Congress: Covid-19 aid faces time crisis with impeachment on the corner

Congress: Covid-19 aid faces time crisis with impeachment on the corner

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In the meantime, the government is just two weeks away from the start of an impeachment process that will disrupt all other Senate deals, creating even more incentives to act quickly. The speed with which Biden has to abandon his calls for unity in the name of achieving something in the midst of a pandemic will set the tone for his relationship with Republicans on Capitol Hill and more broadly set the tone for his first 100 days as president at a time of crisis.
The impeachment article will be delivered around 7 pm Eastern time on Monday, when House administrators will take it to the Senate House. The senators will be sworn in on Tuesday, and then there will be an interval of about two weeks before the focus is back on impeachment. Meanwhile, Democrats will struggle to confirm as many of Biden’s nominations as possible. They will also have to decide soon how to proceed with the resolution of the organization that has been paralyzed for a week. Minority leader Mitch McConnell insisted that Democrats promise – in writing – that they will not explode the obstruction in the organizing resolution. Democrats do not want to give up their influence, even when they argue that they have no immediate plans to get rid of the obstruction.

60 votes are needed to approve this organizing resolution. This means that McConnell is challenging Democrats not to blow up the obstruction in disagreement over whether they will promise not to blow up the obstruction. Again: to pass this resolution without Republicans, Democrats would have to change the rules to allow it to pass a simple 51-vote majority. That – in essence – would be to eradicate the obstruction.

What last night told us about bipartisanship

Several advisors with whom CNN spoke made it clear that Sunday’s call between a group of bipartisan senators and the Director of the National Economic Council Brian Deese, Jeff Zients and Louisa Terrell was a good first step, but there is still a big disagreement over the price general of that stimulus package and what is really needed.
Everyone recognizes that more money for testing and vaccines is essential. But a minimum wage of $ 15? Billions in state and local funding? $ 1,400 stimulus checks? Several aides told CNN that senators on both sides argued that they needed more data on why nearly $ 2 trillion was the right choice. They just approved a package of more than $ 900 billion a month ago. A Republican aide told CNN that it was not just Republicans who turned down that number, but that some of the Democrats on the call were also “relaxed” about spending so much. Checks, they argued, need to be more targeted. If a fight over the price of a stimulus bill seems familiar, it is. The cost of the latest stimulus plan plagued Republicans and Democrats for six months, the last time Congress tried it.

Everything you need to know: After the meeting, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who is widely seen as one of the most “achievable” Republican senators in this package, released a statement to CNN saying “It seems premature to consider a package of this size and scope. “

In other words: if Biden and his team want this done quickly, they may have to end their goal of getting 10 Republicans to sign up and move on (also known as next week or two) to the next step: a maneuver procedural budget that would require only 51 votes.

A quick update of this great old process: reconciliation

This is a process that requires the House and Senate Budget committees to first approve a budget with specific instructions for the House and Finance Senate Ways and Resources Committees to draft a Covid relief bill. The Senate would then have to approve that budget with 51 votes, but when they do, it will open a long Senate vote that will keep us awake overnight, while members offer hundreds of political amendments.

After the budget is approved by the House and Senate, each committee drafts its Covid relief bill. And this bill will have to meet a very specific set of criteria that will be tested by the Senate parliamentarian in a process that we affectionately call “Byrd’s bath”. It was named after former Senator Robert Byrd, who established a set of rules that reconciliation bills must comply with to ensure that the budget process is not taken advantage of by the majority party. There are some rules.
  1. Proponents of the proposal need to prove that the bill in question increases revenues or reduces spending.
  2. That these changes are not merely “incidental”.
  3. That all changes are within the jurisdiction of the committees described in the reconciliation instructions.
  4. The senators for your proposal need to obtain at least the same amount of savings as the House bill achieved. And you have to achieve the same goals in the windows of one and five years.
  5. The proposal cannot have an impact on Social Security.
  6. The provision should not increase spending or decrease revenue outside the budget window if you want it to be permanent.

Long negotiations are already underway now in the House and Senate budget commissions, Finance and Forms and Means, on which provisions would be acceptable under these guidelines. There is a big debate going on now about whether or not some appropriation provisions would be acceptable (traditionally, appropriations are not handled through reconciliation). There are debates going on about whether the $ 15 minimum wage would meet the criteria. There are many very smart people on the Republican and Democratic side who have been struggling with these issues for weeks. That’s because there was always an expectation that, at some point, Democrats would have to end bipartisan negotiations and do so without Republicans.

Not so fast

Moving forward with reconciliation would still require the Democrats to be completely united. This means that they cannot be just progressive members like Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren leading this attack. Democrats need 100% unity. They need Joe Manchin from West Virginia, Sen. Jon Tester from Montana and Sen. Angus King from Maine, Sens. Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona and Mark Kelly. We still don’t know how these members would vote if the reconciliation process started in the next week or two. Would they argue that there were not enough good faith negotiations with Republicans? We just don’t know now.

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