowing limit has its perils. A debt ceiling dispute in 2011 that Congress resolved two days before the borrowing limit was reached caused stock prices to fall and the first-ever credit downgrade for U.S. debt. 

Under Senate rules, 60 votes are needed to advance the legislation instead of a simple majority vote. The chamber is evenly divided between the Democratic and Republican caucuses, and Republicans already blocked two efforts to raise the debt limit last week. 

Making an exception to the supermajority rule, also known as the filibuster, would allow Senate Democrats to bypass Republican opposition, if all 50 are in unison.

Republican Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, wants Democrats to raise the debt ceiling without Republican votes and using a more convoluted process known as reconciliation, that Democratic leaders have said will be time consuming and raise uncertainty as the deadline nears. 

“They have the time to do it. And the sooner they get about it, the better,” McConnell said at a news conference Tuesday. 

Democrat Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, accused Republicans of manufacturing a crisis as he announced a Wednesday vote on a bill to raise the debt limit already passed by the House of Representatives. 

“If Republicans want to vote ‘no’ tomorrow, if they really want to be the party of default, that’s their choice,” Schumer said on the Senate floor. 

The national government’s debt now stands at $28.4 trillion.  

The United States has for decades imposed limits on its borrowing, but Congress has always raised the debt ceiling or lifted it entirely for a period of time to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debts, averting a worldwide financial crisis spawned by the biggest global economy. 

Even a close call would likely be damaging. A 2011 debt ceiling dispute, which Congress resolved two days before the borrowing limit was due to have been reached, caused stocks to tumble and prompted a first-ever credit downgrade for U.S. debt. 

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters. 
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Biden Advocates Spending Plans Amid Uncertainty

President Joe Biden traveled to Michigan on Tuesday to promote his legislative priorities on infrastructure and social spending. The two bills face a stalemate in Congress as members of Biden’s own Democratic Party wrangle over the size and scope of the package.

Investing in infrastructure and expanding social welfare programs are two key issues Biden campaigned on.

With his legislative agenda stalled in Congress, he visited a worker training facility Tuesday in Howell, Michigan, to promote his plans. 

“It isn’t enough just to invest in our physical infrastructure,” Biden said. “If we’re going to lead the world like we used to, if we’re going to do that, we have to also invest in our people like you do right here in this training facility.”

Biden pushed key legislative agendas — the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that has bipartisan support, and the $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan. 

The latter is championed by progressives to fund what they call “human infrastructure,” including education and climate change mitigation. 

“They don’t increase the debt because they’re paid for by asking the very wealthy to begin to pay their fair share,” Biden said. “As a matter of fact, a significant portion of this plan cuts taxes for working people. And best of all, the cost of these bills in terms of adding to the deficit is zero.”

The plans are stuck as lawmakers in Biden’s own party disagree on their size and scope.

Democratic centrist Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona say the $3.5 trillion package is too expensive and they want it trimmed.

Meanwhile, progressives in the House of Representatives threaten to withdraw support for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure proposal unless the larger bill passes. Since the Senate is split 50-50, Democrats cannot afford to lose a single vote.

“If those two things fail, the administration is going to have not a whole lot to show for its first year,” according to Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center. 

“And it also really calls into question the kind of core premise of the Biden presidency, which is focused, pragmatic, calm, legislative expert who can get things done. If all of a sudden the Democratic Party spins out of control under his leadership, it really calls that kind of fundamental idea into question.” 

Biden visited lawmakers in Congress last week but failed to get them to agree, despite popular support for some of the bills’ components.

Not only would the legislation address the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, but the bills would also provide for universal prekindergarten, lower-cost child care and paid family leave. 

“The pandemic revealed a lot of the frailties in the U.S. economy, and the legislation is now addressing some of those,” said Grumet. “There’s also been a significant focus on climate change in both of these pieces of legislation, which obviously matters a lot to the global community.” 

Biden’s Michigan visit reflects the importance of securing moderates’ support by the October 31 vote deadline. 

Another legislative deadline for Biden is October 18, by which date Congress must vote to increase the debt ceiling to avoid potential global economic turbulence caused by the U.S. defaulting on its debts. 
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Colleagues’ Stock Trading Scandals Slow Fed Chief Powell’s March to Renomination

With time ticking down on his term as chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, Jerome Powell’s reappointment to the post looks less certain than it did just a few weeks ago, as left-leaning Democrats hammer away at a series of scandals involving senior Fed personnel. 

On Monday, Powell’s chief antagonist in Congress, Senator Elizabeth Warren, released a letter to the head of the Securities and Exchange Commission asking the agency to investigate “ethically questionable” securities transactions by the presidents of two of the Federal Reserve’s district banks, and the Fed Board’s vice chairman. 

The letter came less than a week after Warren castigated Powell during a Senate Banking Committee hearing over what she sees as his lax regulatory approach toward large financial institutions.

“Your record gives me grave concerns,” Warren said, addressing Powell directly at the hearing. “Over and over, you have acted to make our banking system less safe, and that makes you a dangerous man to head up the Fed. And it’s why I will oppose your renomination.” 

Renomination still likely 

Powell’s four-year term as leader of the U.S. central bank will expire in February, and it has been broadly assumed that President Joe Biden would renominate him to another term. Experts say they still expect Powell to be renominated but feel less certain of that outcome than they did a few weeks ago. 

“I think he’s much more likely than not (to be renominated),” David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy at the Brookings Institution, told VOA. “But it did move the needle a little bit, and not in his direction.”

“I still think it’s reasonable to assume that Powell is renominated, because he has enjoyed, for the most part, bipartisan support,” Mark Hamrick, senior analyst and Washington bureau chief for Bankrate.com, told VOA. 

“The Federal Reserve was relatively quick in responding to the dire financial conditions that were created by the pandemic lockdowns, and it fairly effectively and fairly quickly restored order to markets,” he said.

However, the questionable investing by Fed officials on his watch may be eroding what had been substantial support for Powell, even among generally progressive Democrats. 

In a note to clients last week, Karen Petrou, managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics, wrote, “One of Mr. Powell’s strengths in the renomination battle has been divisions among Democratic progressives, making this resonant scandal particularly costly to his otherwise-strong position within the Biden Administration.” 

Questionable trading 

Last month, the Fed announced an investigation of the central bank’s ethics policies after reports surfaced that the presidents of the Federal Reserve Banks of Boston and Dallas had been actively trading in the stock market and in real estate at the same time that they were helping to set the nation’s monetary policies. Both said their investment activities complied with all applicable laws and Fed guidelines, and both announced their retirement on September 27. 

On Friday, Bloomberg reported that Federal Reserve Board Vice Chairman Richard Clarida bought between $1 million and $5 million in stock the day before Powell made a major speech on efforts to help the U.S. economy recover from the pandemic.

When Bloomberg reported Clarida’s trading activity, the Fed issued a statement sayingthe transactions were part of a “a pre-planned rebalancing to his accounts” that were pre-cleared by the Fed’s ethics officials, and that the timing was coincidental. 

Powell addressed the trading activity of the two bank presidents during congressional hearings last week, noting that while the trading activity was technically within the rules established by the Fed, the appearance of the activity was “just obviously unacceptable.” 

“[T]he problem is that the rules, the practices and the disclosure needs to be improved,” Powell said during congressional testimony, adding, “We will rise to this moment.” 

Investigation demanded 

In her letter to the SEC, Warren called out Powell by name. 

“It is not clear why Chair Powell did not stop these activities, which corrode the trust and effectiveness of the Fed. The Fed officials’ trades clearly run afoul of Fed guidelines stating that officials should ‘avoid any dealings or other conduct that might convey even an appearance of conflict between their personal interests, the interests of the System, and the public interest,'” she said. 

While Warren may not ultimately succeed in derailing a renomination of Powell, a Republican who was appointed to his first term by former President Donald Trump, her efforts may still have a major impact on the Fed. The Biden administration has a number of important central bank appointments to make, in addition to the chair.

‘Personnel is policy’ 

“She’s clearly using this as a way to make it difficult for the administration to reappoint Powell,” Wesel said, adding, “It’s pretty clear that the Biden White House cares a lot about what Elizabeth Warren thinks. And it’s pretty clear that Elizabeth Warren has figured out that personnel is policy.” 

The Federal Reserve Board is made up of seven governors who are appointed by the president and serve overlapping terms of 14 years each. From among the sitting board members, the president also appoints the Fed’s chair, vice chair, and vice chair for supervision to four-year terms. 

There is currently one empty board seat, and another will open up when Clarida’s term expires in January. The four-year-term of the current vice chair for supervision will end October 13. 

Warren and others on the left have made it clear that they would prefer to see sitting Fed Governor Lael Brainard replace Powell as Fed chair. But if Biden were to make her the vice chair for supervision and promise to add more left-leaning members to the board, that might help assuage their concerns about a Powell reappointment, according to analysts.

“There’s going to be some horse trading around this,” said Jesse Van Tol, president of the National Community Reinvestment Coalition. “I can still see a scenario where the administration decides it’s in their interest to trade to get a few other Fed governors confirmed and leave Powell in place, if they believe they can trust him and work with him.” 

 
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Biden Assails Republicans for Impasse over Increasing US Debt Limit

U.S. President Joe Biden assailed opposition Republican lawmakers Monday for obstructing Democrats from increasing the country’s borrowing authority to avert a potentially catastrophic default on October 18, when the U.S. government expects to run out of cash to pay its bills. 

Biden said he could not guarantee the United States would not default for the first time, contending it is up to Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell to allow Senate Democrats on their own to increase the debt limit past its current $28.4 trillion level without the threat of a Republican filibuster to block quick action. 

The U.S. leader said if the government defaults on its debts, Republicans would be responsible. Economists predict a default could have dire consequences for U.S. stock indexes and the world economy, and possibly force the government to delay pension payments to older Americans or make timely payments to government contractors. 

Biden said: “I can’t believe (a default) will be the end result, because the consequences would be so dire. … But can I guarantee it? If I could, I would. But I can’t.”

He depicted a default as akin to a “meteor headed to crash into our economy,” warning of higher interest rates and declining stock valuations affecting the investments of millions of Americans. 

McConnell sent a letter Monday to the White House reiterating that Republicans would not help Democrats to resolve the debt ceiling impasse. 

Senate Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats, with 50 seats in the 100-member Senate and the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, are willing to lift the debt ceiling on their own without Republican support on a simple majority vote. 

But McConnell has refused to yield the right of Republicans to filibuster the issue, which would force the Democrats to reach a 60-vote threshold with the support of at least 10 Republicans. He says Democrats should approve the debt ceiling increase through a legislative tactic called reconciliation that cannot be filibustered, a procedure Democrats say would be time-consuming and cumbersome. 

“Since mid-July, Republicans have clearly stated that Democrats will need to raise the debt limit on their own,” McConnell wrote in the letter. “We have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well.” 

Biden urged McConnell to simply allow Democrats to vote on the debt ceiling hike by not filibustering it, an option that would not require any Republican votes, but would allow Democrats to proceed without obstruction. 

“They need to stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy,” Biden said. “Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job but threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job — saving the economy from a catastrophic event — I think, quite frankly, is hypocritical, dangerous, and disgraceful. Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.” 

The country’s long-term debt is tantamount to personal credit card debt for consumers, requiring payments for debts already incurred. But in the latest standoff, McConnell and some Republican lawmakers are contending that lifting the debt ceiling would allow congressional Democrats to greatly expand government spending for the biggest expansion of social safety net programs since the 1960s that Republicans uniformly oppose.

The U.S., virtually alone among world governments, imposes a debt ceiling, which Congress has had to increase on numerous occasions in recent decades because the U.S. chronically spends more on government programs than it collects in revenue from corporations and individual taxpayers. 

Sometimes, the debt ceiling has been increased to a specific amount, but other times it has been suspended for a year or two. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said last week that Congress ought to simply do away with the debt ceiling altogether, although that appears unlikely since lawmakers in both U.S. political parties relish blaming the other for what they perceive as excessive spending when the other party’s favored spending plans are adopted. 

Schumer said in a letter to colleagues Monday that lawmakers must act quickly to increase the debt ceiling to avoid financial ramifications. 

“Let me be clear about the task ahead of us: we must get a bill to the president’s desk dealing with the debt limit by the end of the week. Period,” Schumer wrote. 

 
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US Democrats Remain Split on Key Legislation

Key U.S. Democratic lawmakers remained at odds Sunday on how to approve both infrastructure improvements in the country and the biggest social safety net expansion in five decades, but the leading progressive signaled there was room for compromise. 

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has for months pushed for a $3.5 trillion plan calling for climate control measures, universal pre-kindergarten classes, expanded health care for older Americans and more. Sanders is an Independent who caucuses with Democrats. 

He told ABC’s “This Week” show, “I accept that there’s going to have to be give and take.” 

He declined to put a price tag on how much spending he would settle for, the same stance taken by another leading advocate for the social safety net legislation, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal of the western state of Washington, in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union” show.

“There’s no number on the table yet that… everyone has agreed to,” Jayapal said, but said that $1.5 trillion proposed by centrist Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is “too small to get our priorities in.” 

President Joe Biden, in a rare visit to the Capitol on Friday to meet with Democratic members of the House of Representatives, suggested the eventual cost could be trimmed to between $1.9 trillion and $2.3 trillion for the social safety net measure, in addition to the trillion-dollar infrastructure legislation to repair the country’s deteriorating roads and bridges and expand broadband internet service throughout the United States. 

The U.S. leader has continued to advocate for passage of both pieces of legislation in tandem with each other. 

Sanders said, “Poll after poll shows that what we are doing is exactly what the American people want. It is not what the big money interests want, it is not what the lobbyists want. It’s what the American people want, and we’ve got to do it.” 

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, leader of the Democratic-controlled House, twice last week postponed a vote on the roads and bridges infrastructure measure. The move followed a threat from several dozen progressive lawmakers to vote against it until they had won assurances that Senate Democrats would also approve the social safety net spending. Pelosi has now set an October 31 deadline for completing passage of the two measures. 

In the politically divided Senate, with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, two moderate Democrats, Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have balked at the $3.5 trillion price tag for the social safety net expansion that would be the biggest in the U.S. since the 1960s. 

On Saturday, Sinema assailed the Democratic congressional leadership for delaying the infrastructure vote last week, calling the decision “inexcusable” and “deeply disappointing.” 

“Democratic leaders have made conflicting promises that could not all be kept — and have, at times, pretended that differences of opinion within our party did not exist, even when those disagreements were repeatedly made clear directly and publicly,” Sinema said. 

She and Manchin have both held several negotiating sessions with Biden and Democratic congressional leaders to try to iron out differences on the legislation but have yet to reach agreement. Both have said they do not support the $3.5 trillion in spending Biden originally proposed and progressive Democrats supported in the face of unified Republican opposition. 

“I’m listening to Sen. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema every day to see where we can get across the finish line,” Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois told CNN. 

Sanders remained optimistic about the eventual passage of both pieces of legislation.

“We’re going to win this,” he told ABC. 
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Blinken Heads to France to Revitalize Transatlantic Alliance

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is heading to Paris, his first trip to France following an enhanced trilateral security partnership known as AUKUS (Australia, U.K., and the U.S.) that heightened tensions between the transatlantic allies.

Experts said they expect Blinken, who has strong personal ties to France, to use the upcoming trip to try to improve U.S.-France relations.

The top U.S. diplomat will chair the Ministerial Council Meeting of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development that is scheduled to take place Oct. 5-6, and commemorate the organization’s 60th anniversary.

Blinken will have a bilateral meeting with French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian in Paris.France is set to hold the presidency of Council of the European Union from Jan. 1-June 30, 2022.

“Secretary Blinken will also meet with French counterparts to continue discussions on further strengthening the vital U.S.-France relationship on a range of issues including security in the Indo-Pacific region, the climate crisis, economic recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, the transatlantic relationship, and working with our allies and partners to address global challenges and opportunities,” said the State Department in a statement Friday.

Tensions over AUKUS deal

U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration announced Sept. 15 a new security pact with Australia and the U.K. Under the deal, Australia will get at least eight nuclear-powered submarines to be built domestically using American technology. The agreement came after Australia pulled out of an earlier deal with France for diesel-electric submarines, angering Paris.

France recalled its ambassadors to the U.S. and to Australia within two days following the announcement. Le Drian declared there is a “crisis of trust” in the United States.

After a phone call between President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron on Sept. 22 which sought to ease tensions over the submarine deal, both leaders decided to “open a process of in-depth consultations” to ensure “confidence.” Macron also decided that French Ambassador Philippe Etienne would return to Washington the following week.

On Thursday, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Etienne at the White House to “continue advancing shared agenda,” in advance of Biden’s meeting with Macron in Europe at the end of October. Both are scheduled to attend the Group of 20 summit in Rome at that time.

“We need to make sure trust is there,” said Karen Donfried, the newly confirmed assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs, in a phone briefing on Friday.

While the U.S.-France relationship remains an important one for both sides, James Goldgeier, who is a senior visiting fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, said the Biden administration “seems to have been a bit taken aback by the angry French reaction” to the AUKUS deal.

“It’s good that the two presidents are looking for ways to move forward. There is no question that the Biden administration sees the Indo-Pacific as its main focus. U.S. policy toward regions like Europe are seen through that lens,” Goldgeier told VOA.

The State Department said in a statement that the U.S. delegation to OECD’s October ministerial also includes Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and the U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai.

OECD & China

The OECD gathering will discuss the climate crisis, promoting the transition to net-zero emissions, as well as market-economy principles while continuing its commitment on shared values such as democracy, rule of law, and human rights.

A senior State Department official said another focus during the upcoming OECD meeting is the Blue Dot Network, a mechanism to certify infrastructure projects that meet robust international quality standards.

The United States, Japan and Australia launched the Blue Dot Network in 2019. Named for the view of Earth from space as a mere “blue dot,” it encourages development by certifying public-private investments in global infrastructure that are market-driven, transparent, and environmentally sustainable.

“The administration is very interested in engaging like-minded partners and allies to talk about the behaviors of non-market economies, including China,” said Matt Murray, a senior official from the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs, during a phone briefing on Friday.

Murray told VOA that China will participate in the upcoming OECD meeting as an observer.

“Separate from the ministerial council meeting, and more generally, the U.S. government has undertaken a comprehensive review of the U.S.-China trade relationship because the United States welcomes healthy, fair competition with our trading partners. And economic competition with the PRC should be fair,” added Murray.

Blinken heads to Mexico

Blinken’s weeklong trip also includes a stop at Stanford University, as well as meetings in Mexico City from Oct. 7-8 for the U.S.-Mexico High Level Security Dialogue.

The top U.S. diplomat will join U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to discuss security issues, Mexican Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard said this week.

The high-level meeting comes amid a recent migration crisis as tens of thousands of Haitian migrants gathered at the U.S.-Mexico border last month.

The Biden administration confirmed on Sept. 24 that a makeshift camp where 15,000 Haitian migrants braved desperate conditions along the U.S.-Mexico border was now vacant.

In late September, Mexico also began flying Haitian migrants back to their homeland.
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Abortion, Guns, Religion Top Big US Supreme Court Term

The future of abortion rights is in the hands of a conservative Supreme Court that is beginning a new term Monday that also includes major cases on gun rights and religion. 

The court’s credibility with the public also could be on the line, especially if a divided court were to overrule the landmark Roe v. Wade decision from 1973 that established a woman’s right to an abortion nationwide. 

The justices are returning to the courtroom after an 18-month absence caused by the coronavirus pandemic, and the possible retirement of liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, 83, also looms. 

It’s the first full term with the court in its current alignment.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, the last of former President Donald Trump’s three high-court appointees, is part of a six-justice conservative majority. Barrett was nominated and confirmed last year amid the pandemic, little more than a month after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Trump and Republicans who controlled the Senate moved quickly to fill the seat shortly before the 2020 presidential election, bringing about a dramatic change in the court’s lineup that has set the stage for a potentially law-changing term on several high-profile issues. 

With abortion, guns and religion already on the agenda, and a challenge to affirmative action waiting in the wings, the court will answer a key question over the next year, said University of Chicago law professor David Strauss. “Is this the term in which the culture wars return to the Supreme Court in a big way?” Strauss said. 

Mississippi abortion case

No issue is bigger than abortion.

The justices will hear arguments December 1 in Mississippi’s bid to enforce a ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Lower courts blocked the law because it is inconsistent with high-court rulings that allow states to regulate but not prohibit abortion before viability, the point around 24 weeks of pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the womb. 

Mississippi is taking what conservative commentator Carrie Severino called a “rip-the-Band-Aid-off” approach to the case by asking the court to abandon its support of abortion rights that was laid out in Roe and the 1992 case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 

Mississippi is among 12 states with so-called trigger laws that would take effect if Roe is overturned and ban abortion entirely. 

By a 5-4 vote in early September, the court already has allowed a ban on most abortions to take effect in Texas, though no court has yet ruled on the substance of the law. 

But that vote and the Mississippi case highlight the potential risk to the court’s reputation, said David Cole, the American Civil Liberties Union’s legal director. The arguments advanced by Mississippi were considered and rejected by the Supreme Court in 1992, Cole said. 

“The only difference between then and now is the identity of the justices,” he said. 

Jeff Wall, a top Justice Department lawyer under Trump, said the court could sharply expand gun rights and end the use of race in college admissions, but only abortion is likely to move public perception of the court. “I still don’t think that’s going to create some groundswell in the public, unless it’s accompanied by some kind of watershed ruling on abortion,” Wall said.

Challenge to New York law

In early November, the court will take up a challenge to New York restrictions on carrying a gun in public, a case that offers the court the chance to expand gun rights under the Second Amendment. Before Barrett joined the court, the justices turned away similar cases, over the dissents of some conservative members of the court. 

Until Barrett came along, some justices who favor gun rights questioned whether Chief Justice John Roberts would provide a fifth, majority-making vote “for a more expansive reading of the Second Amendment,” said George Washington University law professor Robert Cottrol, who said he hoped the court would now broaden gun rights. 

More than 40 states already make it easy to be armed in public, but New York and California, two of the nation’s most populous states, are among the few with tighter regulations. 

The case has gun control advocates worried.

“An expansive Second Amendment ruling by the Supreme Court could restrict or prohibit the sensible solutions that have been shown can end gun violence,” said Jonathan Lowy, vice president and chief counsel at the gun violence prevention group Brady. Lowy included state laws requiring a justification to carry a gun as examples of such “sensible solutions.” 

A case from Maine gives the court another opportunity to weigh religious rights in the area of education. The state excludes religious schools from a tuition program for families who live in towns that don’t have public schools. 

Since even before Ginsburg’s death, the court has favored religion-based discrimination claims and the expectation among legal experts is that parents in Maine who sued to be able to use taxpayer money at religious schools will prevail, though it’s not clear how broadly the court might rule. 

Affirmative action is not yet on the court’s agenda, but it could still get there this term in a lawsuit over Harvard’s use of race in college admissions. Lower courts upheld the school’s policy, but this is another case in which the change in the composition of the court could prove decisive. The court upheld race-conscious admission policies as recently as five years ago but that was before Trump’s three appointments accentuated the court’s conservative tilt. 

Federal death penalty

Among other notable cases, the justices will consider reinstating the death sentence for Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The Biden administration is pushing for the capital sentence, even as it has suspended federal executions and President Joe Biden has called for an end to the federal death penalty. 

The court will also weigh two cases involving “state secrets,” the idea that the government can block the release of information it claims would harm national security if disclosed. One case involves a Guantanamo Bay detainee who a lower court said was tortured in CIA custody. The other involves a group of Muslim residents of California who allege the FBI targeted them for surveillance because of their religion. 

Decisions in most of the big cases won’t come before spring because the justices typically spend months drafting and revising majority opinions and dissents. 

Around then, Breyer might signal whether he is planning to retire from a job he has held since 1994. Retirement announcements often come in the spring, to give the president and the Senate enough time to choose and confirm a nominee before the court returns from its summer break and begins hearing cases again in October.

The consequences of Ginsburg’s decision to remain on the court through Barack Obama’s presidency and her death while Trump was in the White House can’t be lost on Breyer, said Tom Goldstein, the founder of the Scotusblog website and a frequent advocate before the court. 

“It’s overwhelmingly likely he’ll retire this term,” Goldstein said. 

The courthouse still is closed to the public, but live audio of the court’s arguments will be available and reporters who regularly cover the court will be in attendance. The tradition-bound court first provided live audio in May 2020, when the court began hearing arguments by telephone during the pandemic. 

Justice Brett Kavanaugh will participate remotely from his home next week during oral arguments after testing positive for COVID-19 despite being vaccinated. The court said Friday that the 54-year-old justice has no symptoms. 
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Agenda in Peril, Biden Heads to US Capitol to Meet With Democrats

President Joe Biden was scheduled to meet Friday with his fellow Democrats in Congress, progressives and moderates in his party remained divided over two massive spending bills that account for much of his domestic agenda. 

Democrats have struggled to coalesce around those two bills. Progressives have vowed to block a $1 trillion infrastructure bill without an agreement to advance a larger social spending and climate change bill. Moderates say that bill’s current $3.5 trillion price tag is too high. 

After a two-hour party meeting, Democratic leaders in the House of Representatives did not appear to have a clear plan. Representative James Clyburn, the chamber’s No. 3 Democrat, said he had “no idea” whether there would be a vote. 

But Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is among Democratic leaders in the chamber, said he expected the House to vote Friday on the infrastructure bill, one day later than planned. “I expect a vote today, and I expect that bill will pass today,” he said. 

House Democrats are waiting for an “iron clad” agreement from the Senate as to what its members could agree to, he said. “We are working on trying to get to a place where everybody is comfortable,” No. 2 House Democrat Steny Hoyer told reporters. 

The White House said Biden would travel to Capitol Hill to speak with Democrats later in the day. 

With a narrow majority in the House, Biden’s party cannot afford to lose too many votes on the infrastructure legislation, which would double spending on roads, pipes and other infrastructure. The bill has already passed the Senate with bipartisan support. 

Democrats said they also planned a vote to ensure that transportation funding, which expired on Thursday, is not disrupted while they continue to negotiate. 

Ahead of the meeting, Representative Pramila Jayapal, the influential chair of the 95-member House Progressive Caucus, said the smaller bill could not pass without agreement on the larger, multitrillion-dollar one. 

“I kept telling her that we didn’t have the votes, and I knew she knew that,” Jayapal said of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Progressives are angry that two Senate moderates — Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema — oppose the size of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan to boost social spending and fight climate change. The Senate is split 50-50 with Republicans, all of whom oppose the multitrillion-dollar bill, so every Democratic vote is needed for passage with Vice President Kamala Harris the tie breaker. 

Manchin has proposed a spending package of about $1.5 trillion. Sinema declined to say Thursday whether she agreed with Manchin’s proposal. She has met with Biden multiple times to discuss the bill. She was home in Arizona on Friday but remained in touch with the White House, a spokesman said.

Democratic Representative Dean Phillips, a moderate, said he wanted to see a vote on the infrastructure bill, even if it was not certain that it would pass. 

House Republicans are unlikely to help pass the infrastructure bill, eager to deny Biden a policy victory ahead of the 2022 midterm elections, when history favors their chances to recapture majorities. 

Debt-ceiling threat

Congress, which averted a politically damaging government shutdown on Thursday, has little time to focus on the infrastructure fight due to another fast-approaching deadline: the debt ceiling. 

A historic U.S. debt default could occur around October 18, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has estimated, if Congress fails to give the government additional borrowing authority beyond the current statutory limit of $28.4 trillion. 

Republicans want no part of the debt limit increase, saying it is Democrats’ problem since they control Congress and the White House. Democrats note that about $5 trillion of the nation’s debt is the result of tax cuts and spending passed during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency. 

The House approved a bill late Wednesday suspending the debt limit through December 2022. The Senate could vote on it “as early as next week,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, but Republicans are expected to block it again as they have twice before. 

 
…

Biden’s Landmark Legislation Faces Rocky Road to Passage

U.S. President Joe Biden faces opposition from within his own party in Congress to pass his signature Build Back Better legislation. The $3.5 trillion package would dramatically expand child care, health care and clean energy in America. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports.
…

America’s Investment in Infrastructure Doesn’t Always Pay Off

About two centuries ago, American local, state and federal governments poured millions of dollars into building canals to move the nation’s people and goods. By 1840, there were 3,000 miles of canals in the United States. But, within 20 years, the rise of the railroads would make canals practically obsolete. In the 1840s, several U.S. states ended up defaulting on the loans they took to build canals and railroads.

The defaults are an example of what can happen when governments spend on infrastructure — because trying to guess the future can be like shooting at a moving target. 

“You try to foresee a future. You try to guess what you’re going to need 10, 20, 30 years down the line,” says Richard White, professor emeritus of American history at Stanford University in California. “It takes a long time to construct this kind of infrastructure. And secondly, you’re going to be paying for it in the future…so very often you can be paying for something you no longer need well into the future.” 

Yet, not spending on infrastructure can be costly. 

“If we continue to not invest, Americans — between now and 2039 —— will lose on average $3,300 per year in lost disposable income,” says Greg DiLoreto, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). “That’s money they’ll lose because they’re spending it on fixing their cars because it ran into a pothole, for example. That’s wasted gas stuck in traffic. Or, this past year where I live, we have the big freeze. People were investing in generators so they would have power. Or that’s when a water line breaks and you go out and you buy bottled water.” 

Every four years, the ASCE grades America’s Infrastructure. The assessment looks at several categories including energy, waste water, drinking water, aviation, roads, bridges, dams and rail. The 2021 Report Card gives the nation’s infrastructure a low C grade — essentially the lowest passing grade possible. 

President Joe Biden has made infrastructure funding a signature piece of his agenda. In August, the U.S. Senate passed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan that focuses on transportation, utilities, including high-speed internet for rural communities, and pollution cleanup. The proposal, which would be the largest federal investment in infrastructure in more than a decade, must still pass in the House of Representatives. 

DiLoreto says it’s hard to prioritize one infrastructure category area over the other because they all hinge together. 

“You’ve got to have strong electric to have strong water and wastewater and broadband,” DiLoreto says. “You’ve got to have a strong road system if you’re going to feed your ports. You’ve got to have strong ports if you’re going to ship your goods and get your goods into this country. And, without the roads to support that, what happens when [goods] wind up on the ports and can’t go anywhere [because] congestion is a problem?” 

While it’s challenging to predict the future, White sees several places where infrastructure money would be wasted. That includes places like coastal Louisiana, the San Francisco Bay and large parts of Florida and the Atlantic coastline, which could be impacted by climate change and rising sea levels.

“Do we really want to build infrastructure in places where we’re no longer going to be able to inhabit?” White says. “Are we really going to want to build a huge amount of infrastructure to protect coastlines that we really cannot protect? Are we going to want to set up sewage systems that, in fact, will be overwhelmed by ocean rise? We have a whole series of things which are going to be controversial because people live there now and they’re going to want that infrastructure to protect them.” 

Another potentially unpopular move would be to refrain from spending money on more fire-prone areas of the country, primarily in the West. From January 1, 2021, through September 29, 2021, more than 46,000 wildfires burned through almost 2.4 million hectares of land across the United States.

“We should not be building up infrastructure that encourages people to move into places where these kinds of fires are going to ravage them, force them out, [and] we’re going to have to spend huge public resources trying to protect them,” White says. “It seems to me the writing’s on the wall. It’s not that hard to figure out, but none of these things are necessarily going to be particularly popular.” 

Local governments own most of the nation’s infrastructure, but any ambitious infrastructure plans require at least some federal funding. 

“There’s no question that all the spending increases happen because of bold elected officials, and elected officials are only bold when the people they represent tell them to be. So we need bold leadership to make this happen,” DiLoreto says. “We also need to design these projects both sustainably and to be resilient.” 
…

Democrats Delay Vote on Infrastructure Plan, Bowing to Progressives

Democratic leaders of the U.S. House of Representatives delayed a planned vote on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill that had been set for Thursday, bowing to party progressives who had demanded action on a larger social policy bill first.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden have been scrambling to patch up differences between progressive lawmakers, who want a $3.5 trillion social spending package to go along with the infrastructure plan, and moderates wanting a smaller bill.

The move gave Biden and Democratic leaders more time to try to assemble the votes to gain support for a key part of his agenda.

“A great deal of progress has been made this week, and we are closer to an agreement than ever,” said White House spokesperson Jen Psaki. “But we are not there yet, and so, we will need some additional time to finish the work, starting tomorrow morning first thing.”

Some progressive Democrats have vowed to vote against the bill to invest in the nation’s roads, bridges and other infrastructure, angry that Democrats have not yet reached agreement on a multitrillion-dollar companion bill with funding for social services and to address climate change.

Faced with increasingly stiff odds of passing their $3.5 trillion social spending proposal, Biden and his aides are trying to find out what narrower proposal could unite an ideologically fractured Democratic caucus of lawmakers, according to people familiar with the matter.

Lawmakers on the party’s left flank have said they will not vote for the infrastructure bill unless they feel certain their priorities will be reflected in the social spending bill.

Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar, a leader of House progressives, told reporters: “Nothing has changed with our caucus members. We don’t have the votes to pass infrastructure.”

Moderate Democratic Senator Manchin has proposed a spending package of about $1.5 trillion. Another Democratic moderate, Senator Kyrsten Sinema, declined to say whether she agreed with Manchin’s proposal. She has met with Biden multiple times to discuss the bill.

With razor-thin majorities in Congress, Democrats cannot afford to lose many votes if they want to pass their agenda.

They are unlikely to win much support from House Republicans eager to take back the majority in the 2022 congressional elections.

Debt-ceiling threat

In yet another high-stakes battle, congressional Democrats and Republicans continued brawling over giving the Treasury Department additional borrowing authority beyond the current statutory limit of $28.4 trillion. A historic U.S. debt default could occur around Oct. 18, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has estimated, if Congress fails to act.

Republicans want no part of the debt limit increase, saying it is Democrats’ problem since they control Congress and the White House. Democrats note that about $5 trillion of the nation’s debt is the result of tax cuts and spending passed during Republican Donald Trump’s presidency.

The House approved a bill late on Wednesday suspending the debt limit through December 2022. The Senate could vote on it “as early as next week,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said, but Republicans are expected to block it again.

Yellen said on Thursday it would be a “catastrophe” if Congress does not raise the debt ceiling. The uncertainty is starting to filter into financial markets, although few believe the nation will ultimately default.

The looming debt crisis is rattling Americans on both sides of the political spectrum, according to an Ipsos national opinion poll conducted for Reuters on Tuesday and Wednesday.

It showed that 65% of adults, including eight in 10 Democrats and five in 10 Republicans, are “very” or “somewhat” concerned that Congress will fail to reach a debt deal in time. 

 
…

Biden’s Landmark Legislation Faces Tough Road to Passage

U.S. President Joe Biden faces opposition from within his own party in Congress to pass his signature Build Back Better legislation. The $3.5 trillion package would dramatically expand child care, health care and clean energy in America. VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports.
…

US Congress Approves Stopgap Funding to Keep Government Open

The House and Senate voted Thursday afternoon in favor of stopgap legislation to keep the government funded until December 3, avoiding a midnight shutdown. 

The Senate vote was 65-35, which was followed by a House vote of 254-175. President Joe Biden signed the legislation into law Thursday night at the White House.

The legislation maintains current funding levels across government agencies. It also includes $28.6 billion for states suffering from hurricane and wildfire damage, and $6.3 billion to help relocate Afghan refugees moving to the United States after Washington ended its two-decade war in Afghanistan last month. 

Avoiding a shutdown was just one item on a busy congressional agenda. 

The House was also set Thursday to vote on a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan to repair the country’s aging roads and bridges and expand broadband internet service throughout the U.S.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi planned to go ahead with the vote, even though some progressive Democrats promised to vote against it unless they received assurances that political moderates in their party and two key centrist senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, would also support a separate $3.5 trillion measure to greatly expand the country’s social safety net programs.

“We’re on the path to winning the vote” on the infrastructure plan, Pelosi told reporters Thursday morning. The Senate has already approved the bipartisan legislation.

Senate Republicans earlier this week blocked passage of another measure to avert the possible partial government shutdown because it also included a provision to suspend the country’s long-term debt limit, which they are trying to force Democrats to adopt on their own without Republican support.

But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans would support a measure that deals only with the funding package to keep the government open into the new fiscal year that starts Friday.

There have been 21 partial U.S. government shutdowns since 1976, including three during the single four-year White House term of President Donald Trump.

By law, U.S. government agencies must have congressionally authorized funding to operate. Shutdowns have usually occurred when Congress and the White House cannot agree on funding levels for specific operations or whether the programs in question deserve to be funded at all.

Without funding during the shutdowns, many government operations have been halted, such as pension payments to older Americans, the processing of income tax refunds and accessibility to national parks. National security operations, however, have been deemed essential, and workers have stayed on the job even though their paychecks might be delayed.

Additionally, Pelosi told Democratic colleagues the House would vote soon on suspending the national government’s debt limit.

Even if the House passes the legislation, though, its fate in the politically divided Senate, with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, is uncertain.

Senate Republicans already twice this week have rejected efforts to suspend the debt limit, saying it is an effort by opposition Democrats to clear the path for the massive new spending plan to expand social safety net programs, the most since the 1960s.

Republicans uniformly oppose the Democratic proposals championed by Biden.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told congressional leaders on Tuesday that the government would likely run out of money to pay its bills by October 18 if Congress did not suspend the debt limit or raise it substantially beyond its current $28.4 trillion total.
…

International Safe Abortion Day Marked by Battles in US, Latin America

Protesters around the world marked International Safe Abortion Day this week as high-profile cases in the United States and Latin America once again focused attention on the debate over reproductive rights.VOA’s Congressional Correspondent Katherine Gypson reports on the fight over a Texas abortion law that has reached Capitol Hill.

Producer: Bakhtiyar Zamanov
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Democratic-Controlled Congress Poised to Approve Stopgap Funding to Keep US Government Open

The Democratic-controlled U.S. Congress appeared set Wednesday to approve a stopgap funding measure to avert a partial national government shutdown at midnight Thursday. 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation would maintain current funding levels across government agencies through December 3. It would also include $6.3 billion to help relocate Afghan refugees moving to the U.S. after Washington ended its two-decade war in Afghanistan last month, and $28.6 billion to help eastern and southern states recover from devastating hurricanes and western states from raging wildfires. 

“We can approve this measure quickly and send it to the House so it can reach the president’s desk before funding expires midnight tomorrow,” Schumer said in remarks on the Senate floor. “With so many critical issues to address, the last thing the American people need right now is a government shutdown. This proposal will prevent one from happening.” 

Senate Republicans earlier this week blocked passage of another measure to avert the shutdown because it also included a provision to suspend the country’s long-term debt limit, which they are trying to force Democrats to adopt on their own without Republican support. 

But Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said Republicans would support a “clean” funding package to keep the government open into the new fiscal year starting October 1, such as the legislation proposed by Schumer. 

If passed by the Senate, the stopgap funding bill would head to the House of Representatives, where House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer told reporters Tuesday that the chamber could also vote on it later Wednesday. 

Previous shutdowns

There have been 21 partial U.S. government shutdowns, all since 1976, and include three during former President Donald Trump’s one-term administration. The second shutdown during Trump’s term on February 9, 2018, was only a few hours and involved a filibuster by Republican Senator Rand Paul. 

By law, U.S. government agencies must have congressionally authorized funding in order to operate. Shutdowns have usually occurred when Congress and the White House cannot agree on funding levels for specific operations or whether the programs in question deserve to be funded at all. 

Without funding during the shutdowns, many government operations have been halted, such as pension payments to older Americans, the processing of income tax refunds and accessibility to national parks. But national security operations have been deemed essential and workers have stayed on the job, even as their paychecks might be delayed. 

Debt limit

Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democratic colleagues the chamber would vote soon on suspending the national government’s debt limit. 

But even if the House passes the legislation, its fate in the politically divided Senate, with 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats, is uncertain. 

Senate Republicans already twice this week have rejected efforts to suspend the debt limit, saying it is an effort by opposition Democrats to clear the path for a massive new spending plan to expand social safety net programs the most since the 1960s. 

Republicans uniformly oppose the Democratic proposals championed by President Joe Biden. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told congressional leaders on Tuesday that the government is likely to run out of money to pay its bills by October 18 if Congress does not suspend the debt limit or raise it substantially beyond its current $28.4 trillion total. 

 
…

Uncertainty Grips Washington in Face of Another Possible Shutdown

If Congress fails to act, the U.S. government’s authority to continue spending money will expire at midnight on Thursday, forcing more than 1 million federal workers and an untold number of contractors to stop working. Thousands more will be expected to continue working without clarity about precisely when they will be paid. 

“The stakes are whether the United States government is able to answer the many challenges that we face as a country,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, an advocacy group for improved federal government.

And once the government shuts down, Stier said, restarting it isn’t like flipping a switch. 

“This is a multitrillion-dollar, very complex entity,” he told VOA. “And so, turning it off and turning it back on actually takes a ton of energy and a bunch of time. So, it is highly costly — billions of dollars costly — when you have a shutdown, even if it’s not for a very long period of time.” 

History of shutdowns 

Since 1980, the federal government has shut down because of a lack of funding 21 different times. 

This would be the first government shutdown of President Joe Biden’s term in office. Going back to Jimmy Carter’s term in office from 1977 to 1981, every U.S. president except for George W. Bush has experienced at least one such funding crisis, though the majority have lasted only a few days and several have been for a few hours. 

The last time the government shut down was in 2018, when a dispute between then-President Donald Trump and congressional Democrats over his proposal to build a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico resulted in a record-setting 35-day partial closure that stretched into January 2019. 

Not a full shutdown 

The term “government shutdown” is something of a misnomer. Under existing rules, when the government runs out of funding, federal agencies are required to furlough all “nonessential” employees. Doctors and nurses at hospitals run by the Department of Veterans Affairs will still be allowed to go to work. So will Transportation Security Agency officers, active duty members of the military and most federal law enforcement officers. 

But employees deemed essential will still not be paid until the shutdown is resolved. 

In a sign of the degree to which government shutdowns have been normalized as just part of how Washington does business, Trump in 2019 signed the Government Employee Fair Treatment Act, which guarantees that federal workers, essential and nonessential, receive the back pay they missed during the duration of any future government shutdowns. 

However, Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said that a promise of getting paid eventually is cold comfort to a federal worker unable to pay their rent. 

“So many of our members live paycheck to paycheck,” Kelley told VOA. “Unless a creditor or landlord agrees to work with them, they’re going to be in a terrible situation.” 

If financial distress winds up affecting a furloughed employee’s credit rating, Kelley said, the damage can extend to their careers. “A lot of security clearances depend on your credit rating,” Kelley said, meaning that workers whose credit suffers could lose their jobs. 

What to expect 

In past shutdowns, the most publicly visible effects were the closure of national parks and the museums near the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Those would also likely happen this time around. But it’s beneath the surface where shutdowns cause real turmoil. 

About 60% of government employees would be barred from working during a shutdown, which means that any number of seemingly mundane procedures would stop happening. New passport applications wouldn’t be processed; small business loans wouldn’t be approved; requests for federal retirement benefits would stop moving through the system. 

Most Americans would not be immediately affected by stalled government activity. But those who are — a person waiting for a passport, a small-business owner waiting for funding, a retiree needing income — could face anything from inconvenience to significant economic injury. 

Employees of government contractors are particularly vulnerable. For example, Congress has contracts with private firms to supply the workers who provide food service on Capitol Hill and clean congressional offices. During a shutdown, those workers cannot work, and because they are paid an hourly wage rather than a salary, they rarely recover those lost wages. 

Economic damage is limited and localized 

The 35-day shutdown during the Trump administration was only partial, because before it began, Congress had passed funding measures for some agencies, most notably the Department of Defense.

Nevertheless, the Congressional Budget Office later estimated that the shutdown had “delayed approximately $18 billion in federal discretionary spending for compensation and purchases of goods and services, and suspended some federal services.”

The overall impact on GDP was minor, the CBO found. During the shutdown and immediately following it, economic activity slumped noticeably, but much of that “lost” productivity was recouped later in the year. On balance, the CBO said that the 35-day shutdown cut 2019 GDP in the U.S. by just 0.02% 

However, the CBO noted, the damage from the shutdown was not equally distributed.

“Underlying those effects on the overall economy are much more significant effects on individual businesses and workers,” the agency found. “Among those who experienced the largest and most direct negative effects are federal workers who faced delayed compensation and private-sector entities that lost business. Some of those private-sector entities will never recoup that lost income.” 

‘Completely irresponsible’ 

Kelley, of the American Federation of Government Employees, pointed out that it is unprecedented for the government to be shut down in the midst of a pandemic, calling it “completely irresponsible” to hobble agencies battling COVID-19 with staff shortages. 

“Shutting down the government at this critical juncture, in this fight against the dangerous delta variant (of the COVID-19 virus) is simply unthinkable,” he said. 

Stier, whose organization prepared detailed guidance for government agencies navigating shutdowns, said all that guidance had to be rewritten to reflect employees working remotely, and that new measures remain untested. 

 
…

Amid Democratic Infighting, Biden’s Domestic Agenda Hangs by a Thread

The events of the next four days on Capitol Hill will go a long way toward determining the ultimate success or failure of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, as four different legislative initiatives converge in a burst of frenetic policymaking. 

Congress must pass a budget resolution for the new fiscal year before Friday to avoid a partial shutdown of the federal government, and it must raise the limit on the Treasury Department’s authority to borrow money to avoid a catastrophic default on the country’s debts that could occur as soon as mid-October. 

At the same time, the Democratic Party is tearing itself apart internally with arguments over two additional bills that the president sees as vital to his agenda. 

“I don’t know whether everything is going to get resolved this week,” said William A. Galston, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. “But there’s no question about the fact that the next week or two — or maximum three — are make-or-break for the Biden administration’s legislative agenda.” 

Democratic infighting 

The first of the two bills that Democrats are fighting over is a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill that has already passed the Senate with bipartisan support. The second is a much larger $3.5 trillion bill with tax credits and social spending that would forward multiple Democratic priorities, including efforts to address climate change, expand access to health care, address inequality, and more.

The problem is that the progressive wing of the party is promising to block passage of the infrastructure bill unless the social spending bill is passed first, and moderates are balking unless the infrastructure package is passed first and the cost of the social spending bill is slashed. 

Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington research organization, said the Democratic leadership in the House is in a position similar to the Republican leadership a decade ago. At that time, with the far-right Tea Party movement ascendant, Republican leaders faced a group on the party’s ideological fringe that was willing to scuttle the broader party’s goals to achieve their own, narrower objectives.

“It has historically been the case that when the speaker and the president of the Democratic Party say, ‘We’re going to do this now,’ the party gets in line,” said Grumet. Now, he said, “There is an open question, that will be somewhat resolved in the next few days, about whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and President Biden can, in fact, maintain cohesion in a very diverse Democratic Party.” 

And that covers only the House of Representatives. For the social spending bill to pass the Senate, Democrats would have to bring along all 50 of their members, including West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema, both of whom have expressed serious doubts about the proposal.

Republicans filibuster funding bill 

Senate Republicans complicated the process on Monday night by using a legislative tool — the filibuster — to kill a House-passed bill that would have funded the government into December and suspended the debt ceiling restrictions on Treasury borrowing until December 2022. Their aim is to force Democrats to use a process known as “budget reconciliation,” which is immune to the filibuster, to raise the debt ceiling using only Democratic votes. 

Lawmakers in both parties dread having to raise the debt ceiling for fear of being criticized for reckless spending.

Democrats, however, want Republicans to participate in the debt ceiling vote, because the measure would help defray the costs of spending bills and tax cuts passed when the GOP held power. 

Additionally, Democrats had planned to use budget reconciliation to pass the $3.5 trillion social spending bill. But adding an urgent debt ceiling increase complicates that bill significantly and greatly compresses the time that Democrats would have to work on it. 

Filibuster as cudgel 

The stakes are particularly high because after a reconciliation bill is passed, Republicans will be in a position to block most future Democratic initiatives. That’s because budget reconciliation can typically be used only once per budget cycle, leaving Republicans able to filibuster — and thereby kill with unlimited debate — any further Democratic bills. 

Democrats, who control the 100-member Senate with 50 votes plus the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris, would need 10 Republican senators to join them to achieve a 60-vote supermajority required to end a filibuster — a near impossibility given the sharp partisan divisions on Capitol Hill.

Failure to secure the president’s objectives now could leave Democrats with nothing to show for two years of unified control of Congress. That would make an already difficult midterm election even more challenging. 

Historically, the party of a sitting president usually loses representation in Congress in midterm elections. With their tiny majorities in the House and Senate, Democrats were already facing the likelihood of losing control of one or both chambers in 2022.

Infrastructure vote postponed 

Speaker Pelosi, a California Democrat, had promised her party’s moderates a vote Monday on the $1 trillion infrastructure package. But, late Sunday night, she announced that the vote would be postponed until Thursday. 

Over the weekend, Pelosi also said the House would vote this week on the larger domestic policy bill — a piece of legislation that hasn’t been written yet because of the extensive intraparty disagreements over what ought to be in it and the price tag. 

House Democrats were scheduled to meet Monday night to find a way forward. 

If the party fails to bridge internal divides and misses the opportunity to enact historic domestic policy, it would likely seal Democrats’ fate, political experts assert. 

“If there isn’t a path to ‘yes’ that people are prepared to take, then the Democratic Party will have failed and will be seen by the American people as having failed,” said Galston, of the Brookings Institution. “And failure, plus a president with low job-approval numbers, is a formula for a political cataclysm in the midterms.” 

 
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US Senate Fails to Pass Government Funding, Debt Ceiling Measures

The U.S. Senate failed Monday to pass measures to avert a partial government shutdown and prevent a federal default at the start of a crucial legislative week that is highlighting the challenges facing the sharply divided Congress.

Republican lawmakers voted to oppose the bills Monday evening, forcing Democrats to look for other ways to keep the government open beyond Thursday and to raise the debt ceiling before the government is expected to default on its loans sometime in late October or early November.

The near party-line vote failed 48-50. Democrats narrowly control both Houses of Congress, but under Senate rules, 60 out of 100 votes are needed to pass most legislation in that chamber.

Republicans have said they want Democrats to lift the debt limit on their own, saying they do not support the Democrats’ multitrillion-dollar spending plans.

“We are not willing to help Democrats raise the debt ceiling while they write a reckless taxing and spending spree of historic proportions behind closed doors,” Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell said on the Senate floor Monday.

Democrats say much of the nation’s debt was incurred during the Trump administration. Historically, both parties have voted to raise the limit to prevent the United States from defaulting on its debts. 

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said that the Republican action is “one of the most reckless and irresponsible votes I have seen take place in the Senate” and that “the Republican Party has solidified itself as the party of default.” 

McConnell said Republicans would support a bill funding the day-to-day operations of the government, which runs out of money after Thursday. Democrats, however, do not want to separate the government funding measure from the debt limit bill. 

In addition to the impasse on those measures, Congress is also at odds over a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill as well as a $3.5 trillion Democratic social spending and climate change bill.

The House of Representatives began debate Monday on the infrastructure bill ahead of a planned vote Thursday on the measure, which is a major part of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the dates in a letter to Democratic lawmakers Sunday. In television interviews, she expressed confidence the bill would pass.

“Let me just say that we’re going to pass the bill this week,” Pelosi said on ABC’s This Week.

The Senate approved the infrastructure plan in a vote last month that saw 19 Republicans join all 50 members of the Democratic caucus.

Progressive Democrats in the House, however, have tied the infrastructure bill to the larger $3.5 trillion social spending bill, which faces more opposition, including from some Senate Democrats who say they will not support that much spending.

House progressives say they won’t vote for the infrastructure bill unless there is progress on the social spending bill, while Democratic moderates say they may not vote on the larger spending bill until the infrastructure bill passes. 

Pelosi told ABC’s This Week that the negotiations would certainly result in a lower price tag for the social spending bill, calling such a development “self-evident.”

The $3.5 trillion proposal includes plans to provide universal prekindergarten instruction, free community college classes, expanded health care for older Americans, child care funding and money to combat the effects of climate change. It would also attempt to change immigration law and lower prescription drug prices.

The infrastructure spending, with nearly half of it in new government funding, would repair aging roads and bridges and expand broadband, pay for replacement of dangerous drinking-water systems that use lead pipes, add new sewer infrastructure, expand passenger rail and transit systems, and improve airports.

Biden has been meeting with fellow Democrats to ensure his legislative agenda passes. 

When asked what legislative success would look like, he told reporters Monday at the White House, “We’ve got three things to do: the debt ceiling, the continuing resolution and the two pieces of legislation. If we do that, the country’s going to be in great shape.” 

Some information for this report came from The Associated Press and Reuters. 

 
…

Democrats Negotiate on Spending Bills Key to Biden’s Domestic Agenda

A time of intensity. That’s what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, is calling this coming week in Congress as lawmakers are expected to vote on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, but also consider the Democrat-backed $3.5 trillion sweeping social spending package, core to the Biden administration agenda. Michelle Quinn reports.   

Produced by: Henry Hernandez 
…

US House to Debate $1 Trillion Infrastructure Bill 

The U.S. House of Representatives is due to begin debate Monday on a $1 trillion infrastructure bill ahead of a planned vote Thursday on the measure that is a major part of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced the dates in a letter to Democratic lawmakers Sunday, and in television interviews she expressed confidence the bill will pass. 

“Let me just say that we’re going to pass the bill this week,” Pelosi said on ABC News’ “This Week” show.

She added that she would not bring a bill to the House floor for consideration unless it has enough support to pass. 

Biden also expressed confidence when asked about the bill, telling reporters Sunday “it’s going to take the better part of this week.”

The Senate approved the infrastructure plan in a vote last month that saw 19 Republicans join all 50 members of the Democratic caucus.

The infrastructure spending, with nearly half of it in new government funding, would repair aging roads and bridges and expand broadband, pay for replacement of dangerous lead-piped drinking water systems, add new sewer infrastructure, expand passenger rail and transit systems, and make airport improvements.

Pelosi said in her letter that House leaders are also working with the Senate and White House on a separate $3.5 trillion proposal involving social safety net and climate change programs. That measure includes plans to provide universal pre-kindergarten instruction, free community college classes, expanded health care for older Americans, childcare funding, money to combat the effects of climate change, and make immigration law changes and attempt to lower prescription drug prices.

But the larger bill, which advanced in the House Budget Committee on Saturday, faces more opposition, including from some Senate Democrats who say they will not support that much spending. 

Pelosi told ABC’s “This Week” that the negotiations would certainly result in a lower price tag, calling such a development “self-evident.” 

Some information for this report came from the Associated Press and Reuters. 

 
…

House Panel OKs Democrats’ $3.5T Budget Bill 

Democrats pushed a $3.5 trillion, 10-year bill strengthening social safety net and climate programs through the House Budget Committee on Saturday, but one Democrat opposed the measure in an illustration of the challenges party leaders face in winning the near unanimity they’ll need to carry the sprawling package through Congress. 

The Democratic-dominated panel, meeting virtually, approved the measure on a near party-line vote, 20-17. Passage marked a necessary but minor step for Democrats by edging the bill closer to debate by the full House. Under budget rules, the committee wasn’t allowed to significantly amend the 2,465-page measure, the product of 13 other House committees. 

The more important work has been happening in an opaque procession of mostly unannounced phone calls, meetings and other bargaining sessions among party leaders and rank-and-file lawmakers. President Joe Biden, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., have led a behind-the-scenes hunt for compromises to resolve internal divisions and, they hope, allow approval of the mammoth bill soon. 

Pelosi told fellow Democrats in a letter Saturday that they must pass the social and environment bill this week, along with a separate infrastructure bill and a third measure preventing a government shutdown on Friday. 

“The next few days will be a time of intensity,” she wrote.

Political vulnerability

Moderate Rep. Scott Peters, D-Calif., joined all 16 Republicans on the Budget Committee in opposing the legislation. His objections included one that troubles many Democrats: a reluctance to support a bill with provisions that would later be dropped by the Senate.

Many Democrats don’t want to become politically vulnerable by backing language that might be controversial back home, only to see it not become law. That preference for voting only on a social and environment bill that’s already a House-Senate compromise could complicate Pelosi’s effort for a House vote this week. 

Peters was among three Democrats who earlier this month voted against a plan favored by most in his party to lower pharmaceutical costs by letting Medicare negotiate for the prescription drugs it buys.

Party leaders have tried for weeks to resolve differences among Democrats over the package’s final price tag, which seems sure to shrink. There are also disputes over which initiatives should be reshaped, among them expanded Medicare, tax breaks for children and health care, a push toward cleaner energy, and higher levies on the rich and corporations. 

Democrats’ wafer-thin majorities in the House and Senate mean compromise is mandatory. Before the measure the Budget panel approved Saturday even reaches the House floor, it is expected to be changed to reflect whatever House-Senate accords have been reached, and additional revisions are likely. 

‘Decades of disinvestment’

The overall bill embodies the crux of Biden’s top domestic goals. Budget panel Chairman John Yarmuth, D-Ky., cited “decades of disinvestment” on needs like health care, education, child care and the environment as the rationale for the legislation. 

“The futures of millions of Americans and their families are at stake. We can no longer afford the costs of neglect and inaction. The time to act is now,” Yarmuth said. 

Republicans say the proposal is unneeded, unaffordable amid accumulated federal debt exceeding $28 trillion and reflects Democrats’ drive to insert government into people’s lives. Its tax boosts will cost jobs and include credits for buying electric vehicles, purchases often made by people with comfortable incomes, they said. 

“This bill is a disaster for working-class families,” said Rep. Jason Smith of Missouri, the committee’s top Republican. “It’s a big giveaway to the wealthy, it’s a laundry list of agenda items pulled right out of the Bernie Sanders socialist playbook.”

The unusual weekend session occurred as top Democrats amp up efforts to end increasingly bitter disputes between the party’s centrist and progressive wings that threaten to undermine Biden’s agenda.

 A collapse of the measure at his own party’s hands would be a wounding preview to the coming election year, in which House and Senate control are at stake.

Infrastructure bill

To nail down moderates’ support for an earlier budget blueprint, Pelosi promised to begin House consideration by Monday of another pillar of Biden’s domestic plans: a $1 trillion collection of roadway and other infrastructure projects. Pelosi reaffirmed this week that the infrastructure debate would begin Monday.

But many moderates who consider the infrastructure bill their top goal also want to cut the $3.5 trillion social and environment package and trim or reshape some of its programs. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have been among the most visible centrists demanding a smaller price tag. 

In response, progressives — their top priority is the $3.5 trillion measure — are threatening to vote against the infrastructure bill if it comes up for a vote first. Their opposition seems likely to be enough to scuttle it, and Pelosi hasn’t definitively said when a vote on final passage of the infrastructure measure will occur.

With each portion of the party threatening to upend the other’s most cherished goal — a political disaster in the making for Democrats — top Democrats are using the moment to accelerate talks on the massive social and climate legislation. Compromise is a requirement, because the party can lose no votes in the Senate and a maximum of three in the House to succeed in the narrowly split Congress.
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Republican Review Finds No Proof Arizona Election Stolen from Trump

A Republican-backed review of the 2020 presidential election in Arizona’s largest county ended Friday without producing proof to support former President Donald Trump’s false claims of a stolen election.

After six months of searching for evidence of fraud, the firm hired by Republican lawmakers issued a report that experts described as riddled with errors, bias and flawed methodology. Still, even that partisan review came up with a vote tally that would not have altered the outcome, finding that Biden won by 360 more votes than the official results certified last year.

The finding was an embarrassing end to a widely criticized, and at times bizarre, quest to prove allegations that election officials and courts have rejected. It has no bearing on the final, certified results. Previous reviews by nonpartisan professionals that followed state law found no significant problem with the vote count in Maricopa County, home to Phoenix.

Still, for many critics, the conclusions reached by the firm Cyber Ninjas and presented at a hearing Friday underscored the dangerous futility of the exercise, which has helped fuel skepticism about the validity of the 2020 election and spawned copycat audits nationwide.

“We haven’t learned anything new,” said Matt Masterson, a top U.S. election security official in the Trump administration. “What we have learned from all this is that the Ninjas were paid millions of dollars, politicians raised millions of dollars and Americans’ trust in democracy is lower.”

‘They are trying to scare people’

Other critics said the true purpose of the audit may have already succeeded. It spread complex allegations about ballot irregularities and software issues, fueling doubts about elections, said Adrian Fontes, a Democrat who oversaw the Maricopa County election office last year.

“They are trying to scare people into doubting the system is actually working,” he said. “That is their motive. They want to destroy public confidence in our systems.”

The review was authorized by the Republican-controlled state Senate, which subpoenaed the election records from Maricopa County and selected the inexperienced, pro-Trump auditors. On Friday, Senate President Karen Fann sent a letter to Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich, urging him to investigate issues the report flagged. However, she noted the review found the official count matched the ballots.

“This is the most important and encouraging finding of the audit,” Fann wrote.

Trump issued statements Friday falsely claiming the results demonstrated “fraud.”

Despite being widely pilloried, the Arizona review has become a model that Trump supporters are pushing to replicate in other swing states where Biden won. Pennsylvania’s Democratic attorney general sued Thursday to block a GOP-issued subpoena for a wide array of election materials. In Wisconsin, a retired conservative state Supreme Court justice is leading a Republican-ordered investigation into the 2020 election, and this week threatened to subpoena election officials who don’t comply.

None of the reviews can change Biden’s victory, which was certified by officials in each of the swing states he won and by Congress on Jan. 6 — after Trump’s supporters, fueled by the same false charges that generated the audits, stormed the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent certification of his loss.

The Arizona report claims a number of shortcomings in election procedures and suggests the final tally still could not be relied upon. Several claims were challenged by election experts, while members of the Republican-led county Board of Supervisors, which oversees elections, disputed claims on Twitter.

“Unfortunately, the report is also littered with errors & faulty conclusions about how Maricopa County conducted the 2020 General Election,” county officials tweeted.

Election officials say that’s because the review team is biased, ignored the detailed vote-counting procedures in Arizona law and had no experience in the complex field of election audits.

‘The Senate’s contractors don’t understand election processes’

Two of the report’s recommendations stood out because they showed its authors misunderstood election procedures — that there should be paper ballot backups and that voting machines should not be connected to the internet. All Maricopa ballots are already paper, with machines only used to tabulate the votes, and those tabulators are not connected to the internet.

The review also checked the names of voters against a commercial database, finding 23,344 reported moving before ballots went out in October. While the review suggests something improper, election officials note that voters like college students, those who own vacation homes or military members can move to temporary locations while still legally voting at the address where they are registered.

“A competent reviewer of an election would not make a claim like that,” said Trey Grayson, a former Republican secretary of state in Kentucky.

The election review was run by Cyber Ninjas CEO Doug Logan, whose firm has never conducted an election audit before. Logan previously worked with attorneys and Trump supporters trying to overturn the 2020 election and appeared in a film questioning the results of the contest while the ballot review was ongoing.

Logan and others involved with the review presented their findings to two Arizona senators Friday. It kicked off with Shiva Ayyadurai, a COVID-19 vaccine skeptic who claims to have invented email, presenting an analysis relying on “pattern recognition” that flagged purported anomalies in the way mail ballots were processed at the end of the election.

Maricopa County tweeted that the pattern was simply the election office following state law.

“‘Anomaly’ seems to be another way of saying the Senate’s contractors don’t understand election processes,” the county posted during the testimony.

Logan followed up by acknowledging “the ballots that were provided for us to count … very accurately correlated with the official canvass.” He then continued to flag statistical discrepancies — including the voters who moved — that he said merited further investigation.

The review has a history of exploring outlandish conspiracy theories, dedicating time to checking for bamboo fibers on ballots to see if they were secretly shipped in from Asia. It’s also served as a content-generation machine for Trump’s effort to sow skepticism about his loss, pumping out misleading and out-of-context information that the former president circulates long after it’s been debunked.

In July, for example, Logan laid out a series of claims stemming from his misunderstanding of the election data he was analyzing, including that 74,000 mail ballots were recorded as received but not sent. Trump repeatedly amplified the claims.Logan had compared two databases that track different things.

Arizona’s Senate agreed to spend $150,000 on the review, plus security and facility costs. That pales in comparison to the nearly $5.7 million contributed as of late July by Trump allies.

Maricopa County’s official vote count was conducted in front of bipartisan observers, as were legally required audits meant to ensure voting machines work properly. A partial hand-count spot check found a perfect match.

Two extra post-election reviews by federally certified election experts also found no evidence that voting machines switched votes or were connected to the internet. The county Board of Supervisors commissioned the extraordinary reviews in an effort to prove to Trump backers that there were no problems. 
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Biden Won’t Shield Trump Records From House’s January 6 Inquiry

President Joe Biden will not invoke executive privilege to shield former President Donald Trump’s records in relation to an investigation into the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. 

“The president has already concluded that it would not be appropriate to assert executive privilege,” Psaki said. “And so, we will respond promptly to these questions as they arise.” 

The U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee investigating the deadly January 6 riot at the Capitol has subpoenaed four former members of Donald Trump’s administration, including Mark Meadows and Steve Bannon, the panel’s chairman said on Thursday. 

A mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6 as Congress was meeting to certify Democrat Biden’s presidential election victory, delaying that process for several hours as then-Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress, staff and journalists fled from rioters. 

Trump said he would fight the subpoenas “on executive privilege and other grounds.” 

Executive privilege allows the White House to refuse to comply with demands for records such as congressional subpoenas or Freedom of Information Act requests. The legal principle is rooted in the idea that some privacy should be given to presidential advisers so they can have candid discussions. 

A sitting president has in the past used executive privilege to keep records and communications from an earlier administration secret, but it is rare. 

With Biden nixing executive privilege, it was widely expected that Trump would file a legal challenge. 

Representatives for the former president were not immediately available for comment.
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Experts: Biden Foreign Policy Troubles Linked to Domestic Focus

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is defending President Joe Biden’s foreign policy record as the administration faces pressure over its handling of Haitian migrants on the U.S. border, the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and a nuclear submarine deal with Australia that angered France. VOA’s senior diplomatic correspondent Cindy Saine has more. 

Produced by: Kim Weeks
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Arizona County Says Cyber Ninjas Election Review Shows Biden Win

Arizona’s most populous county has confirmed that a draft report of a partisan audit of its vote count in the 2020 presidential election declares Joe Biden as the winner.

The report by Cyber Ninjas, a little known Florida-based cybersecurity company, shows Maricopa County’s result in November was correct, the county tweeted late Thursday.

“The #azaudit draft report from Cyber Ninjas confirms the county’s canvass of the 2020 General Election was accurate and the candidates certified as the winners did, in fact, win,” it wrote.

The conclusion, which is expected to be released publicly Friday, effectively ends the discredited Republican-led bid to throw out Biden’s victory there in favor of former president Donald Trump.

Maricopa County did not publish the draft report and Cyber Ninjas did not immediately respond to an AFP request.

Biden’s victory in the key Arizona county was the first by a Democratic presidential nominee in decades.

Trump supporters and organizations who claim he was cheated out of an election win, including some who have also peddled wild conspiracy theories, funded the review to the tune of millions of dollars.

Since his crushing election defeat, Trump has resurfaced to criticize his successor.

In July, at his first campaign-style rally since leaving the White House, he repeated the lie that he won November’s election and that Biden prevailed only through fraud.

Trump, who has been booted from social media and was impeached for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol, may yet seek reelection in 2024 but has not announced his plans. 

 
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US House Backs Bill to Provide $1B for Israel Missile-Defense System

The U.S. House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly on Thursday for legislation to provide $1 billion to Israel to replenish its “Iron Dome” missile-defense system, just two days after the funding was removed from a broader spending bill. 

The measure passed by 420 to 9, with two members voting present. 

Some of the most liberal House Democrats had objected to the provision and said they would vote against the broad spending bill if it was included. That threatened the bill’s passage, with Democrats only narrowly controlling the House, because Republicans have opposed the plan to fund the federal government through December 3 and raise the nation’s borrowing limit. 

The removal led Republicans to label Democrats as anti-Israel, despite a long tradition in the U.S. Congress of strong support from both parties for the Jewish state, to which Washington sends billions of dollars in aid every year. 

Israel responded quickly. “Thanks to all members of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democratic and Republican alike, for their sweeping support for Israel and the commitment to its security. Those who try to challenge this support got a resounding response today,” Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett said in a statement. 

Some liberal Democrats voiced concerns recently about the United States’ Israel policy, citing Palestinian civilian casualties as Israel responded to Hamas rocket attacks in May. Israel said most of the 4,350 rockets fired from Gaza during the conflict were blown out of the sky by Iron Dome interceptors. 

“We should also be talking about the Palestinian need for protection against Israeli attack,” Democratic Representative Rashida Tlaib, an opponent of the funding, said during debate.

The bill, which was introduced in the House Wednesday, provides $1 billion to replace missile interceptors used during the May conflict. 

There was no immediate word on timing of a vote in the Senate.
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