 | | Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, arriving at the Capitol on Tuesday.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times |
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Well, it's infrastructure week … again … and that must mean we're up here at the Capitol waiting for a deal. |
It's been less than a month since President Biden and a bipartisan group of senators announced that they had agreed on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package, including about $600 billion in new spending. The fragility of the agreement was clear almost instantly, and so it is still. Senators who backed the deal in principle have been haggling over the details, and over the weekend, negotiators said they had abandoned a key funding mechanism that they had previously agreed to: increased tax enforcement by the Internal Revenue Service. |
Now, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, is expected to call a procedural vote on Wednesday, known as a cloture vote, to open debate on a shell of the bill — and it is not clear that he has the 60 votes he needs. That means the legislation could be in jeopardy before it's even written. |
All of this would be bog-standard congressional sausage-making if the issue at hand were just the contents of an infrastructure package. Instead, it has basically become a referendum on the concept of bipartisanship. |
The success of most of Biden's agenda depends on either getting 10 Republicans on board or getting rid of the filibuster, a measure that centrist Democrats like Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona have refused to do because they insist they can get 10 Republicans on board. And if they can't manage that even on a bill that Republicans helped negotiate, then — well, we don't know what then. |
For the latest on the legislative wrangling and its implications, I went to Emily Cochrane, one of The Times's congressional reporters, who has been covering the infrastructure negotiations from the start. |
Hi Emily. Why is Schumer calling a cloture vote before the bill's text is finalized? Is that unusual? |
It's something that has been done before, in part because the legislative process just takes a lot of time in the Senate. Should this pass, we have a handful of votes and a few days before there's an actual vote on substance. |
This is also an institution that works at its best with a hard deadline (that perhaps can be moved once or twice without too much pain). So it's also a hardball move on Schumer's part — he doesn't want this process to drag on much longer, and he's forcing some kind of a deadline on the negotiators. |
What is the Republican reaction right now — are Republican senators mostly united against the cloture vote, or is the caucus split? |
As of now, they seem mostly united against the cloture vote. The Republican negotiators have pushed for Schumer to delay it till Monday, arguing that they can wrap up legislative text by then. |
Does the opposition reflect objections to the substance of the bipartisan framework, or is it mainly procedural? |
I think it's important to note that 10 Republicans have not committed to supporting the bipartisan deal once it emerges, even if a handful of them are making some supportive noises about substance. |
But the five main Republican negotiators have also joined with their colleagues in raising concerns about what they say is a premature procedural step. |
What is the status of the negotiations over the bill's text? Are there indications that the negotiators have made progress in recent days or weeks? |
They are ongoing as you read this. They've been in a marathon series of meetings — with some lasting more than two hours — and have hammered out some details. I.R.S. enforcement money has been kicked out, for example, and they seem to be coalescing around some alternatives. |
But paying for infrastructure is the hardest hurdle to clear, especially when both sides have drawn significant red lines. |
If the vote fails on Wednesday, is the bipartisan deal dead, or could it be revived? |
It could be revived and brought up again. It's going to be an extremely long, hot infrastructure summer. |
 | | Madeleine Fugate, a rising ninth grader in Los Angeles, has stitched together a Covid Memorial Quilt — inspired by the AIDS Memorial Quilt of the 1980s — of fabric squares donated by people who lost loved ones to the coronavirus.Gabriella Angotti-Jones for The New York Times |
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Covid survivors want to become a political force. |
WASHINGTON — In Facebook groups, text chains and after-work Zoom calls, survivors of Covid-19 and relatives of those who died from it are organizing into a vast grass-roots lobbying force that is bumping up against the divisive politics that helped turn the pandemic into a national tragedy. |
With names like Covid Survivors for Change, groups born of grief and a need for emotional support are turning to advocacy: writing newspaper essays, and training members to lobby for things like mental health and disability benefits, paid sick leave, research on Covid "long haulers," a commission to investigate the pandemic and a national holiday to honor its victims. |
As President Biden tries to shepherd the country into a post-pandemic future, these groups are saying, "Not so fast." Scores of survivors and family members are planning to descend on Washington next week for "Covid Victims' Families and Survivors Lobby Days," a three-day event with speakers, art installations and meetings on Capitol Hill — and, they hope, at the White House. |
Patient advocacy is not new in Washington, where groups like the American Cancer Society have perfected the art of lobbying for research funding and improvements to care. But not since the early days of the H.I.V./AIDS epidemic has an illness been so colored by politics, and the new Covid activists are navigating challenging terrain. |
A House resolution expressing support for designating March 1 as a day to memorialize the pandemic's victims has 50 co-sponsors — all of them Democrats. The call for an investigative commission has been met with silence from Biden. The partisan rancor that killed a plan to investigate the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol has made the Covid activists' search for answers all the more challenging. |
"This isn't a political finger-pointing exercise," said Diana Berrent of Long Island, who founded the group Survivor Corps. "We are not looking for a trial of who was right and who was wrong. We need an autopsy of what happened." |
Read the full article here, and previous coverage of Covid survivors' political engagement here. |
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