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First100-030421
There's a lot that can be done from the White House, under existing authority.
It’s March 4, 2021 and welcome to First 100. You can sign up to have First 100 delivered to your email by clicking here.
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The Chief
The news broke while I was writing yesterday’s edition that the Senate was changing the eligibility rules for direct payments in the American Rescue Plan. The dirty details are here. Everyone making up to $75,000 (individuals) and $150,000 (couples) still gets the full $1,400 check; instead of phasing out fully by $100,000/$200,000, it phases out by $80,000/$160,000.
This is bad policy and politics, as Eric Levitz and Jordan Weissman explain. It saves a miniscule $12 billion yet angers a particular group of upper-middle class people whose socioeconomic status matches that of the political journalists who will report on this. The last time we had that dynamic was 2015, when Democrats tried to kill and then quickly retreated on 529 savings plans for college education.
This means nothing to the federal government and everything to people affected. Say I had a wife and three kids and made $150,000 a year; I would get $7,000 in direct payments. If I made just $10,000 more, I’d get nothing, plus those additional earnings would be taxed at the normal rate. If I lived in a high-tax state, the combined state/federal tax rate could be 30 percent on that money. In other words, I’d have nothing to show for making that additional $10,000; I’d take home the same as if I earned $150,000. This is called a high marginal tax rate, and it punishes people for no good reason other than the vanity of Joe Manchin and some colleagues.
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This is what legislating looks like, and it’s what it will look like for the next two years, even if you get rid of the filibuster. Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and every other Senate Democrat has maximum leverage if Republicans don’t sign onto bills. (And considering that Republicans are making Senate clerks spend ten hours reading the entire American Rescue Plan, a process that’s normally waived, I don’t see much bipartisanship on the horizon.) It’s going to be a grinding, soul-crushing, enervating spectacle for those who want to see policy advances, even if the end result is positive. The American Rescue Plan is a powerful piece of legislation but everyone will remember the useless extraction of 0.6 percent of its value in check targeting. Those are the biases of journalism and politics, and it’s a fair point when popular policies are needlessly held back.
And this is why we have to ask the question: whatever happened to the executive action blitz?
When we conceived of the Day One Agenda, it wasn’t just to play a parlour game about what a president can do without new laws from Congress. It was intended to respond to exactly the situation we’re in right now. The paragraph below comes from my introduction of the series, written 18 months ago. It predicted a pretty obvious future:
Democrats are only an even-money shot, at best, to flip the Senate. And yes, even if they succeed, Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell can obstruct the majority with the filibuster, and it would not be up to the next president, but the 50th senator ideologically, someone like Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema, to agree to change the Senate rules to eliminate the 60-vote threshold for legislation. (There’s always budget reconciliation, but that limited path goes through the same conservaDems.)
I support pushing Manchin and Sinema and the rest of the caucus on the filibuster; I support whip counts and making McConnell’s obstruction visible for all to see. Sinema appears pretty dug in, telling a constituent that the filibuster will “result in better, commonsense legislation,” so good luck with all that. But the Day One Agenda is a safety valve. It’s not dependent on Sinema or Manchin or anyone in Congress. It reflects the progress that can be made using existing policy passed by Congress.
Early on in Biden’s presidency he seemed to understand this. There was a flurry of executive action on a host of climate, economic, and national security policies. We’ve been tracking them all at our Executive Action Tracker. There haven’t been any changes in close to a month. Executive action was clearly seen as something you do to reverse a few policies of the predecessor, and then move on to “real” work.
It’s natural for policymakers and the media to make this shift. And the slow advancement of Biden’s cabinet, because the Senate wasn’t even fully organized until late January, accounts for some of this, as a lot of executive action happens at the agency level. There’s also a pandemic on, and a lot of executive action is just managing the vaccination process. (See Education Secretary Miguel Cardona saying his top priority is getting teachers vaccinated.) But it’s a big bureaucracy, and a lot that can be done.
There are two reasons to focus on executive action. First, base motivation: the slow grind of the legislative process will wear down supporters (particularly once Biden runs out of reconciliation bills), while progress can still be made under existing law. Second, policy matters: the reason to do this stuff is because it would help people.
It’s worth reinterpreting the Trump tax cuts to make them more egalitarian, and auditing the wealthy far more aggressively. It’s worth descheduling marijuana and reversing the toll that the drug war has wrought on people’s lives. It’s worth bringing down the cost of prescription drugs through crackdowns on drug company scheming and sustained use of eminent domain for patents. It’s worth embarking on a “heroes jubilee” to cancel student debt or automatically enroll debt-ridden essential workers in the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. There are a ton of other ideas in banking policy and agricultural policy and defense policy and more.
This has stalled out, unacceptably. And that gets far too little attention. I read David Shor’s autopsy for Democrats, and there was a moment of recognition, amid the robotic responses about ideological polarization, that policy is a thing parties ought to practice when in power. “How we should campaign and what we should do once in office are different questions. Our immigration system is a humanitarian crisis, and we should do something about that,” Shor noted briefly.
I’m concerned with what we should do. It’d be good to see more urgency from everyone else.
What Day of Biden’s Presidency Is It?
Day 44.
Today I Learned
- I was on KPFA yesterday discussing the rescue bill. Listen here. (KPFA)
- We’re two weeks away from first-time unemployment claims being above the highest level of the Great Recession for a full year. (Calculated Risk)
- One in three nonprofits could shutter because of the pandemic. (The Hill)
- A Betsy DeVos holdover is still running the Office of Federal Student Aid. (HuffPost)
- The idea of “unnecessary” aid to state and local governments is wrong and absurd. (Governing)
- The administration has put in more hurdles to drone strikes outside active battlefields. (New York Times)
- The House is not ready to take up the Biden immigration bill yet. (Politico)
- The deal with pharmacy chains to vaccinate patients offers up a trove of customer data to CVS and Walgreens. (The New Republic)
- Biden getting feisty on states reopening, calling their logic “Neanderthal thinking.” (New York Times)
