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House Democrats Move to Push Through Their $3.5 Trillion Budget Blueprint: Live Updates
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Daily Political Briefing
Aug. 24, 2021, 3:33 p.m. ET
Aug. 24, 2021, 3:33 p.m. ET
Democratic leaders moved to muscle their $3.5 trillion budget blueprint through the House on Tuesday, promising a late-September vote on a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure measure in efforts to win over a group of moderates who had threatened to block it.
After more than 24 hours of quiet haggling and bitter recriminations among Democrats, party leaders appeared on the brink of ending a standoff with the faction of conservative-leaning Democrats who had demanded that the infrastructure package pass before the budget plan. The measure on track for a vote on Tuesday would commit lawmakers to a House vote on the infrastructure bill by Sept. 27.
It would also give final approval to the budget plan, which paves the way for quick action by Congress to enact much of President Biden’s economic agenda, including a vast expansion of safety net and climate programs.
Democratic leaders scrapped tentative plans to advance it on Monday, after it became clear that centrist Democrats were unwilling to vote to approve it in the narrowly divided House, where the party can afford to lose as few as three of its members if all Republicans are opposed, as expected.
“I’m sorry that we couldn’t land the plane last night, and that you all had to wait,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats during a closed-door meeting early Tuesday, according to an aide familiar with the comments. She added, “I think we’re close to landing the plane.”
Ten centrist Democrats had publicly refused to move forward with the budget before the infrastructure package passed the House, arguing that the broadly supported bipartisan compromise that passed the Senate this month — which omitted many of the party’s top priorities — should be enacted immediately.
But progressive Democrats, backed by Ms. Pelosi, have said they do not want to move forward with the infrastructure measure until the Senate approves far-reaching legislation to implement the broader budget plan, including universal preschool, paid leave, child and elder care programs and a substantial set of tax increases on wealthy people and corporations. Party leaders plan to push through that bill in the coming weeks using a fast-track process known as reconciliation, which would shield it from a filibuster and allow it to be approved on a simple majority vote, over unanimous Republican opposition.
In an effort to win over both factions, Ms. Pelosi and her leadership team on Monday proposed tethering the two items together, coupling approval of the budget blueprint with a measure that would allow the House to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in the future. On Tuesday, they settled on Sept. 27 as a hard date for that vote. The measure would also allow the House to consider a voting rights measure that has broad support among Democrats, which was expected to pass later Tuesday.
Rank-and-file lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with the delay in passage of the budget blueprint. The standoff has exacerbated deep mistrust among liberal Democrats who fear the moderates may ultimately block the multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation package carrying the majority of their priorities. In a private meeting on Monday, Democrats fumed and warned that blocking final passage could upend Mr. Biden’s agenda.
“We cannot squander this majority and this Democratic White House by not passing what we need to do,” Ms. Pelosi told her colleagues on Monday, according to two people familiar with the remarks.
Vice President Kamala Harris was delayed Tuesday for more than three hours as she was departing from Singapore for Vietnam because of a report of a recent possible “anomalous health incident” in Hanoi, where she will discuss public health strategies and seek to bolster partnerships in the South China Sea, a crucial piece of President Biden’s strategy to counter the rising economic influence of China.
“Anomalous health incident” is how the Biden administration typically refers to cases of the so-called “Havana Syndrome” attacks, the unexplained headaches, dizziness and memory loss reported by scores of State Department officials, C.I.A. officers and their families.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Harris, Symone Sanders, assured reporters traveling with the vice president on her second foreign trip since taking office that her health was not affected.
“You saw her get onto the plane. She is well, all is fine and looking forward to meetings in Hanoi tomorrow,” Ms. Sanders said when pressed on the cause of the delay. She later added: “This has nothing to do with the vice president’s health.”
A State Department spokesman said in a statement that “after careful assessment, the decision was made to continue with the vice president’s trip.” The delegation arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Tuesday night.
Before departing for the airport, Ms. Harris participated in a closed-door meet-and-greet with U.S. embassy staff. Members of the press corps traveling with her were already loaded into a motorcade awaiting her departure when they were abruptly sent back to their hotel rooms, before being summoned back to continue the trip.
Upon arriving in Hanoi aboard Air Force Two, Ms. Harris did not respond to a shouted question from a reporter about why she decided to continue on her trip in the wake of the report.
The House is expected to vote on Tuesday to restore federal oversight of state election laws, as Democrats begin a push to strengthen the landmark 1965 Voting Rights Act amid a national fight over access to the ballot box.
Democrats view the legislation, named after the late civil rights icon Representative John Lewis of Georgia, as a linchpin in their battle against voting restrictions in Republican-led states. It would reverse two Supreme Court rulings that gutted the statute, reviving the power of the Justice Department to bar some discriminatory election changes from taking effect. It would also make it easier for voters to bring legal challenges to balloting rules that are already on the books.
Up against urgent deadlines ahead of next year’s midterm elections, Democrats were expected to adopt the measure along party lines during a rare August session, just days after the bill was introduced. But stiff Republican opposition awaits in the Senate, where a likely filibuster threatens to sink the bill before it can reach President Biden’s desk.
That outcome is becoming familiar this summer, as Democrats on Capitol Hill try to use their party’s control of Congress and the White House to lock in watershed election changes — only to be blocked by their Republican counterparts. In the meantime, more than a dozen G.O.P.-led states have already enacted more than 30 laws making it harder to cast votes.
Frustration with that dynamic has fueled increasingly desperate calls from progressives and many mainstream Democrats to invoke the so-called nuclear option and eliminate the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate. Doing so would allow Democrats to move unilaterally without Republican support, but any rules change would require support from all 50 Democrats in the chamber, and key moderates oppose doing so.
During the debate before Tuesday’s vote, proponents of the bill, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, framed it as a vital complement to Democrats’ other major elections bill, the For the People Act. Even more ambitious, that legislation would set new national standards making it easier to vote, end partisan gerrymandering and combat dark money.
“The history of the fight for voting rights in America is long and painful,” said Representative Deborah Ross, Democrat of North Carolina. “It’s up to us to meet the urgency of the moment, live up to our constitutional responsibilities and pass this critical piece of legislation.”
Lawmakers drafted the Voting Rights Act fix to respond directly to a pair of Supreme Court rulings in which a conservative majority invalidated or weakened key portions of the statute.
The first came in 2013, when the justices in the case of Shelby County v. Holder effectively struck down a provision requiring states and jurisdictions with a history of discriminatory voting practices to receive advance approval from the federal government for any changes to their election rules.
The court specifically ruled that the formula used to determine which entities should be subject to such requirements was outdated, and said Congress would have to update it for it to be constitutional. The bill being debated on Tuesday proposes an updated and expanded coverage plan.
The legislation also attempts to overturn a Supreme Court decision last month in Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee that took aim at a separate section of the statute and made it harder to successfully challenge voting changes as discriminatory in court.
Republicans have enthusiastically supported expansions of the Voting Rights Act in the past. But since the court’s 2013 decision, they have shown little appetite to revive the portions of the statute that were struck down, arguing that the kind of race-based discrimination that the law was originally designed to fight no longer exists.
Instead of addressing a real problem, said Representative Michelle Fischbach, Republican of Minnesota, Democrats were trying to give the federal government “unprecedented control” to run roughshod over the states and set rules that would be beneficial to their political candidates.
“It empowers the attorney general to bully states and forces those states to seek federal approval before making changes to their own voting laws,” she said.
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transcript
‘No Change to Timeline,’ Pentagon Says of Aug. 31 Troop Withdrawal
The Pentagon press secretary John F. Kirby noted there has been no change in strategy for extraditing U.S. troops from Afghanistan.
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There’s been no change to the timeline of the mission, which is to have this completed by the end of the month. We continue to make progress every day in getting Americans as well as S.I.V. applicants and vulnerable Afghans out. And you heard the numbers that the general briefed. The president’s direction has been to complete this withdrawal, this evacuation and withdrawal, by the 31st of August. That that is the direction that we are operating under, and therefore, that is driving a lot of our plans. You heard us say and you heard the secretary say that if there needed to be a conversation about changing that, that he would have that conversation. I’m not going to get into internal deliberations about what people may be thinking one way or the other. But you heard the national security adviser say yesterday that he believes that we can accomplish this mission by the end of the month. So we are still driving towards the end of the month. That’s where we are now. And if and when there’s any change to that we’ll certainly make it clear to the American people. We remain committed to getting any and all Americans that want to leave to get them out. And we still believe, certainly now that we have been able to increase the capacity in the flow, we believe that we have the capability, the ability to get that done by the end of the month.
President Biden on Tuesday told world leaders gathered virtually for a meeting of the Group of 7 nations that he is aiming — for now — to get American troops out of Afghanistan by his Aug. 31 deadline, but said there was still a possibility of extending that mission, a senior administration official said.
Military officials will start withdrawing the 6,000 forces in Kabul as early as this week or this weekend, according to an American military official, who said U.S. forces would continue to fly evacuation missions up til the last few days of the withdrawal. Then they will need to give priority to the remaining troops and equipment, and to any American citizens wanting to leave.
Officials said the military needs to start moving out within the next several days in order to meet the Aug. 31 deadline, given the logistics of moving troops and equipment. Officials said military officials could slow the departure if Biden extends the deadline.
In closed-door remarks with the world leaders, Mr. Biden told his foreign counterparts that every day that American troops stay in the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the risk escalates. He called the danger of a terrorist attack “very high,” according to a senior administration official.
The president reiterated his desire to complete the mission by the deadline, but he said withdrawal will hinge on completing the goal of airlifting all Americans and Afghan allies out of the country to safety.
For now, the president told the G-7 leaders, the mission is on track to be completed by the last day of the month. But he warned that if the Taliban did not cooperate — on Tuesday they vowed to reject any extension of Mr. Biden’s troop withdrawal deadline — that could change.
The world leaders have said they would urge the United States to delay its final exit from Afghanistan to ensure that all citizens of other countries could be evacuated safely.
The president and his team have said for days that Mr. Biden is considering whether the 6,000 troops securing the Kabul airport should stay past the Aug. 31 deadline to facilitate more evacuations.
Officials have said they are hopeful that won’t be necessary, but activists, lawmakers and representatives of other governments have expressed skepticism that all of the people seeking to flee the Taliban government will be able to do so by the end of the month.
The Taliban warned Monday that there would be “consequences” if Mr. Biden chose to leave forces in their country beyond that date. And American military and intelligence officials have warned of a heightened danger of attacks from ISIS-K, an offshoot of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, and other terror networks.
The pace of evacuations has accelerated dramatically despite the chaos and desperation, mostly among Afghans, outside the airport. American officials reported Tuesday morning that 21,600 people were evacuated on Monday, and that 58,700 people had been flown out of the city since it fell on Aug. 14.
But Mr. Biden is in a bind.
If he orders an extension of the mission, he may be putting troops and diplomats in more danger. But conservatives have already accused him of being willing to “strand” Americans in Afghanistan by leaving before all of them have been evacuated.
That drew a sharp response on Monday from Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.
“I think it’s irresponsible to say Americans are stranded,” Ms. Psaki said in response to a question from Peter Doocy of Fox News. “They are not. We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home. We are in touch with them via phone, via text, via email, via any way that we can possibly reach Americans to get them home if they want to return home.”
Lawmakers in both parties urged Biden administration officials in a closed-door briefing Tuesday to extend the Aug. 31 deadline for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan, arguing that it would not be possible to evacuate all Americans and Afghan allies by then.
The rising pressure from Congress came as President Biden said that he intended — for now — to stand by the end of the month deadline. But in recent days, even top Democratic lawmakers have said that date is unrealistic.
“There is a broad bipartisan agreement within the United States Congress that we have to get American citizens out and we have to get our Afghan partners and allies out,” said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, who is a former Army Ranger. “That can’t be accomplished between now and the end of the month, so the date has to extend until we get that mission done.”
Lawmakers pressed the Biden administration to extend the mission during a classified briefing with the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, the director of national intelligence and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
“That was a major point we all tried to make: urging them to do more to advocate with the president to extend the deadline,” said Representative Elissa Slotkin, Democrat of Michigan and a former C.I.A. officer and defense official.
On Monday, the president told leaders during a virtual meeting of the Group of 7 that he intended to withdraw American troops by the deadline, a senior administration official said. He cited a high risk of terrorist attacks as one reason.
But Representative Michael McCaul of Texas, the top Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, said that if the president did not extend the withdrawal date, “he will have blood on his hands.”
“People are going to die, and they are going to be left behind,” Mr. McCaul said.
Lawmakers said they were not told during the briefing how many American citizens remain on the ground in Afghanistan. White House officials said on Tuesday that since Aug. 14, the United States had “evacuated and facilitated the evacuation” of approximately 58,000 people.
For weeks, members of Congress have been inundated with thousands of pleas from American citizens and Afghans trying to escape Afghanistan.
“After 20 years at war, our actions over the next week will leave the most lasting impression around the world,” Ms. Slotkin said on Twitter. “And I want the U.S. to be known as a nation that takes risks for those who risk everything for us.”
The top Republican in the Pennsylvania State Senate promised this week to carry out a broad review of the 2020 election results, a move that comes as G.O.P. lawmakers continue to sow doubts about the contest’s legitimacy by pushing to re-examine votes in battleground states like Arizona.
State Senator Jake Corman, who serves as president pro tempore of the G.O.P.-controlled chamber, made the comments in an interview with a right-wing radio host, and they were first reported by The Philadelphia Inquirer on Tuesday. His remarks were the strongest sign yet that Pennsylvania — which President Biden won by more than 80,000 votes — may press forward with a review of 2020 results, despite no evidence of voter fraud that would have affected the outcome.
In the interview, Mr. Corman said that he wanted to begin “almost immediately” and that hearings would begin this week. He added that he expected to use the full power of the state’s General Assembly, including subpoenas, to conduct the review, which he referred to as a “forensic investigation.”
“We can bring people in, we can put them under oath, we can subpoena records, and that’s what we need to do and that’s what we’re going to do,” Mr. Corman said. “And so we’re going to move forward.”
Previously, State Senator Doug Mastriano, a Republican and vocal proponent of former President Donald J. Trump’s falsehoods about the election, had called for a review of results in three counties.
Until recently the chair of the Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee, he sent letters requesting ballots, records and machines from Philadelphia County, which encompasses the state’s largest city and which Mr. Biden won with over 80 percent of the vote; York County, south of Harrisburg, which Mr. Trump won handily; and Tioga County, in the northern part of the state, which Mr. Trump also carried with ease. All three counties refused to comply, and Mr. Mastriano’s legal authority to enforce the requests remains unclear.
Last week, Mr. Corman removed Mr. Mastriano from his position as chair of the committee and installed State Senator Cris Dush, also a Republican, to lead the panel and oversee the review.
In the interview, Mr. Corman expressed his own doubts about the election.
“I don’t necessarily have faith in the results,” he said. “I think that there were many problems in our election that we need to get to the bottom of.”
Jason Thompson, a spokesman for Mr. Corman, said that they were “not setting a hard cap on how long the audit will take,” but that he could not comment further because “many of the details of the audit plan are still being worked out, and Senator Dush will need a little more time to settle on the final approach.”
Veronica Degraffenreid, who as the acting secretary of the commonwealth oversees Pennsylvania’s elections, has discouraged counties from participating in any election reviews, noting that any inspection of voting machines by uncredentialed third parties would result in their decertification, and that counties would have to bear the considerable costs of replacing the equipment.
“The Department of State encourages counties to refuse to participate in any sham review of past elections that would require counties to violate the trust of their voters and ignore their statutory duty to protect the chain of custody of their ballots and voting equipment,” Ms. Degraffenreid’s office said in a statement last month.
It remains unclear exactly how Mr. Corman and the Pennsylvania Senate will proceed with their review, including what they might seek in terms of equipment and records, and which counties they might focus on. Mr. Corman did say that, after talking with fellow legislators in Arizona, he was looking for a “neutral arbiter” to help carry out the review — a potential nod to how the Maricopa County review became widely ridiculed in part because the chief executive of the company carrying out the re-examination had promoted conspiracy theories about rigged voting machines costing Mr. Trump victory in the state.
“I think it’s important that we get people involved that don’t have ties to anybody, that are professional, that will do the job so that we can stand behind the results,” Mr. Corman said.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its health advice for travel to six countries it now considers to be “very high” risk given the rapid spread of the coronavirus and the Delta variant. It is suggesting that people avoid traveling to these countries altogether, or if they must go, to get vaccinated beforehand.
The six countries — Haiti, Kosovo, Lebanon, Morocco, the Bahamas and St. Martin in the Caribbean — have all had more than 500 cases per 100,000 residents in the past 28 days, pushing them into the C.D.C.’s highest warning category.
Several other countries, including Brazil, Britain and Georgia — which currently has the highest daily global average, at 126 new cases a day per 100,000 people, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University — were already on the list.
The warnings come as the rapid spread of the Delta variant has upended travel plans for Americans amid a summer that many had hoped would include more freedoms thanks to high vaccination rates.
“Even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants,” the C.D.C. warns on its site. The agency also recommends against any international travel without full vaccination.
“The Covid-19 situation, including the spread of new or concerning variants, differs from country to country,” the agency says. “All travelers need to pay close attention to the conditions at their destination before traveling.”
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transcript
‘Unlawful Claims’: Harris Rebukes China’s Diplomacy
Vice President Kamala Harris criticized China during an address in Southeast Asia, and sought to assure nations in the region that the U.S. was a reliable partner.
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Our vision includes freedom of navigation, which is vital to us all. The livelihood of millions of people depend on the billions of dollars in trade that flow through these sea lanes each day, and yet in the South China Sea, we know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea. These unlawful claims have been rejected by the 2016 arbitral tribunal decision. And Beijing’s actions continue to undermine the rules-based order, and threaten the sovereignty of nations. The United States stands with our allies and partners in the face of these threats. And I must be clear. Our engagement in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific is not against any one country, nor is it designed to make anyone choose between countries. Instead, our engagement, it’s about advancing an optimistic vision that we have for our participation and partnership in this region.
Vice President Kamala Harris sought to fortify the United States’ image as a credible ally on Tuesday by offering a rebuke of China during an address in Southeast Asia, an effort that comes as the White House faces growing questions about its reliability amid continuing violence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
“We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” Ms. Harris said in Singapore, adding that what she described as China’s “unlawful claims” continued “to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”
The White House is aiming to refocus its foreign policy strategy on competing with China’s rising economic influence rather than on continuing to fight “forever wars,” such as the two-decade long conflict in Afghanistan. The chaotic effort to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul has overshadowed the vice president’s trip, which began on Sunday in Singapore and will also take her to Vietnam.
Ms. Harris’s overseas trip, her second as vice president, gained heightened urgency in the days before she boarded Air Force Two. The journey had been seen as a chance to bolster economic and security ties with key partners in Singapore and Vietnam, a crucial piece of President Biden’s strategy in the South China Sea. But in the wake of the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, her trip became the administration’s first test of the White House efforts to reassure the world that it can still be a trusted international partner.
That pressure is likely to increase when Ms. Harris arrives in Vietnam. Her senior aides have faced questions about the historical parallel between the U.S. evacuation of American citizens in 1975 from Saigon and the situation in Kabul — replete with scenes of desperate Afghans running behind U.S. military planes, and of American citizens, Afghan allies and their relatives crowded into the Kabul airport and stuck in limbo.
A draft report on a much-ridiculed review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s largest county has been delayed by a Covid-19 outbreak on the team preparing the analysis, the Republican president of the Arizona State Senate said on Monday.
The president, Senator Karen Fann, said in a statement that three people on the five-member team were “quite sick,” including Doug Logan, the chief executive of the Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, that is in charge of the review.
A portion of the draft was still set to be delivered to Ms. Fann on Monday, but the remainder will await the recovery of the three team members. Lawyers for the State Senate will begin reviewing the partial draft on Wednesday, Ms. Fann said, and more meetings will be required before the findings of the review are made public.
The statement offered no hint of the contents of the partial draft. Mr. Logan and others involved in the review have previously claimed to have found irregularities in the official results of the November balloting, only to see those allegations debunked by election officials.
Mr. Logan’s company began reviewing 2.1 million ballots and election equipment from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, in April on orders of the Republican majority in the State Senate. Ms. Fann has said that the review was conducted to address claims of voter fraud by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, though no evidence of widespread fraud exists. She has also said that President Biden’s narrow victories in both the county and the state would remain official regardless of the findings.
Ms. Fann and other supporters of the review have argued that it was thorough and nonpartisan. But a range of election experts and the Republican-led leadership of Maricopa County have denounced the exercise from the beginning, citing haphazard rules for handling and counting ballots as well as lax security.
Supporters’ claims of an impartial review have been broadly dismissed. Mr. Logan spread conspiracy theories of a rigged election in Arizona on Twitter last year; his firm recruited volunteer workers for the review through Republican organizations; and virtually the entire cost of the exercise has been shouldered by conservative groups supporting Mr. Trump.
On Monday, Ms. Fann said the draft report had been further delayed because images of mail-ballot envelopes that had been demanded from Maricopa County election officials were delivered only on Thursday. A final report will be released, she said, only after a final meeting “to continue checking for accuracy, clarity and proof of documentation of findings.”
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