President Biden’s White House is in the process of putting together a proposal for an enormous infrastructure and jobs bill — a bill that seems as though it could lead to the Democrats’ second use of the reconciliation process to pass a piece of major legislation without any Republican votes in the Senate. Biden’s team first dreamed up a bill that calls for about $3 trillion in new spending. The first iteration of the plan would have been offset by about $1 trillion in new taxes. But, The Washington Post’s Jeff Stein reports, the team second-guessed itself, worrying that simply left too big a spending deficit, which could, in turn, cause economic mayhem.  President Biden speaks, as Vice President Harris stands by, about the administration's coronavirus response on Monday. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post) |
The second version of the bill, expected to be unveiled this week, more than triples the taxes, to about $3 trillion — and boosts spending up to $4 trillion, Stein reports. The revision is an acknowledgment of the limits of new spending, even for Democrats, who are eager to pass more signature legislation while they still control both houses of Congress. But will Congress be able to swallow tax hikes that big? The tax increases would affect businesses, investors and wealthy Americans, starting with a higher tax rate for corporations. Biden has said that tax increases for individuals would not affect anyone making less than $400,000 per year. And in a move likely to please his supporters, those changes would come in part by largely reversing President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts. Republicans are already signaling opposition. “The idea we should agree to some huge economy-crushing tax increase so the government can go on yet another spending binge is a nonstarter for me,” said Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.). Like almost all of their big legislative priorities these days, Democrats are limited by the filibuster, the rule that requires 60 votes to pass most legislation. And reconciliation, the process that Democrats used to pass their coronavirus stimulus package, is restricted to just a few uses each budget cycle (and can be used only for certain spending and tax legislation). But Biden and Democrats have some big promises to deliver on — and they seem unlikely to sit around and wait. Even the biggest roadblock in the Democratic Senate caucus this term has said he is ready. “As long as it’s paid for,” Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said of the bill’s price tag. “This country needs to rebuild itself.” Trump’s covid team airs outA CNN special that aired Sunday marked perhaps the most public moment of reflection yet from top health officials in the Trump administration about what went wrong in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic. Several of them criticized the politicization of the pandemic and Trump administration statements about its spread that were misleading or false. Deborah Birx, who served as White House coronavirus coordinator, said that most of the virus-related deaths in the United States after the first 100,000 in the spring 2020 surge could have been prevented. She also criticized Trump administration officials who believed that increased testing was a bad thing; Trump frequently claimed that cases would simply “go down” if the United States did less testing. “People really believed in the White House that testing was driving cases, rather than testing was a way for us to stop cases,” Birx said. Besides, “when we said there were millions of tests available, there weren’t, right?” said Brett Giroir, who led the Trump administration’s coronavirus testing efforts. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, accused Trump HHS Secretary Alex Azar of personally intervening to change reports on U.S. deaths. The common theme: It was worse inside the Trump administration than people knew, and no one was listening.  A worker registers people in line for drive-through vaccines Monday at a 24-hour coronavirus mass vaccination event in Metairie, La. (Gerald Herbert/AP) |
The Washington Post’s Dan Diamond writes that the CNN special is just the first in a coming blitz of post-Trump media looking back at the former president’s response to the pandemic — much of which gives former Trump officials an opportunity to recast their role in the story in a more favorable light than previously reported. That highlights the difficult position in which medical officials under Trump found themselves: working for a president who, in most cases, could fire them on a whim or sideline them in favor of more acquiescent advisers, but often finding themselves in the middle of chaotic and even absurd claims about the virus’s deadly potential. While there is cause for hope in 2021, as more and more Americans get vaccinated, the current CDC director said Monday that she has a feeling of “impending doom” as the seven-day average of new U.S. cases hovers at about 60,000 per day. And the postmortem on the Trump administration’s response to the pandemic is just beginning. | 
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