Kabuki

Speaker Pelosi worked all weekend to get a deal on the $1.5 trillion infrastuture vote, except it was only Thursday. Why am I skeptical of this whole story? Earlier in the day, Rep Hoyer was pretty sure the big vote wasn't going to happen.

The No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives had a one-word answer when reporters asked if he was confident the $1 trillion bill would pass in a vote scheduled later in the day.

"Nope," said Representative Steny Hoyer.

CNN also reported during the day,

A source familiar with the whip operation of the House Progressive Caucus tells CNN that the group just completed a status check with their members and their number of “no” votes remains “solid.”

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the caucus, has said repeatedly that at least half of her members were prepared to vote "no" if there wasn’t a guarantee around the wider spending package. That would mean somewhere in the range of 45 to 50 "no" votes.

The source says that most progressives have not even been contacted and asked to switch their vote. They say only two members have been contacted at all, adding the calls did not come from Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.

Elsewhere, Clyburn said himself that he hadn't even tried to whip the vote. Whatever negotiations were taking place, they weren't with individual House members. So with whom, if anyone, were Speaker Pelosi and other leaders negotiating? Bernie Sanders emerged from the woodwork during the week:

Sanders, in a series of tweets posted on Tuesday, said the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Thursday without the reconciliation package would be “in violation of an agreement that was reached within the Democratic Caucus in Congress.”

He also said such a move would “end all leverage that we have to pass a major reconciliation bill.”

And it's hard not to think Sanders had the final word last night:

"It is an absurd way to do business, to be negotiating a multi-trillion-dollar bill a few minutes before a major vote with virtually nobody knowing what's going on. That's unacceptable. And I think what has got to happen is that tonight, the bipartisan infrastructure bill must be defeated," Sanders said.

But of course, the root problem wasn't Sanders, though it's become more clear in recent days that Sanders is an author, if not the principal author, of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The problem is Sen Manchin, who for now holds the cards and is fully aware of it.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is in the driver’s seat and letting liberal Democrats in the House and Senate know that he plans to set the terms for the budget reconciliation bill that they hope to use to enact President Biden’s "Build Back Better" agenda.

. . . By declaring that his top-line limit would be $1.5 trillion — a full $2 trillion less than the number he voted for in the Senate budget resolution last month — Manchin made it clear that the reconciliation bill isn’t passing anytime soon.

I've been wondering for some time who's been pulling the Democrat strings. For a while, I believed it was Speaker Pelosi. The problem is that the events of the past couple of weeks place Pelosi in the position of the tech bosses I used to work for, who promised to work all weekend, didn't deliver, and eventually lost their jobs. Pelosi is a disposable pawn at this point, and I suspect she's now on her way out. Given the tensions of the past week, Sanders's mask is coming off, and he's now the Democrat power -- or that is, he would be if Manchin weren't thwarting him.

At this point, not only is Pelosi on her way out, by January 2023 if not sooner, but both Biden and Schumer are also irrelevant. The contest is between Sanders and Manchin.

There Is No OSHA Vaccine Mandate

I've been posting on the information I've seen that there's in fact no realistic way OSHA can enforce a mandate that all employers of more than 100 people require them to be vaccinated in the name of "workplace safety". In fact, given the constraints of regulatory rule making, this would likely take so long that any COVID crisis would be over long before such a rule could go into effect.

This report on a question posed by a reporter to Press Secretary Psaki makes the situation even clearer.

The absence of even a scintilla of material to indicate the White House or any federal agency is organizing an action plan of how to structure the guidance itself is telling. The silence of the machine tells us it is not turned on. The bureaucracy has not been triggered. The machinery of the federal government has not been instructed to begin any process to execute on the instruction that OSHA will, “develop a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated.” Nothing.

As the piece indicates,

[T]he White House has no idea what the current plan is for OSHA to create this rule that will require a national mandate for private sector workers. The emphasis is on voluntary compliance as an outcome of the decree that a mandate would be forthcoming.

In fact, this part of the plan is working. Consider United Airlines:

United Airlines is preparing to fire almost 600 employees who failed to comply with the company’s COVID-19 vaccination policy by the Sept. 27 deadline, company executives told employees Tuesday.

United was one of the first major US companies to announced [sic] a vaccine mandate for its 67,000 US employees, the overwhelming majority of whom have complied.

, , , President Joe Biden announced earlier this month that his administration will mandate that companies with over 100 employees require their employees get vaccinated or have them test regularly for the virus.

Company executives, though, have said the announcement was light on specifics and are awaiting details so they can implement a plan.

The problem for a company like United that goes ahead with "voluntary compliance" is that while this may provide a pretext for the action and allow some degree of both virtue signaling and public relations cover, it still leaves the company open to legal challenge. The story above says,

United did not provide a breakdown of the kinds of employees who haven’t yet been vaccinated, but nearly 400 workers represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers had not uploaded proof of vaccination by Tuesday, District 141 President Mike Klemm told CNBC.

The union represents more than 25,000 United employees.

Klemm said the union plans to file wrongful termination grievances if the workers who refused to be vaccinated are fired, according to the outlet.

And I'm still left with the question of what is a valid "proof of vaccination", especially if it's something you "upload", as the story puts it. Do you upload an image of your vax certificate? Can't this easily be photoshopped? I went on the web and found this:

Seems like I could edit this into something with my name on it just with MS Paint, cut and paste a photocopy and scan it, or buy something better on the black market. How does United's HR department have the time and resources to check 60,000 of these things?

The only bright side for United is what's implied in the Dilbert cartoon above. If a vaccination mandate requires a company to fire X percent of its workers, that's basically a free pass to downsize without a buyout for the workers who are cut. I'm surprised that more companies don't go for this, except that maybe the smarter ones are recognizing that "voluntary compliance" isn't a free pass, and in the end, nearly all whom they terminate will either get hefty settlements or be reinstated.

"Highly Overrated Person"

The news aggregators, if they mentioned this story at all, put it somewhere below Dog the Bounty Hunter in yesterday's developments, but this kept me thinking all day:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats on Monday that passage of the $550 billion [sic] infrastructure bill must not wait for President Joe Biden's multitrillion-dollar safety net bill, saying the larger package is not yet ready for a vote.

. . . "I told all of you that we wouldn't go on to the [infrastructure bill until] we had the reconciliation bill passed by the Senate. We were right on schedule to do all of that, until 10 days ago, a week ago, when I heard the news that this number had to come down," Pelosi said, according to the source. "It all changed, so our approach had to change.

. . . The development indicates that the vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill is likely to happen in the House on Thursday, whether or not there is a deal on the separate bill by then, which progressives have demanded to win their votes for it.

But it is not clear that the infrastructure bill can pass the House, even if Pelosi calls the vote.

What struck me was less Pelosi's reversal than what she let out in the course of her statement: a week or 10 days ago, she "heard the news that this number had to come down". Well, wouldn't this be important? Apparently she kept it to herself until Monday night, which was pretty much past the last minute.

Why would she do that? I think it's fairly plain. She'd been telling the House moderates that she'd schedule a separate vote on the $1.5 trillion infrastructure package on Monday, while she'd been telling the Progressive Caucus she'd tie them together. Her solution was going to be to pull the rug out from under the moderates by "postponing" Monday's vote to Thursday, while hoping Sen Sinema might not notice, since the senator was on record saying if no vote took place Monday, she was a "no" on the bigger bill.

It sounds as though Sen Sinema did in fact notice this, and I assume important people contacted Pelosi about the problem (my money is on Sen Schumer). As a result, Pelosi made her Monday night announcement that the vote would take place on Thursday after all. Yeah, that's definitely gonna happen.

But then Bernie Sanders weighed in:

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Tuesday urged House Democrats to block the $1.2 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure bill, defying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) agenda of passing the legislation Thursday.

. . . “I strongly urge my House colleagues to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Congress passes a strong reconciliation bill,” the Sanders pleaded.

. . . “We had to accommodate the changes that were being necessitated,” Pelosi reportedly told Democrat members about the reconciliation package. “And we cannot be ready to say until the Senate passed the bill, we can’t do BIF [bipartisan infrastructure deal].”

“[W]e’re still waiting for the number because you cannot prove the design on the legislation without the number,” Pelosi explained. “And the president is working on that piece. He’s working on that piece.”

Pelosi’s reported attempt to whip the vote in favor of passing the “bipartisan” bill has not convinced far-left House members. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told reporters Monday the bills are linked together and warned a Thursday vote could fail.

Indeed, as Pelosi said, Biden is working on that piece.

President Joe Biden canceled his trip to Chicago this week to stay in Washington to haggle with lawmakers over the administration's two large legislative priorities, a White House official said Tuesday.

. . . The battle over the $3.5 trillion price tag centers on Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, centrist Democrats who have insisted that it be reduced. But they have not named their price, which has led to protracted negotiations.

And neither Manchin nor Sinema has yet named a top-line number, even after meeting with Biden yesterday, and their statements after the meetings have been vague bromides about "progress". It's plain that Manchin and Sinema hold the cards and see no particular urgency in reaching a solution.

At this stage, their strategy is going to be to run out the clock while letting the House Democrats kill the infrastructure bill. What's becoming clear is that neither Pelosi nor Schumer nor Biden ever gave much thought to a Plan B. Pelosi in particular relied on making conflicting promises to the progressives and the moderates within her caucus, without gaming the situation out.

Highly overrated person.

Edging Toward Disaster

One thing that puzzles me in the current state of legislative action is how little skepticism there is among journalists and commentators across the board over whether any of their do-or-die agenda items will succeed at all. I've been bringing little to my perception other than my experience of everyday people who promise to get things done but don't, and I see similar patterns at the national level that keep being confirmed. This may be because elites are simply insulated from ordinary affairs that need basic planning skills and competence in execution.

So when I saw Speaker Pelosi moving the deadline for Monday's vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill to Thursday while getting the $3.5 trillion package done as well, and getting the continuing resolution through the Senate on top of that, I pretty much knew nothing like that is going to happen. This story simply confirms what I've been seeing here and there for weeks:

The $3.5 trillion package, written by self-proclaimed socialist Bernie Sanders (I-VT), is not ready for a House vote, as Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) blocked a key tax provision on proscription [sic] drug makers that Sanders believes is needed.

Yesterday's developments didn't help:

Senate Republicans on Monday blocked a bill that would fund the government and suspend the U.S. debt ceiling, leaving Democrats scrambling to avoid a possible economic calamity.

. . . Lawmakers need to approve government funding before Friday to avoid a shutdown. The U.S. risks default if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling by a point that is likely to come in October, according to the Treasury Department.

Yet again, these are issues that had been known to the players for many months, but nothing was done to resolve them by the time Congress went on its summer recess. When it returned, the Democrat leadership lost itself in fantasies that everyone would "work all weekend" to get things ready. And as of now, we're in Speaker Pelosi's "week of intensity" where they'd get around to doing what they didn't do when they worked all weekend.

Meanwhile, President Biden yesterday did Speaker Pelosi one better and said the infrastructure bill, or maybe the whole $5 trillion package, up to now promised for Thursday, may not happen this week at all. Well, if the Progressive Caucus has 50 "no" votes on the $1.5 trillion unless it can vote on the $3.5 trillion package first, then likely it won't happen. But we're hearing in the link above that the $3.5 trillion package isn't ready in any case.

An op-ed piece in The Hill outlines the only possible outcome from this situation:

As Democratic infighting continues over their $3.5 trillion social spending legislation, the fate of Joe Biden’s presidency and the Democrats’ majority in Congress hang in the balance.

. . . Ultimately, President Biden must act urgently, using his influence among Democrats and moderate Republicans in the House to ensure the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure agreement, first and foremost.

Simultaneously, the president along with Democratic leaders in Congress must develop a set of principles or a framework that will convince progressives not to kill the bipartisan infrastructure plan, and then work to negotiate down the size of the $3.5 trillion bill to something that moderate Democratic Senators — namely, Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) — can get on board with.

The problem is that all such analyses assume a level of engagement and competence that's harder and harder to see from either President Biden or Speaker Pelosi. As of last week, the centrist analyses like the one above were saying Biden needs to Get Involved to break the stalemate. Well, he's involved, or at least as involved as he's gonna get. Joe Biden isn't LBJ.

Like him or hate him, Lyndon Johnson often got what he wanted, Ho Chi Minh aside. I think there are basic problems of character, possibly exacerbated by age, that are thwarting both Biden and Pelosi. Handsome is as handsome does. This is a crisis of their own making, and at this late stage, neither's going to change.

Pelosi Delays Infrastructure Vote

I said yesterday that today would be a test of Bruce's Law, "When there's an important deadline falling due next Monday, and the bosses promise everyone's going to work all weekend to meet it, this won't happen." The much-predicted September 27 vote on the bipartisan $1.5 trillion infrastucture bill has been moved to September 30, or maybe just "sometime this week". (I've been calling it the $1.5 trillion bill, but I've seen numbers from $1.2 to $1.7 trillion.)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a new date for the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, after committing to moderate Democrats in August that the vote would take place by Monday, September 27.

On Sunday, in a "Dear Colleague" letter, the speaker told Democratic lawmakers the House would begin debate on the bill on Monday and hold the vote on Thursday.

. . . Pelosi told ABC she believes the House will pass the infrastructure bill "this week," but also conceded that she would never bring "a bill to the floor that doesn't have the votes."

While this confirms my prediction that the Monday deadline wouldn't be met, there are broader implications. By promising the vote would maybe sorta kinda take place Thursday, Speaker Pelosi is simply doubling down on an even bigger miracle. Thursday September 30 is also the deadline for a continuing resolution that keeps the government open through December.

The measure theoretically buys Congress about nine additional weeks to negotiate full-year spending bills for the rest of fiscal 2022, or perhaps more likely, an omnibus package that funds most agencies for the remainder of the year.

. . . But it’s unclear whether the continuing resolution will pass both chambers of Congress in its current form. The bill would also suspend the debt limit through Dec. 16, 2022, a measure Republicans have said they’re unwilling to support.

But earlier this month, predictions were much more sanguine about how things would fall together by now. According to The Hill on September 5,

Before October, the House is aiming to pass two major pieces of legislation: a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and a forthcoming $3.5 trillion spending package backed by Democrats that would advance key parts of President Biden’s economic agenda. They’ll also need to pass government funding legislation to avoid a shutdown on Oct. 1.

House leadership has set a Sept. 27 deadline to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill as committee chairs rush to finish drafting their portions of the larger spending package by Sept. 15 to hold a floor vote shortly thereafter.

So as of early this month, work was expected to be complete on the $3.5 trillion bill, with a floor vote, by September 15. This hasn't happened. As best anyone can tell, Speaker Pelosi now intends to crush everything into just a few days:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said in a message to Democrat House members on Saturday that the upcoming week would be a “time of intensity” as the party will try to ram through three major spending bills.

“September 30th is a date fraught with meaning,” Pelosi began. “This week, we must pass a Continuing Resolution, Build Back Better Act and the BIF.” [The BIF is apparently the $1.5 trillion bill.]

But this piece in Politico following Pelosi's announcement outlines the size of the tasks that must now be completed within three days.

The continuing resolution has already passed the House [but faces problems in the Senate], the BIF is awaiting a vote (which Pelosi had promised would be held Monday) and Saturday night, the House Budget Committee moved forward the mammoth reconciliation package, aka BBB. The BBB is headed for a vote on the floor this week, even while it’s far from final as Democratic leaders grasp for “an endgame compromise that can pass both the House and Senate,” write Jennifer Scholtes and Caitlin Emma.

So everything has to turn out exactly right on three separate projects over the next three days, when as of just last week, everyone was going to work all weekend to get only one of them done. Didn't happen. This is not a formula for success. I think Trump may have had the right of it:

Nancy Pelosi should be ashamed of herself. She is a highly overrated person. I know her well. She is highly overrated.

So far, the focus has been on Biden for incompetence or diminished capacity. People need to look harder at Speaker Pelosi.

Testing Bruce's Law

On Thursday, I began to formulate what I'm calling Bruce's Law, which might be expressed as, "When there's an important deadline falling due next Monday, and the bosses promise everyone's going to work all weekend to meet it, this won't happen." In fact, when you might expect the office to be a beehive of urgent actitity on Saturday and Sunday, things will be dead quiet, and nobody will be there.

The New Yorker piece I linked yesterday, which is aimed at an elitist audience sympathetic to Biden's agenda, reflects the conventional wisdom surrounding tomorrow's key deadline to vote on the $1.5 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package:

On Wednesday, Biden spent five hours with Democratic members of Congress, in various groupings, in search of an elusive deal, and will surely be working the phones right up until Monday’s deadline for the House vote on the infrastructure bill—and beyond.

There it is, we'll be working on it all weekend, right up to Monday! Well, the first question is whether that's in fact what they're doing. Are they in the office? Are the phone lines humming? Well, no.

President Joe Biden left the White House on Friday for another weekend away from Washington, DC, as Democrats continue fighting over his planned $5 trillion in spending.

The president spoke with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on the phone in the afternoon before he boarded Marine One for Camp David.

. . . The White House cited “progress” in a readout of the call sent to reporters after Biden left.

“The three agreed to stay in touch about their outreach through the weekend,” the readout concluded.

Well, how close to agreement are the various sides? Even before the cliffhanger weekends I experienced in my corporate days, I had a pretty good idea of how much work needed to be done to meet the Monday deadline and how realistic a goal it was to finish it in a weekend. (Actually, the programmers had been goofing off for many months, and a single weekend never made a difference.)

What puzzles me is how difficult it's been to find realistic estimates of the House whip count. The numbers in most stories seem very small -- it's the Squad, AOC and a half dozen harpies, versus the House moderates, eight or ten who forced the September 27 vote on Pelosi some weeks ago. But the actual numbers, as far as I can tell, are much larger:

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) said Friday that 50 House Democrats will oppose the $1.2 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure bill, which is scheduled for a vote Monday.

“Pramila Jayapal told me at least 50 of her progressive members still plan to vote to sink the infrastructure bill if it goes forward Monday,” a CNN reporter tweeted. “She added that leadership taking some steps to move ahead on the big reconciliation bill is ‘not enough.'”

. . . When Jayapal was interviewed Wednesday on CNN, she explained she is concerned the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package will not pass the House if the Democrats give up leverage and pass the $1.2 trillion bill without its far more expansive cousin, which is full of far-left goodies.

Well, what about the Republicans? We're told that Speaker Pelosi can lose only a few Democrat votes, but if she loses 50, can the Republicans make up for it and pass the package? It doesn't look that way, according to Politico:

Fewer than a dozen House Republicans are expected to vote for the $550 billion infrastructure bill — which got 19 Senate GOP votes last month — according to multiple lawmakers in the party.

If House Democrats keep pushing their two-track plan for a party-line social spending bill and a bipartisan infrastructure bill, they can't expect many GOP passengers on that second train.

. . . Those numbers are still in flux, the members said, addressing the closely held vote count candidly on condition of anonymity.

Being Politico, the piece is sanguine about the possibility that the House Progressive Caucus can be prevailed upon to decouple the $1.5 trillion bill from the $3.5 trillion bill. But as of Friday, it was fairly plain this wasn't going to happen.

In the meantime, Biden is at Camp David, but he's sure gonna keep in touch.

This will be a key test of Bruce's Law. My bet is there's no vote tomorrow.

There's Actually No Vax Policy

The other day I saw a story that confirmed my surmise about having OSHA issue a national workplace vax policy, as Biden had announced:

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has yet to release a draft to force private businesses to mandate coronavirus vaccines or implement rigorous testing requirements, nearly two weeks after President Joe Biden made the demand.

The normal rule making process involves not just drafts, but public comment periods, advance notice, and so forth. But as I posted on September 16, OSHA doesn't have the staff or budget to enforce such a policy, which in any case is months from implementation. But employers who would be affected can't file suit against the policy until it's published and goes into effect, which delays likely reversal in the courts.

In fact, we could even think this is deliberate. It reminds me of the complaint in a recent New Yorker piece:

The Biden Presidency, on both the foreign and domestic fronts, remains a jumble of aspirations—and retains a haze of uncertainty about how to achieve them. Much of his political problem, it seems to me, is a vast gap between his articulated goals and what is politically possible. . . . the Democratic Party is barely a majority party in the U.S. Congress. It’s a fifty-fifty Senate, and a fifty-fifty world. In a purely practical sense, the challenge for Biden is that he hasn’t got to the hard part yet.

But as far as I can see, this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Biden's intent is to look like he's Doing Something about COVID, but his choices are all bad ones. Anyone who actually means to enforce vaccine passports, like Mayor DeBlasio, runs into the problem that many people who are denied entry for not having a passport are going to be minority, especially African-American. They claim with some justice that the policy is racist.

There's another conundrum here. The well-publicized New York brawl at Carmine's restaurant started when a staffer "accused [three women] of presenting fake COVID-19 vaccine cards". Wait a moment. What's an authentic COVID vaccine card? How can you tell a fake?

For instance, my barber shop, in a spontaneous policy, requires "proof of vaccination". My wife and I keep our vaccination cards in our home safe for the simple reason that if we lose them, some future policy could cause difficulties if we don't have them. So for my barber and anyone else who asks, I made a photocopy of the card and keep it in my wallet. But it's clearly a photocopy. My barber accepts it, but why should he? You can't use a photocopy of a driver's license or a birth certificate. Did the Carmine's staffer refuse to accept a photocopy? Is a photocopy "fake"?

There's no rule, because there's no actual policy. An employer who fires people for not being vaxxed in advance of an official OSHA policy runs a great deal of risk, especially if many affected are minorities. But this becomes the employer's problem, not Biden's, while the employer has no recourse, because he can't point to any actual policy that he's following, while on the other hand, he can't sue OSHA for redress, either. Meanwhile, Biden can claim he's Done Something.

And the ambiguity gets worse. On September 9, Biden strongly implied that in addition to the two jabs last spring, people would be required to get the boosters once they were available (which Biden at the time said would be nearly a week ago, September 20). But now, Dr Walensky of all people says the CDC is not changing its definition of "fully vaccinated".

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said Friday that the definition of “fully vaccinated” won’t change when COVID-19 booster shots are rolled out—at least in the near future.

Well, the FDA isn't completely on board with the boosters.

While they endorsed it for those who were 65 years and over, as well as those at high risk of severe disease, they didn’t endorse it for everyone else. That blew up Biden’s plans for a huge roll-out. Two senior FDA officials even quit last month, reportedly over what they felt was a rush to push out the shots for everyone in the country.

My wife and I are over 65. Barring any surprises, which I don't rule out, we'll probably get the boosters, but as of now, we have no idea when, where, or how we'd get them, except if it's anything like the first jabs, we can't just call our doctor at Kaiser, we've got to go to a cattle pen. But even if we didn't bother, it looks like for the foreseeable future, our existing vax cards will work.

Unless they change their minds.