Good Tuesday evening. Republicans today blocked a bipartisan deal to provide $10 billion in pandemic funding from advancing in the Senate as they push for a vote to prevent the Biden administration from rescinding a Trump-era Covid-related immigration policy. The delay means that the coronavirus funding may not be able to pass until lawmakers return from a two-week recess starting next week. To pass the deal sooner, they’d need all 100 senators to agree.
Here’s what else is going on:
Biden Signs Fix for Obamacare’s ‘Family Glitch’
President Joe Biden signed an executive order Tuesday that would expand coverage under the Affordable Care Act by allowing the cost of family health insurance to be used as a reference point when determining who qualifies for subsidies.
White House officials said that as a result of the change, about 200,000 people would gain new coverage and nearly 1 million would see their premiums go down.
Under existing rules, the so-called family glitch in the ACA requires the cost of health insurance for a single person to be used when determining the level of federal subsidies available for those seeking coverage. If the cost of insurance available through a job for one person is less than 10% of household income, then it is considered reasonable and no subsidies for plans through the federal exchanges are available — even if the cost of private health insurance for a whole family is far higher, as it typically is. Biden’s executive order changes the rules to allow the cost of family insurance to be used as the deciding factor for those seeking such coverage.
Obama pays a visit: Former President Barack Obama visited the White House for the signing ceremony and paid tribute to Biden’s effort to keep the ACA alive as it hits 12 years old, while reminding his fellow Democrats of the imperfect nature of political compromise. "The reason we're here today is because President Biden, Vice President Harris, everybody who's worked on this thing understood from the start that the ACA wasn't perfect,” Obama said. “To get the bill passed, we had to make compromises. We didn't get everything we wanted. That wasn't reason not to do it.”
At the ceremony, Biden playfully referred to the comment he made back in 2010 when Obama signed the ACA into law: “This is a big [expletive] deal,” he famously whispered to Obama in a remark that was not intended for public consumption but was broadcast for all to hear. Before signing the bill Tuesday, Biden jokingly warned Obama, “Let me remind you, it’s a hot mic.”
More favorable views: The ACA — derisively referred to as Obamacare in its early days, a name the former president embraced, neutralizing much of the sting — has been controversial from the moment it passed, with a majority of voters expressing disapproval of it during much of Obama’s two terms in office. Republicans made a lot of noise about repealing the law, but those efforts failed and talk of repeal has gone quiet, at least for now. And the law itself has risen in public opinion over time.
A recent poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that 55% of respondents had a favorable opinion of the ACA, while 42% had an unfavorable opinion. As The Washington Post’s Emily Gruskin writes, “the law grew more popular during the 2016 presidential election, and Americans’ opinions on the ACA improved to net positive as President Donald Trump and Republicans tried to repeal it, and since then have continued to climb. Last October, a record 58 percent of Americans were favorable toward the ACA, and 41 percent were unfavorable.”
Congress Prepares to Again Top Biden on Defense Budget
The White House last week requested a defense budget for fiscal year 2023 that would be the largest in history, at least in nominal terms. That request, as Politico’s Connor O’Brien reports, poses a dilemma for Biden’s fellow Democrats: whether to “back President Joe Biden’s historically high Pentagon budget or spend even more.”
Many Democrats had hoped — or are still hoping — to cut defense spending once Biden took office. O’Brien explains that circumstances have dashed those hopes. “[T]he new reality, spurred on by high inflation and a raging land war in Europe, means that Democrats for the second year in a row are looking at rebuffing their own president and adding tens of billions of dollars to the Defense Department’s budget that the agency didn’t ask for,” he writes.
Biden asked for $813.3 billion in national defense spending, including $773 billion for the Pentagon. The overall total would represent an increase of $31.2 billion, or 4%, over 2022 levels.
Yet even before Biden released his budget request, Republicans were already calling for more, with key GOP lawmakers pressing for a 5% increase above the rate of inflation. “Biden’s budget once again cuts the size of our military in the heart of a national security crisis,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the third-ranking House Republican, complained misleadingly in a statement released Monday by the House Armed Services Republicans.
Most other Republican complaints about Biden’s defense budget have been more careful to specify that it’s only a cut in inflation-adjusted terms. The Washington Post’s Philip Bump on Tuesday provided a useful visualization of how inflation affects the defense budget picture.
Here’s defense spending since 1940 in nominal terms:
And here’s the same spending adjusted for inflation, using 2021 dollars and estimates of full-year inflation rates for this year and next.
A real concern? “Concern about the spending power of the money allocated to defense began late last month, in part as a function of a report from McKinsey & Company that showed how different rates of inflation would affect that pool of budgeted money,” Bump reports. “If Biden’s budget increases spending less than inflation, then the military can buy less than it could in prior years.”
Some Democrats appear ready to go along with the GOP’s push for a larger increase. “At this point, I think we need a 5 percent real increase in the budget and I think that our ultimate goal should be to get to 5 percent of GDP, or [approximately] $1 trillion,” Rep. Elaine Luria (D-VA), a member of the Armed Services Committee, told Politico. “That is what it is going to take to modernize the nuclear enterprise … and to make a serious investment in our shipbuilding and actually be serious about deterring Chinese aggression against Taiwan.”
Rep. John Yarmuth (D-TN), chair of the House Budget Committee, told Politico that the war in Ukraine means there will be less resistance among Democrats this year to an increase in defense spending — though there may still be some pushback over delivering the Pentagon more money than it sought. “I don’t think anybody wants to go higher,” Yarmuth said.
The bottom line: Given the war in Ukraine, high inflation and the considerable leverage Republicans will have over the budget process in a narrowly divided Congress, lawmakers appear poised to once again provide a larger defense budget boost than Biden requested.
Quote of the Day
“My advice would be to create permanent bases but don’t permanently station [U.S. forces], so you get the effect of permanence by rotational forces cycling through permanent bases. I believe that a lot of our European allies, especially those such as the Baltics or Poland and Romania, and elsewhere — they’re very, very willing to establish permanent bases. They’ll build them, they’ll pay for them.”
— Army Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testifying before Congress Tuesday about the Biden administration's 2023 budget request. Milley said that rotating U.S. troops through bases in Eastern Europe would help deter Russian aggression, but at a lower cost than permanent bases by avoiding the expense of providing long-term housing, schools and other services for members of the U.S. military and their families.
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News
- Build Back Center: Biden Plows a Revamped Lane for the Midterms – Politico
- Democrats’ Dilemma: Back Biden’s Pentagon Budget or Supersize It – Politico
- GOP Blocks Advancing COVID-19 Deal Amid Trump-Era Immigration Fight – The Hill
- Congress Could Finally Pass a Covid Bill. They’ll Soon Have to Do It All Again. – Politico
- White House to Extend Student Loan Pause Through August – Associated Press
- Sanders Pushes for 95 Percent Tax on Corporate ‘Windfall’ Profits – The Hill
- The C.D.C. Will Undergo a Comprehensive Re-Evaluation, the Agency’s Director Said. – New York Times
- A New Wave of Covid-19 Is Coming. Here’s How to Prepare. – New York Times
Views and Analysis
- The U.S. Economy Is Booming. So Why Are Economists Worrying About a Recession? – Ben Casselman, New York Times
- Joe Manchin’s Brand Is Not Helping Democrats. But There’s a Republican Who Might. – Michelle Cottle, New York Times
- As Prices Soar, We Need Action — Not Spin – Katrina vanden Heuvel, Washington Post
- Congress Should Reassess the Fed’s Dual Mandate and Focus Exclusively on Inflation – Reps. French Hill (R-AR) and Byron Donalds (R-FL), The Hill
- Americans Hoping for Political Peace Are in for More Disappointment – David Von Drehle, Washington Post
- How Long Covid Is Accelerating a Revolution in Medical Research – Frances Stead Sellers, Washington Post