The Shutdown Threat Just Got Real

By Yuval Rosenberg

The Shutdown Threat Just Got Real

Last week’s tentative deal to prevent a shutdown of the federal
government after the fiscal year ends at midnight on September 30
fell apart late Friday, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
reportedly objecting to a White House demand for more money for a
farmer bailout as part of the agreement. Republicans blamed Pelosi
for backing out of the agreement, while Democrats claimed they had
never really made a deal in the first place.

In an attempt to move beyond the dispute, House Democrats
unveiled a continuing resolution on Monday that would keep the
government open through mid-December. The bill omits the issues
that hung up negotiators last week — including $30 billion for a
relief fund for farmers that Republicans wanted and roughly $2
billion for food aid for children that Democrats had sought — while
extending current funding for most government agencies. The bill
would also extend highway funding and the National Flood Insurance
Program, and prevent a $50 per month increase in the cost of
Medicare Part B.

“The Continuing Resolution introduced today will avert a
catastrophic shutdown in the middle of the ongoing pandemic,
wildfires and hurricanes, and keep government open until Dec. 11,
when we plan to have bipartisan legislation to fund the government
for this fiscal year,” Pelosi said in a statement Monday.

House leaders plan to vote on the bill Tuesday.

Republicans are leery: Senate Majority Leader Mitch
McConnell (R-KY) was quick to criticize the bill, though without
stating clearly that he would oppose it. “House Democrats’ rough
draft of a government funding bill shamefully leaves out key relief
and support that American farmers need. This is no time to add
insult to injury and defund help for farmers and rural America,”
McConnell said in a tweet.

The White House was a bit less critical, suggesting that the
Trump administration could conceivably go along with the Democratic
plan rather than risk a shutdown. “We do prefer additional farm aid
in the CR [continuing resolution],” top White House economic
adviser Larry Kudlow said. “Most of all we want a clean CR to keep
the government open.”

The Senate could block a House-passed bill or vote on an amended
version and pass it back to the House. It could also ultimately
approve the House version and move on to other matters.

Progressives call for new tactics: The news of the death
of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg late Friday added a
new potential wrinkle to the negotiations, with some progressives
calling for Pelosi to use the continuing resolution — and the
threat of a shutdown — to gain leverage in their effort to stop or
delay the nomination of a new member of the court.

David Sirota, a former speechwriter for Vermont Senator Bernie
Sanders (I-VT), said
Monday that Democrats should consider every possible option in
their political battle over the high court, including blocking the
“must-pass budget.”

Pelosi says she’s not interested: Asked by ABC News host
George Stephanopoulos on Sunday if she had considered using the
government funding bill as leverage in an attempt to slow the
nomination of a new Supreme Court justice, Pelosi
said “none of us has any interest in shutting down
government. That — that has such a harmful and painful impact on so
many people in our country. So I would hope that we can just
proceed with that. There is some enthusiasm among some, exuberance
on the left to say let's use that, but we're not going to be
shutting down government.”

Pelosi did say that she is considering other ways to fight the
Supreme Court battle. “Well, we have our options,” she said in
response to a question about the possibility of using an
impeachment proceeding to slow the Senate’s effort to confirm a new
judge. “We have arrows in our quiver that I’m not about to discuss
right now, but the fact is we have a big challenge in our
country.

The shutdown threat can’t be dismissed
entirely: Although all parties involved have said
they want to avoid a shutdown of the government, the lack of
agreement so close to the deadline — just over a week away — does
not bode well. “With McConnell's announcement that Senate R's
oppose the CR House Dems filed today, we're suddenly in ‘government
shutdown looms’ territory 9 days ahead of deadline,” The Washington
Post’s Erica Werner said
Monday.

Debt Will Nearly Double by 2050: CBO

The national debt will increase to about twice the size of the
economy over the next 30 years, the Congressional Budget Office
said Monday in its latest long-term budget
outlook.

Currently equal to about 98%, the debt-to-GDP ratio is projected
to increase to 195% by 2050, reaching levels never seen in the
nation’s history.

The CBO said that the coronavirus recession has changed the
outlook significantly: “CBO now projects that debt as a percentage
of GDP will be 45 percentage points higher in 2049 than the agency
projected last year. Larger projected deficits in 2020 and 2021
contribute significantly to that difference. The increase in those
deficits results primarily from the effects of the pandemic and
actions taken to respond to it.”

The CBO also warned about the risks involved with rising debt.
“High and rising federal debt makes the economy more vulnerable to
rising interest rates and, depending on how that debt is financed,
rising inflation,” CBO said. “The growing debt burden also raises
borrowing costs, slowing the growth of the economy and national
income, and it increases the risk of a fiscal crisis or a gradual
decline in the value of Treasury securities.”

Still, CBO Director Phillip Swagel said in a statement
that a crisis is not immediately at hand. “There is no set tipping
point at which a fiscal crisis becomes likely or imminent, nor is
there an identifiable point at which interest costs as a percentage
of GDP become unsustainable,” Swagel said. “But as the debt grows,
the risks become greater.”

CDC Removes New Guidance on How Coronavirus Spreads

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is making some
confusing — and potentially controversial — changes to its guidance
on how the coronavirus spreads.

What’s happening: The agency on Friday quietly updated
its website to say that the novel coronavirus can spread "through
respiratory droplets or small particles, such as those in aerosols,
produced when an infected person coughs, sneezes, sings, talks or
breathes." Where the agency had previously warned that the virus
spreads mainly via larger droplets when people are in close
contact, the revised page
reportedly said that aerosols — smaller particles
that can linger in the air for longer — were “thought to be the
main way the virus spreads."

On Monday morning, the CDC removed that updated language, saying
a draft version of proposed changes had been posted in error. "It
was a failure of process at CDC,” Jay Butler, the agency’s deputy
director for infectious disease,
told The Washington Post. The agency reportedly is
still working on updated guidance to be posted as soon as Monday.
It wants to convey that aerosol transmission is possible, but not
the primary method by which the virus spreads, a source told

The Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters, part 1: Friday’s revisions represented a
significant shift. Some experts suggested the new language “should
drive a major rethink of public policy — particularly at a time
when students in many areas are returning to indoor classrooms,”
the Post reports. The Journal’s Caitlin McCabe adds: “Acknowledging
aerosol transmission of the coronavirus would carry significant
implications for how businesses and schools proceed with
re-openings. To reduce the risk of aerosol transmission, property
owners and building managers would need to implement precautions
such as better ventilation and proper social distancing, according
to scientists and researchers studying Covid-19.”

Why it matters, part 2: As the Trump administration seeks
to push schools and businesses to reopen, such reversals instantly
raise concerns, warranted or not, about the
politicization
of pandemic response.

“That type of whiplash, especially without an explanation
directly from the CDC, creates confusion and unfortunately it leads
to lack of trust in the CDC overall,” Dr. Leanna Wen, a visiting
professor of health policy and management at the George Washington
University and former Baltimore health commissioner, told CNN. “The
fact that they retracted this, even though this is common
scientific knowledge at this point, one has to wonder what’s behind
it. Was there political pressure, political interference that’s
driving this rather than science?”

This isn’t the first time health officials have walked back
their guidance regarding the coronavirus. The CDC just last week

reversed controversial guidance that said that
people who were exposed to someone with the virus don’t need to get
tested if they don’t have symptoms of infection. And President
Trump last week disputed his CDC chief’s public comments on the
importance of face masks and the timing of a vaccine.

The CDC about-face also comes after Health and Human Services
Secretary Alex Azar reportedly issued a memo barring health
agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, from
signing any new rules "regarding the nation’s foods,
medicines, medical devices and other products” — a move that
outside experts
warned could add to the public perception of
political interference in decisions that should be based in science
and medicine.

The bottom line: Even if the CDC’s
changed guidance was simply a failure of process and
not political, it’s another stumble that
highlights the dangerous erosion of trust in public health
officials under the Trump administration — and it threatens to
further erode that trust. Remember, the CDC has long been viewed as
one of the world’s leading public health organizations. But its
mistakes have been piling up. “This cannot happen again,” the CDC’s
Butler told the Post.

How RBG’s Death Puts the ACA at Greater
Risk

The death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg puts the Affordable
Care Act at greater risk as the Supreme Court prepares to hear a
challenge to the law just after November’s elections.

“Ginsburg’s death is the nightmare scenario for the Affordable
Care Act,” Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor
who supports the Obama health law, told
The Washington Post. “If the suit had a trivial
chance of success yesterday, it has a new lease on life.”


Axios’s Sam Baker breaks down how the outlook for
the law has changed:

“Conventional wisdom had held that Chief Justice John
Roberts would likely join with the court’s liberals to save the ACA
once again. But if President Trump is able to fill Ginsburg’s
former seat, Roberts’ vote alone wouldn’t be enough to do the
trick, and the law — or big sections of it — is more likely to be
struck down. … In the absence of a new justice, the court could
easily deadlock 4-4. That would leave in place the 5th Circuit
Court of Appeals’ ruling, which said the individual mandate is
unconstitutional but didn’t decide how much of the rest of the law
to strike down along with it.”

The legal fights over the law likely wouldn’t end there,
meaning that if Trump is able to seat another conservative justice
on the court, that justice may still have a chance to rule on the
Affordable Care Act down the line.

Justice Dept. Labels Three Cities as 'Anarchy' Jurisdictions
and Targets for Funding Cuts

The Justice Department said Monday that New York City, Seattle
and Portland, Oregon, would be designated as jurisdictions “that
have permitted violence and destruction of property,” opening up
the possibility that federal funding for those cities would be cut
under a memorandum signed by President Trump early this month. The
memo said the government should review the use of federal funds by
jurisdictions “that permit anarchy, violence, and destruction.” It
specifically mentioned Portland, Seattle, and New York as well as
Washington, DC.

“We cannot allow federal tax dollars to be wasted when the
safety of the citizenry hangs in the balance,” Attonery General
William Barr said in a statement. “It is my hope that the cities
identified by the Department of Justice today will reverse course
and become serious about performing the basic function of
government and start protecting their own citizens.”

The Justice Department announcement criticized the Democratic
leaders of those three cities for rejecting federal law enforcement
involvement in response to social justice protests and said the
cities “have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract
criminal activities.” Local leaders have said that President Trump
was inflaming tensions by pressing for a stronger law enforcement
crackdown on protests and sending armed federal agents to
Portland.

The Justice Department said other cities may be added to the
list based on a number of criteria, including whether they
disempower or defund police departments or “any other related
factors the Attorney General deems appropriate.”

What’s next: The White House budget
office is supposed to issue guidance about cutting funding to the
three cities, even though it’s not clear that Trump has the power
to cut federal funding. “The Trump administration was unsuccessful
in a similar funding-cut move against New York and other cities
over their immigration policies. A federal appeals court ruled that
the move violated the separation of powers spelled out in the
Constitution,” The Washington Post
reports. Legal challenges could follow here, too.
Whatever the ultimate outcome, the administration has for now
reinforced Trump’s “law and order” campaign messaging.

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