How Is This "Negotiation" Anything But A Charade?

Media reports from both ends of the spectrum on what's being hyped as "negotiations" on the BBB and BIF bills are in a strange never-never land. I noted yesterday that the Washington Examiner says the BBB is "still unwritten", but this doesn't stop CBS News from referring to a 2,465 page bill and listing a series of line items. So how does Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Examiner, who wrote that piece, still have a job if someone from CBS can give a page count?

CBS calls it the standard $3.5 trillion in that piece, but this story by Sean Moran, who happens to be a a congressional reporter for Breitbart News, calls it "the $3.1 trillion reconciliation bill, or the Build Back Better Act". This is just one of the many discrepancies over the actual numbers for both the BBB and BIF that I've seen in recent weeks.

The only conclusion I can draw is that none of these people is working real hard. Sean Moran goes on to say,

Since Senate Democrats only have a one-member majority, either Manchin or Sinema could tank the Build Back Better Act by withdrawing their support.

A promising middle school student who follows current events knows this is incorrect: the Senate is tied, nobody has a majority, but the vice president, currently a Democrat, casts the deciding vote in a tie. How does a professional journalist anywhere on the spectrum get this so wrong? The whole press corps, with only a few exceptions, is lazy and ignorant, and they get away with it. People like me have to spend some amount of time and energy every morning double checking these paid and prestigious experts.

But we're basically getting the same happy talk about "progress" that we got last month. The Hill has this story:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) met separately Monday with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) as liberals and centrists in the party struggle to cut a deal on President Biden's sweeping spending plan.

Except it isn't "President Biden's sweeping spending plan"; reports are that Sanders is the author. Biden has been detached at best. The story goes on,

"I would hope that we're going to see some real action within the next week or so," Sanders told reporters. "We discussed the way forward."

But NBC News reports,

As the clock ticks with few signs of progress, the White House is holding a series of meetings this week to pressure Democrats to resolve their differences and reach a deal on President Joe Biden's sweeping economic policy bill.

. . . "The president is certainly feeling an urgency to move things forward, to get things done. I think you've seen that urgency echoed by members on the Hill who agree that time is not unending here and we're eager to move forward with a unified path," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key centrist holdout who has rejected the proposed $3.5 trillion level, expressed doubt that a deal could be reached by the end of the month.

"There's an awful lot that's going on. I don't know how that would happen," he told reporters Monday.

For now, I think what's happening is that Pelosi is quietly dropping the Götterdämmerung strategy the Democrats adopted after the 2020 election: if the world is going to end, the thing to do is run up your credit cards just before it does so you don't have to pay them back. Conservative Treehouse, a blog on the Kraken right, summarizes this strategy:

Joe Biden is an appointed figurehead for a background agenda driven by Obama’s Chicago Marxists. The Biden far-left policy agenda is strategically a massive throw everything at the legislative process in an effort to create major change in a short period of time. Biden is the disposable front man for this operation, and Pelosi is the facilitating legislative cohort.

. . . Everything you would normally consider to be a concern that would limit the extremes of any legislative effort has been removed. They plan to lose next year, so they have nothing to lose right now.

I question that this anything like a strictly Marxist agenda -- Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, for instance -- but it's correct to see it as an attempt to run up the credit cards before the world ends.

The problem is that Visa is already declining charges well before you've bought the yacht. The actual strategy for now is to transition to "never mind" without seeming to. So just as we did last month, we're goinng to see happy talk about we're gonna work all weekend until something else comes up and the whole thing drops off the screen. The point now is exclusively to save face.

I suspect the press knows this and isn't putting much effort into the story.

Is Obama Pulling The Strings?

Back in August, I was frustrated that nothing was happening in the news, but at least I could justify it, because it was August. But as of this morning's headlines, still nothing. The big event is the death of fully vaxxed Colin Powell from COVID. But right after that, a major aggregator has Washington Post Deputy Editorial Page Editor Ruth Marcus getting trolled for mask-shaming some dude in an elevator. Nothing's happening.

So this may be one reason for a steady stream of speculation about who's pulling President Biden's strings, mostly focusing on Barack Obama. Most recently, commentators have noted that Obama is campaigning for McAuliffe in Virginia when Biden would probably be a net negative there.

The problem is that if Obama were in fact pulling Biden's strings, it's hard to imagine that Biden would be doing as disastrously as he is. But Obama himself reportedly said, “You know who really doesn’t have it? Joe Biden.” Obama may be campaigning for McAuliffe, but as far as trying to negotiate the BBB deal among the feuding Democrats, he's nowhere to be found. Other people have the leverage there.

Respectable media is finally starting to notice that nothing's happening. The Washington Examiner has begun to catch up:

The House and Senate return to session next week and will have only 10 legislative days [actually eight] to meet an Oct. 31 deadline set to pass both the social welfare spending package and a bipartisan infrastructure bill.

The two measures, which make up the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda, are in doubt.

. . . In an interview Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t commit to the Oct. 31 date she set just weeks ago.

“We’ll bring the bill to the floor when we have the votes to bring the bill to the floor,” the California Democrat told reporters at a San Francisco event touting the still-unwritten legislation.

In addition to getting the number of legislative days wrong, this story also illustrates the obtusenss of reporters on either end of the spectrum. The BBB is hardly "still unwritten". In 2009, the late Rush Limbaugh made an important point about Obamacare: he said that bill must have been drafted years earlier in think tanks, and the draft had long been circulating. The BBB agenda is the same. It's described, as it is above, as "the entirety of President Joe Biden’s economic agenda", but stories also say now and then that Sen Sanders, the self-described socialist, is the one who drafted it.

And likely Sanders himself had little to do with its actual content, except to endorse what other well-placed loonies had put into the draft, which a Limbaugh in health would be asserting now is likely a years-old pipe dream that Sanders and his allies could finally bring to the floor due to Pelosi's and Biden's weakness. But the pipe dream was something concocted in a time when the Democrats had bigger majorities. Their current control of congress is so thin that in both houses, tiny groups of recalcitrants in the low single digits can stall a putative juggernaut.

Right now, if anyone is pulling the strings, it's Sen Sinema. Everyone else is in a fantasy.

I'm Not A Karl Rove Fan

But the clip above shows he's been paying attention. I've been focused on the putative Oct 31 deadline to pass BBB via reconciliation, but Rove speaks to the bigger picture: by the White House schedule, the debt ceiling extension, governmnent funding, the BIF, and the BBB must all be passed by December 3. He makes the point that Sen Schumer doesn't want to use reconciliation to pass the debt ceiling extension, because this leads to a "vote-a-rama". CNN explains this:

Usually in the legislative process, lawmakers can use a series of procedural maneuvers to avoid voting on amendments. But in a budget reconciliation process -- which Democrats are using to advance their sweeping package -- you can't do that.

Lawmakers cannot hold a final vote on a reconciliation bill until all the amendments have been "disposed of," or in simpler terms, "voted on." The practice involves votes on a series of amendments that can -- and usually do -- stretch for hours.

. . . These marathon voting sessions can go for hours and often all night. The amendments are not binding, but they serve as a way for each party to force the other side on the record about controversial issues. This is where future political ads are born.

Sen. John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, said Tuesday that it's possible an agreement is reached to have 10-minute votes and to finish by midnight, but he cautioned that it's "easier said than done."

Other estimates I've heard recently suggest it would take roughly two weeks to pass either the BBB or debt ceiling extension by reconciliation with a vote-a-rama. This is at least the public reason Sen McConnell allowed Sen Schumer until December to pass the debt ceiling extension, presumably plenty of time if Schumer actually takes that step. However, every indication is that Schumer won't take it.

But Rove also raises the point that the UN Climate Conference is taking place in Glasgow on Nov 1-2, to which many administration figures will travel, and it will be part of Biden's own European trip beginning Oct 30. And although Rove mentions the Thanksgiving holiday (a week-long congressional recess), he doesn't mention the additional week-long Veterans Day congressional recess, also in November. So between junkets and holidays, it's even more likely than I had originally surmised that November is a near total loss.

And so far, all we've heard from Speaker Pelosi is the same happy talk about "progress" that she gave last month. And if Sen Schumer were serious about advancing anything via reconciliation, the unlikelihood of getting anything at all done in November means he needs to start when the Senate returns from its latest recess tomorrow.

So it looks like the Democrats are continuing to channel the incompetent tech managers I used to work for, doubling down on bigger and bigger deadlines that they're gonna work all weekend to meet. But now there's yet another deadline:

Since his inauguration this year, questions have been raised about Biden's physical and cognitive wellbeing.

Psaki repeated her previous promise that once the president gets a physical - which she said in May would be before the end of 2021 - the administration would be 'transparent' about its findings.

. . . Requests for Biden's medical records were reignited last month after a September 16 speech the 78-year-old president made was frequently interrupted by his persistent cough.

Stein's Law: that which cannot continue must stop

Stuck In The 1960s

Further to yesterday's post, I'm still not seeing any willingness by congressional leftists to recognize a need to make serious reductions in their reconciliation package to get anything through, although President Biden is now making noises in that direction

President Joe Biden publicly conceded Friday that the dollar amount of the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill was going to shrink during a speech at a child care center in Connecticut.

'We're not going to get $3.5 trillion, we'll get less than that. We're going to get it. And we're going to come back and get the rest,' he said, addressing a room partially filled with Democratic lawmakers.

But this suggests to me that there's no serious coordination taking place between the White House and congressional Democrat leaders. He went on to say,

But the question is how much of what is important will we get into the legislation. I’m of the view that it’s important to establish the principle on a whole range of issues, without guaranteeing you get the whole things here.

In other words, he seems to be endorsing the strategy that they'll fund a wide range of programs on a short-term basis and get funds to continue them later. But in yesterday's post, I noted Speaker Pelosi's position:

“Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis: a Build Back Better agenda for jobs and the planet For The Children!”

So with two weeks and eight legislative days to go until their October 31 deadline, so far, they haven't focused on a single strategy. But Sen Sanders, who seems to be the leader of the leftist congressional faction, appears still to think they can get the whole package without negotiation, if only they can bully Sens Manchin and Sinema into going along:

Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are ramping up their war of words as Democrats struggle to get past weeks of increasingly public infighting over their sweeping social spending plan.

Sanders, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, fired the latest salvo on Friday taking the fight over the plan to West Virginia. Sanders penned a Charleston Gazette-Mail op-ed, which will run in the newspaper Sunday, to tout the benefits that could be included under a $3.5 trillion bill, a top-line figure that Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) oppose.

. . . Sanders has downplayed that he, Manchin and Sinema need to get in a room together to try to work out their differences, recently telling a reporter who floated the idea that "this is not a movie."

. . . “The time for us to be negotiating with ourselves is over, and I think it is absolutely incumbent on the two senators ... to start telling us what they want," Sanders told reporters during the Tuesday call.

Nevertheless,

Sanders hasn't yet said what below $3.5 trillion he could support, characterizing the top-line figure as a significant compromise for progressives who wanted a $6 trillion bill.

Yet again, I don't think either the leftists or the Democrat leadership understand the basic question of time and the calendar. In the 1960s, Sanders and those in his corner had all the time in the world to make useless protests and demonstrations. The difference is that now, a clock is ticking.

But there's also the increasing likelihood that the pressure Sanders is actively and tacitly putting on Manchin and Sinema to get them not just to negotiate but to surrender will serve only to irritate them further and potentially push one or both out of the Democrat party.

Yeah, We're Gonna Work All Weekend

So now I'm seeing that the Democrats plan to finish an agreement on the BIF and the BBB by October 31. Both the House and Senate have been on recess this past week, with key figures like Speaker Pelosi and Sen Sinema in Europe. The House and Senate do return next week, but the House will be working only four day weeks until the 31st, while the Senate will at least be wrorking five day weeks.

Although I had earlier seen December 3 as a deadline, November is going to be pretty much of a loss, with both houses in holiday recess for two weeks. But a Washington insiders' newsletter says,

We’ve pointed this out before, but Democrats truly are nowhere when it comes to finishing this reconciliation package. The “serious progress” that has been made is not really evident to us, or to the lawmakers involved.

→ Democratic leaders on the Hill have been unable to reach agreement on a topline number. This is key to everything and is at the heart of their stalemate.

→ Progressives, especially in the Senate, are still demanding a massive expansion of Medicare to include vision, healing and dental programs. That’s a big, big expenditure.

→ House Democrats continue to push for Medicaid expansion and making Obamacare subsidies permanent.

→ The two chambers keep exchanging proposals -- there have been some swapped this week. But they aren’t close to a deal, our sources tell us. Which is why the White House needs to lean in.

So there's unwillingness to compromise among House leftists, while Sens Manchin and Sinema appear to be holding the line on their own demands.

A major holdup in the talks is Sinema's opposition to any tax increases for individuals and large corporations, per two Senate Democratic aides familiar with the matter. Her position threatens to deprive the package of over $700 billion in revenue to finance the bulk of President Joe Biden's agenda.

. . . Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington, the chair of the 96-member Congressional Progressive Caucus, told reporters that progressives were open to cutting the price tag but not the overall scope of the package, favoring packing as many priorities into the legislation as possible, with shorter expiration dates.

"We're not going to pit childcare against climate change," she said. "We're not going to pit seniors against young people."

But Speaker Pelosi is sending a different message:

“In order to pass both the Build Back Better Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill on time, it is essential that difficult decisions must be made very soon,” she wrote to House Democrats, referencing the two planks of Biden’s agenda.

She continued: “Overwhelmingly, the guidance I am receiving from Members is to do fewer things well so that we can still have a transformative impact on families in the workplace and responsibly address the climate crisis: a Build Back Better agenda for jobs and the planet For The Children!”

As I've been saying, a key indicator of incompetence is an inability to plan tasks realistically and adhere to any sort of real-world schedule. It doesn't appear to me that anything has been done to resolve the problems that led to the Democrat failures last month, despite vague happy talk about "progress". We're still just gonna work all weekend to fix it.

The COVID Religion And Abp Broglio

The controversy over United Airlines's vaccine mandate has brought to the fore a key question for people who request exemptions based on religious or conscientious grounds. United's original policy states:

"Given our focus on safety and the steep increases in Covid infections, hospitalizations and deaths, all employees whose request is approved will be placed on temporary, unpaid personal leave on October 2 while specific safety measures for unvaccinated employees are instituted," said United's memo to employees. "Given the dire statistics...we can no longer allow unvaccinated people back into the workplace until we better understand how they might interact with our customers and their vaccinated co-workers."

Although the employees' unions were slow to react, six individual employees did file a class action suit against the company, which is covered in a lengthy, obtuse, and poorly organized piece in Breitbart News.

United Airlines originally told its 67,000 U.S. employees they must be vaccinated against Chinese coronavirus (or secure an exemption) by September 27 or face termination. As the airline’s vaccine mandate stands, any employees with exemptions would still be considered employed but would be placed on unpaid leave and would lose their benefits for up to six years or until the airline deems pandemic conditions safe for unvaccinated employees to return, according to the complaint.

However, the airline indicated that exemptions of any sort would be few and difficult to obtain, and employees who considered requesting one would, according to the CEO, be "putting your job on the line. You better be very careful about that." But in response to the lawsuit, "the airline agreed of its own accord to postpone its vaccine mandate until October 15 for employees with exemptions during litigation." Yesterday, the judge issued a temporary restraining order extending this deadline to October 26 as he considered other issues raised in the case. Still, unvaccinated employees are subject to punitive and humiliating treatment during even this pause:

According to an internal memo obtained by Breitbart News, the airline has temporarily mandated that unvaccinated employees wear N-95 or KN95 respirator masks at all times, effective October 2, as it waits for “the outcome of the litigation” regarding its reasonable accommodation process.

The internal memo continues,

You must wear your mask at all times in all United locations, including outdoors and on aircraft (this includes for personal or business travel). You may remove your mask only when you are actively eating or drinking and you must put your mask back on in between bites and sips. To the extent possible, please only eat or drink outdoors or in rooms alone or when socially distanced from others. Failure to comply with this mask requirement is subject to disciplinary action as outlined in the mask policy in the Working Together Guidelines.

This policy goes well beyond current CDC guidlines or OSHA rules and amounts to effective religious discrimination. In fact, for those who suggest COVID has become a state religion, it clearly suggests that the unvaccinated are ritually unclean and disregards current medical evidence that vaccinated individuals spread COVID as easily as unvaccinated.

I can't help but see Abp Broglio's announcement in that context:

“No one should be forced to receive a COVID-19 vaccine if it would violate the sanctity of his or her conscience,” Timothy Broglio, archbishop for the military services, said in a statement.

Since Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin issued a military-wide vaccine mandate this summer, Broglio said, some service members have requested a religious exemption through the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. While he said the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had determined that being vaccinated was “not sinful,” the church valued its teachings on the “sanctity of conscience.”

“This circumstance raises the question of whether the vaccine’s moral permissibility precludes an individual from forming a sincerely held religious belief that receiving the vaccine would violate his conscience,” he wrote. “It does not.”

The problem for the past two years has been an environment of constantly changing "science" and moving goalposts enforced by the power of the state that leave little room for informed personal choice, or indeed the nudgings of conscience. I can't imagine that Abp Broglio made his announcement without coordinating it with the USCCB and possibly the Vatican as well. This will definitely strengthen the ability of military members, and probably others as well, to substantiate their requests for exemption.

The bishops are showing considerable insight into the real issues at stake in the COVID crisis.

Pushback?

I'm skeptical of stories that pilots and other staff at Southwest are pushing back against the effectively non-existent vaccine mandate by calling in sick. First, the union, and other corresponding unions, make it clear that any such effort is an illegal action and by definition can't be organized. Second, there are other possible explanations for the crunch, and third, people have only so much sick time to use this way.

However, this doesn't mean workers covered by collective bargaining agreements don't have recourse. The same Southwest pilots union that says it isn't behind a sickout has filed suit against the airline.

The Southwest pilots association filed a motion for a restraining order against the airline on October 8.

“Several times since August 30, 2021, Southwest Airlines has taken new unilateral actions which violate the status quo between the parties in further violation of the Railway Labor Act,” the motion states. “Most recently, on October 4, 2021, Southwest Airlines unilaterally rolled out a new and nonnegotiated COVID vaccine mandate for all employees, including SWAPA pilots. The new vaccine mandate unlawfully imposes new conditions of employment and the new policy threatens termination of any pilot not fully vaccinated by December 8, 2021.”

Just as a lay observer, this has struck me as a problem for employers from the start. To set a deadline for employees to be vaccinated or lose their jobs imposes an entirely new condition on employment that didn't exist when they were hired. If they aren't covered by a labor agreement, that's one thing, and presumably an "at will" employment environment pertains. But if there's a collective bargaining contract, any termination outside the terms of the contract is highly questionable, and this is the point the Southwest pilots are raising.

The problem continues to be, as I've noted, that the proposed OSHA rule Biden has announced hasn't been issued and is at best many months, and potentially years, from taking effect. In the meantime, employers are imposing mandates on their own with no legal authority, based only on the threat that a rule will be imposed down the road. The optimism reflected in this story disregards this reality:

"Inside, companies are rejoicing," said Brian Kropp, distinguished vice president of research at Gartner. "It is the best of all possible outcomes for most large employers."

. . . Once the new rule from the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration goes into effect, companies with 100 or more employees will enjoy the benefits of a vaccine mandate without looking like the bad guy, Kropp said.

"They don't have to deal with any of the fallout that's associated with putting in their own mandate," Kropp said. "They can just blame the government for it."

Except the rule hasn't gone into effect, and the companies can't blame the government.

Los Angeles City firefighters have filed a noice of intent to sue on the same basis as the Southwest pilots:

The plaintiffs are members of the United Firefighters of Los Angeles (UFLAC). The union stated its position in an Oct. 4 bulletin, “[T]he city cannot impose any consequences relevant to the October 5 deadline” to be vaccinated for COVID-19, adding that the city’s ordinance “does not provide for any consequence, and any intended discipline must first be bargained with UFLAC.”

It appears that Intel, originally cited as a tech giant happy to comply with a federal mandate, has since hesitated. In its company policy regading COVID, sections 8.1 and 8.3, it repeats that "Intel does not require COVID-19 vaccination for its workforce", although if local governmnet requirements exist, they must be followed. But so far, the promised OSHA rule does not exist.

In addition, FAQ 8.13 prohibits managers from collecting or sharing employee medical data, including vaccination status. "Employees do not need to share whether they have been vaccinated." This in fact is a provision of federal law, the HIPAA Privacy Rule.

The Rule requires appropriate safeguards to protect the privacy of personal health information, and sets limits and conditions on the uses and disclosures that may be made of such information without patient authorization.

Requiring anyone to show an employer, much less a bouncer, barber, or airline clerk one's "proof of vaccination" is likely a violation of federal law. Nobody seems to have thought this through, although it also appears to be an issue in the LA firefighters suit against the city.

This story is rapidly deveoping, and late last night it emerged that six United Airlines employees filed a class action suit against the carrier

claiming that those who were seeking exemptions from the vaccine mandate “were subjected to intrusive inquiries about their medical conditions or religious beliefs, including a requirement that they obtain letters from pastors.” That case is supposed to be heard today and the court restrained the airline from placing on unpaid leave any employee who receives religious or medical exemptions from the company for COVID-19 vaccinations. The court also put a temporary restraining order preventing United from denying any requests for religious or medical exemptions.

So far, this story isn't well reported, and as far as I can determine, the judge's restraining order is on a technical issue of jurisdiction, which is the matter that will be heard today, not the whole case. However, the underlying issue also seems to involve medical confidentiality and likely the HIPAA Privacy Rule.

Unmfortunately, this shows that reporters anywhere on the spectrum aren't well informed on the fields they cover, and their mental cevelopment is roughly at the level of promising middle school students.