Yesterday was International Pi Day--as It has been quite a week in America as the American Rescue Plan was signed into law. Our team pulled together a discourse of the week that was courtesy the Bulwark, Financial Times of London and Politico:
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"Election Integrity" Means Restriction
Amanda Carpenter on why we can't have a reasonable debate when people are trying to cancel votes.
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Leading The Bulwark…
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“Election Integrity” Means Restriction
AMANDA CARPENTER: You can’t have a reasonable debate about voting rights with people who wanted to cancel votes.
On the Pods…
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Bill Kristol on the GOP's Anger Management
On today’s Bulwark podcast, Bill Kristol joins host Charlie Sykes to discuss the Biden COVID-19 speech, how the right is overreacting to it, and the internal arguments about cats and dogs.
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B2D: Is There a Trapdoor in the Recovery Plan?
AEI's Desmond Lachman analyzes the inflation risk in our gargantuan spending and loose money policies. The panel then considers the border crisis and the GOP's outreach to the working class.
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Who’s French? (Episodes 3 & 4)
Sarah and Ben talk about episodes 3 and 4, including who exactly counts as “French” in the French village, what happens to France after the German occupation, what the Communists are up to, and who that guy was who fell out of the sky was.
For Bulwark+ Members… 
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THE TRIAD: Fact Checking Joe Biden
JONATHAN V. LAST on the “Lamestream Media”’s fact-checking Joe Biden’s speech last night. The results will shock you.
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SECRET PODCAST: Biden Speaks; America Celebrates
JVL and Sarah on why the dawn is breaking.
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TNB: Biden’s First Big Speech
Mona, Charlie, Amanda, and Tim talk about Biden’s COVID-19 address, H.R. 1 and the COVID spending bill, as chat about cat people and dog people: can’t we get along?
After a year of tragedy and hardship, help is here for the American people: President Biden signed the American Rescue Plan into law.
This COVID-19 relief package is one of the most progressive pieces of legislation in modern American history -- and it’s going to put us on the road to recovery and help improve lives all across the country. The American Rescue Plan will:
- Send direct $1,400 checks to more than 85% of American households, the single largest direct payment to date. For a typical middle-class family of four making $100,000, this means a direct payment of $5,600. That’s the difference between paying your mortgage or maintaining your health insurance -- or not.
- Ease the financial burden of child care for families by expanding the Child Tax Credit. The American Rescue Plan also includes funding to reduce child care costs for families and increase the pay and benefits of child care workers. This is the single biggest investment in child care since World War II.
- Address the growing hunger crisis facing 29 million Americans -- and as many as 12 million children -- by asking the U.S. Department of Agriculture to expand and extend nutrition assistance programs to make sure no kid goes hungry.
- Combat COVID-19 by increasing federal funding to the CDC for vaccine tracking, administration, and distribution -- to the tune of $7.5 billion.
- Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit to 17 million low-income workers, many of whom are frontline workers keeping our communities safe and running during this pandemic.
The American Rescue Plan also includes protections for renters, provides additional support for small businesses, and extends unemployment benefits. Not to mention that it plans to lift millions of people out of poverty and could cut child poverty in half.
This landmark piece of legislation will improve Americans’ daily lives and help our nation build back better -- just as President Biden and Vice President Harris promised. Read on for more updates coming out of the White House →
Fighting COVID-19
Last night, President Biden announced that he will direct states to make all adults eligible for COVID-19 vaccines by May 1.
The administration is committed to not only increasing the number of vaccinations, but making them more accessible. That’s why the White House has fortified states’ weekly vaccine supply to 18 million doses and supported the establishment or expansion of 441 federally supported community vaccination centers.
We’re making real progress, Michael. At this point, over 62 million vaccinations have been administered -- nearly one in five adults and more than 61% of all Americans over 65 have received their first shot. But it’s still important that folks know the facts about COVID-19 and take precautions. Watch as Center for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky answers some of today’s most pressing questions about the virus:
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With help from Tyler Weyant SCOOP: DEADLIEST YEAR IN U.S. HISTORY — The CDC plans to formally announce that the U.S. death rate increased by 15 percent last year as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic, making it the deadliest in U.S. history, according to two senior administration officials with direct knowledge of the matter. Covid-19 was the third leading cause of death behind heart disease and cancer. Altogether more than 3 million people in the U.S. died in 2020, the agency found. MIDTERM REPORT CARD — Plenty of folks wait until the First 100 Days to grade a new administration’s performance, a benchmark that dates to a Franklin Delano Roosevelt radio address in 1933. Well, forget that. We at the Nightly are going with 50 days, which for President Joe Biden is today, no matter what the White House says. So how’s he done? Judging by approval ratings, pretty darn well. He’s at 53.7 percent in the Real Clear Politics Average. He hit a remarkable 59 percent in the last POLITICO/Morning Consult survey. AP also put him at about 60 percent. He’s about to sign a BREAKING — New York’s two Democratic senators, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand, said Andrew Cuomo, the state’s Democratic governor, should resign. NO GO FOR CUOMO — But Cuomo isn’t budging. After a sixth allegation of sexual misconduct surfaced this week, New York Democrats in Congress and state legislators in Albany called on him today to resign, Cuomo said once again that he has no plans to take their advice. “Let the review proceed. I am not going to resign,” Cuomo said on a conference call with reporters. He added that quitting now would be “bowing to cancel culture.” Nightly chatted with Albany-based New York Playbook writer Anna Gronewold over Slack about what happens next. What stood out to you about Cuomo’s press conference today? I was struck, but not entirely surprised, by how energetic he sounded after weeks of devastating news coverage, especially damning new reports in The New York Times and New York Magazine about a culture of fear, harassment and intimidation in his office. Cuomo came out ready to fight, even throwing slight shade at more than a dozen New York Democrats in Congress who announced in tandem this morning that they wanted him to resign. I didn’t expect him to resign today — I think the poetry of resigning the same day Eliot Spitzer did in 2008 would be almost too much for anyone to bear. But his commitment to waiting until the results of at least two investigations comes out, and the matter-of-fact manner that he stated Covid-19 stats at the beginning of the press conference were a pretty clear stance that he’s not going to let anyone, even broad coalitions of his former political allies, take him out without a fight. Do you think there’s anything that would lead him to resign? So far I’ve been wrong whenever I’ve answered that question, so please don’t put any of your hard-earned money on my answer. But I think if Cuomo decides to step down of his own accord, it would be because he saw definitive numbers that he had lost the majority of voters. Despite the intense coverage, a lot of this is swirling around Twitter, journalists and the political sphere. We'll get new polling soon (and I assume that the Cuomo admin has its own internal numbers) that would show how many average New Yorkers want him to resign. Last numbers we had on that, 55 percent said he should stay in office (March 4). | |
A billboard urging New York Governor Andrew Cuomo to resign is seen near downtown in Albany, N.Y. | Getty Image | |
If he doesn’t resign, where does this go next? There are currently two investigations into his alleged misconduct, which so far ranges from inappropriate “predatory” behavior to literally groping a woman beneath her shirt. One is from state Attorney General Letitia James. It’s unclear what she is looking for or what she might find, but if the results are particularly damning, it would be irrefutable. Cuomo has consistently said New Yorkers should wait on her findings to establish their opinions of him. The second investigation was authorized yesterday by the Assembly, and is the first step in impeachment. There is broad support in the Legislature to move ahead with that process, but that could take weeks to months. Due process is at times a long and messy process, and depending who you ask that can be good or bad. The only other time a New York governor has been impeached was in 1913. (Read this fun account from Dr. Terry Golway) Things are obviously moving fast. What should we be watching for this weekend? On a granular, kind of wonky level, the Senate and Assembly are supposed to release their one-house budgets in the coming hours or days. The budget process is historically dominated by the governor, partly because of how the New York process works and partly because of how Cuomo has for years been able to strong-arm the legislature to get his way. It’s possible that Cuomo is in a weak enough position that it will embolden the Senate and Assembly’s Democratic majorities to get a little bit riskier with their proposals. They’ve got an enormous upper hand at the moment. On a larger level, no one I’ve spoken with — even Cuomo loyalists — think that these are the last of the allegations to come out. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news and tips at mward@politico.com and rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @myahward and @renurayasam. | |
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CRASH TEST — Almost a decade ago, Jeff Zients was asked to rescue Obamacare's online sign-up system — a task that proved pivotal to the presidency. Now the head of the White House Covid response team has six weeks to roll out another website to help millions of people sign up for coronavirus vaccines and make good on President Joe Biden's pledge to get life back to something close to normal by mid-summer, Joanne Kenen, Adam Cancryn and Darius Tahir write. He’ll have to develop a fully functioning, one-size-fits-all national online appointment system for vaccine-seekers who now are spending hours on end dialing phone numbers or hitting “refresh” on websites trying to get an appointment. With more than enough shots expected for every adult in the U.S. by May 1, Zients will have to design a virtual on-ramp that can handle millions of newly eligible people seeking appointments without crashing. Zients — along with Andy Slavitt, now senior adviser for the White House Covid response team — led and oversaw the 2013 effort to fix the calamitously broken HealthCare.gov. After a very wobbly start, sign-ups exceeded expectations in that first year. The vaccine scheduling effort is in its early stages, and an HHS spokesperson said the department hasn’t yet decided how ambitious it will be. But it will be based on the government’s existing VaccineFinder.org website rather than be built from scratch — a move aimed at making the process more efficient and avoiding some of the pitfalls and complexities that doomed HealthCare.gov’s rollout. | |
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— Minneapolis to pay $27M to settle Floyd family lawsuit: The city of Minneapolis today agreed to pay $27 million to settle a civil lawsuit from George Floyd’s family over the Black man’s death in police custody, even as jury selection continued in a former officer’s murder trial. — Tariffs not a focus in next week's China talks: The U.S. does not plan to focus on the tariffs and export controls imposed on China when senior officials gather for their first in-person meeting next week, national security adviser Jake Sullivan said today. “This is our effort to communicate clearly to the Chinese government how the United States intends to proceed at a strategic level, what we believe our fundamental interests and values are, and what our concerns with their activities are,” Sullivan said during the White House press briefing. — Pro-Biden Super PAC launching ads touting Covid relief package: A surge of TV and digital ads selling the massive Covid recovery package will hit the airwaves next week, just as Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris embark on a national tour to explain what they’re delivering to Americans. Unite the Country, a pro-Biden super PAC, has launched a seven-figure TV and digital ad campaign in the battleground states of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia. — Birx lands at Bush Institute after leaving government: Deborah Birx, the former Trump White House coronavirus response coordinator, is joining the George W. Bush Institute as a senior fellow , the organization confirmed today. The role will be Birx’s first since retiring from government earlier this year after more than four decades as a public health official, culminating in her rocky tenure atop the White House task force charged with leading the pandemic response. — N.Y. prosecutor targeting Trump won’t stand for reelection: Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., who is leading a vast criminal investigation of former President Donald Trump’s business dealings, revealed in an interview published today that he will not seek reelection. |
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