Susan Walsh/AP Photo
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President-elect Biden in Wilmington, Delaware on Sunday.
The End of Unsanitized?
Well, yes. Starting on Inauguration Day, January 20, we are going to retire Unsanitized and begin First 100, a daily report on the opening months of the new Biden administration.
There are several reasons for this. First, there isn’t a lot of daylight at this point between reporting on the pandemic and reporting on the early days of the Biden term. His political fortunes are tied to COVID response, on a public health and economic level, and he’s well aware of that. To an unusual degree, very little of an articulated, prioritized agenda has been laid out or even speculated upon, separate from the immediate crisis. There’s a plan to distribute the vaccine and a plan to provide some measure of relief for those struggling. There isn’t much else there. So First 100 will cover very similar territory as Unsanitized, from the perspective of the new administration.
Second, the path of the virus and the endgame is now clear, and tied up tightly with public policy. There’s the race between the vaccine rollout and the more transmissible variants of the disease; there’s the race between mass immunization and dwindling economic support. Biden’s decisions will determine how that proceeds, and what path we’ll find ourselves on by the summer and fall.
And finally, where other facets of executive branch policy move into the foreground, the shift enables me to cover them, free from the relentless lens of the pandemic. We started Unsanitized on the belief that it was a once-in-a-lifetime story that demanded full attention. Though far too many have forgotten, it’s still dictating our social and economic lives. But this is also a moment of transition, and how the Biden team will approach a host of policies in addition to the pandemic will have just as critical an impact. First 100 allows me to spread my wings and delve into those areas.
Unsanitized, by its final edition, will have run roughly 245 editions, with virtually no break since last March. It was an honor to explain the impact of the pandemic every day, to write a first draft of history. I’ll take the same care with First 100 through Thursday, April 29—the 100th day of the Biden presidency.
Read all of our Unsanitized reports
Speaking of Joe Biden
The Senate victories in Georgia have opened up possibilities for Biden, particularly on additional COVID relief. On Friday he promised rapid action on what would be a third relief bill. Even before the plan comes out—and that’s been promised this week—Biden said he would use executive action to continue freezing student loan payments, though he stopped short of using his own authority to cancel student debt. (He said he would ask Congress to cancel the first $10,000 of borrowers’ loan obligations; that might be part of the relief package.)
The very good news here is that Biden is announcing very early that the price tag would be in the “trillions” of dollars and he doesn’t particularly care about the deficit implications. “It is necessary to spend money now,” Biden said. “With conditions like the crisis today, especially with such low interest rates, taking immediate action—even with deficit financing—is going to help the economy.” Biden is simply not taking the bait out of the austerity trap.
So what’s going to be in this package? First and foremost there are the $2,000 checks. Biden has made a point of continuing the populist messaging on the checks from the Georgia runoffs, that $600 was too small. He recognizes that something 80 percent of the country or more will qualify for will simply overshadow the rest of the package, and he’s leading with it.
I’m aware of Joe Manchin rejecting the idea of $2,000 checks, though his office walked that back pretty quickly and on Sunday said he prefers targeting without dismissing the concept entirely. The pound of flesh Manchin may extract is more means testing, but Biden wouldn’t be leading with this very popular measure if it couldn’t pass.
Other parts of this package likely include extending the unemployment insurance boosts beyond March, more money for the vaccine rollout, and state and local aid, the major missing piece on the fiscal side from the last bill. There’s also likely to be more rental assistance, small business help, and funding to allow schools to reopen.
This is a broad package, not just an “immediate” run of checks, as Biden promised in Georgia. It’ll take some time. The inclusion of state and local aid in particular, meanwhile, virtually ensures that the bill would have to be carried out through budget reconciliation, the process by which the Senate can pass budget-related items with a simple majority. Everything in this package would be almost certain to qualify. Senate Republicans are unlikely to support anything with state and local funding in enough numbers to avoid the filibuster.
It’s likely that Biden gets three budget reconciliation bills before the 2022 midterms. There’s one available per fiscal year, and none have been used for the current one. The plan that appears to be taking shape is: a COVID relief bill for Fiscal Year 2021, a broad infrastructure package funded through tax hikes on the rich for FY 2022, and a package to be named later for FY 2023.
The administration should be concerned that the complexities of budget reconciliation, and their impulse to at least test regular order and give Republicans a chance to pass another relief package, will bog down what was a signature campaign promise. It’s my belief that $2,000 checks, an 80-20 issue in the country, has a super-majority in Congress. It could probably carry upon it some things, like vaccine relief, but not everything, and particularly not municipal funding.
The checks can serve as a trust-building exercise. A significant portion of the left is skeptical that the Biden team is committed to making a difference in the lives of ordinary people. Checks have become somewhat totemic in this sense, and can be used to dispel that skepticism. Reconciliation is always available later if Republicans decide to be on the wrong side of an 80-20 issue. Plus, you want to save the reconciliation bills to maximize what can pass on a simple majority. (If we didn’t have a filibuster we could just have the novel concept of majority rule, but some Democratic Senators would rather preen than enable the popular will.)
We’ll see what’s in the package later in the week.
Number of Vaccine Doses Given
8.02 million, with a total of 1.8 million since last checking in on Friday. The percentage of allocated shots administered has jumped to 36 percent. West Virginia is up to 72 percent of its supply, and one major reason is that it rejected the federal plan to partner with CVS and Walgreens to vaccinate long-term care facilities. Instead the state relied on independent pharmacies with existing relationships with nursing homes, and they’re running laps around the big chains. North Dakota, another state with significant local pharmacy ownership, is also doing well, and Oklahoma just stripped CVS of responsibility for vaccines at veteran’s centers. The fifty layers of corporate middlemen appear to be the problem for the chains, relative to the flexibility of local practitioners.
Monopolies create hidden harms beyond price: who wrote a book about that?
Today I Learned
- There’s just no question that the Capitol Riot was a mass super-spreader event. (CNBC)
- Members of Congress were certainly exposed, and even though most have been vaccinated they can still transmit. Making the inauguration an incredibly dangerous event that probably shouldn’t be held. (Washington Post)
- Andrew Cuomo has been a huge impediment to the vaccine rollout. (Jacobin)
- New York City’s vaccination bureaucracy looks counter-productive. (Comptroller Scott Stringer on Twitter)
- Dodger Stadium will be transformed into a mass vaccination site. (Los Angeles Times)
- States need to be much more flexible about who gets the vaccine, on the principle that anybody getting it helps everybody. (New York Times)
- With all the plaudits to Israel about the quick vaccination of their citizens, it’s worth pointing out that their denial of shots to Palestinians is immoral. (Wall Street Journal)
