Senate still stymied on COVID-19, while Manchin dooms anything happening on climate, energy

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The Senate stalemate on, well, everything legislative received a bit of a shake up Monday when an anti-immigrant right-wing judge once again preempted the co-equal executive branch, temporarily blocking President Joe Biden from ending the Trump-imposed pandemic restriction on migrants, including asylum-seekers, from entering the country. That might help break a stalemate in the Senate on providing more COVID-19 funding. And Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) just ended the prospects for Biden and fellow Democrats to make headway on climate issues, or much else, before the midterm elections.

That’s the situation as the Senate resumes real, post-recess work Tuesday as the House trickles back in to do some late afternoon housekeeping. Before Easter recess, Republicans in the Senate derailed a $10 billion funding package for COVID-19 prevention and treatment measures, funding the Biden administration is increasingly anxious to get. The administration originally asked for $22.5 billion, but congressional Republicans nixed that one right off the bat and got it whittled down by more than half, then refused to pass even that unless they got a simple majority vote on an amendment to block Biden from lifting that immigration restriction.

Majority Leader Chuck Schumer does not want that vote because there are five Democrats who would probably vote with Republicans, and he doesn’t want that embarrassment. Now that the courts have stepped in, Republicans might drop it. Or not.

Because they really, really want to embarrass Biden and divide Democrats. The White House is continuing the drumbeat for the COVID-19 funding, arguing that the delay in funding is causing the U.S. to lose out on securing both booster doses and the antiviral medications. Other places—including Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Hong Kong—are ahead of the U.S. in line to get the supplies.

“We know companies are working on additional, promising life-saving treatments that could protect the American people, and without additional funding from Congress, we risk losing out on accessing these treatments, as well as tests and vaccines, while other countries get in front of us in line,” said White House spokesman Kevin Munoz. “Congress must act urgently upon return from recess to provide the funding needed to secure new treatments for the American people and to avoid this dangerous outcome.”

One of the issues is the long lead time it takes for these antiviral and antibody treatments to be produced by manufacturers. The U.S. stockpile is diminishing—the administration has already had to cut back free treatment for the uninsured and start rationing monoclonal antibody treatments. By the time the funding is actually passed, we could be behind the curve in securing the treatments. (Yay, us.) Schumer has talked about trying to tie this funding to the Ukraine aid package that’s coming up so that one can’t pass without the other, but how quickly that is going to happen is unclear.

Schumer promised “swift bipartisan cooperation” in getting the next package of Ukraine aid out, but the administration has not yet made the formal request. Sen. Richard Shelby, the senior Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said that the figure under discussion is around $5 billion in new funding on top of the $13.6 approved in March.

The administration is also considering attaching global food aid to its Ukraine ask because of the disruption in exports of wheat, corn, sunflower oil, and other products from both Ukraine—a major producer, particularly of wheat—and Russia. Aid organizations are warning of a “massive, immediate food crisis” because of ongoing effects of the pandemic and of the war.

While that’s being worked out in the immediate term (immediate being defined as before Congress leaves again for the Memorial Day recess at the end of May), slightly more long-term discussions are supposedly happening with Manchin on resurrecting something of Biden’s Build Back Better plan. Now Manchin has essentially scuttled any chance of that happening by declaring he’s going to do his own climate and energy package and it’s going to be bipartisan.

We’ve been here before. Remember when Manchin was the lone Democratic holdout on voting rights, and he promised that he could get it done with “10 good people” from the Republican side? And no Republicans helped? Here we go again.

“If I can find something bipartisan, we don’t need reconciliation,” Manchin said in an interview with Bloomberg on Monday. Democrats have been pursuing a budget reconciliation bill to pass Biden’s priorities because that process is filibuster-proof. It can pass with a simple majority vote provided by all Democratic senators and Vice President Kamala Harris to break the tie.

Of course, what Manchin is looking at is not combatting climate change. It’s increasing oil production, including making companies use the public lands they’ve secured oil and gas leases for and penalizing them when they don’t. “You’re going to have to have a leasing program that works, O.K., and making sure that leases are fair, and people are not sitting on leases,” Manchin said. “We need to look at all that,” he said. “We haven’t done that.”

His theory is increasing production now will set up a system of incentives for protecting the climate later. For now, a person with knowledge of the talks Manchin has been having told Bloomberg that they’re also discussing “a potential package could include revisions to federal land policy, aid for domestic pipelines, efforts to bolster production of both liquefied natural gas at home and abroad and critical minerals.” That might come with new and expanded tax credits for renewables.

Not only would Manchin have to find 10 Republicans for this to work, it would also have to pass muster with enough House Democrats to pass. Those two things being simultaneously achieved seems pretty darned impossible.

The areas Manchin has talked about resurrecting from that larger package he killed last December were tax reform, lowering prescription drug costs, some health insurance affordability measures, and climate change and energy. Now he wants to take that big chunk out of the mix. Arizona Democrat Kyrsten Sinema has pretty much nixed anything happening to reform taxes and has been problematic on prescription drugs, too. So what Manchin might have just done by rejecting the reconciliation process on climate is to finally kill off the whole effort.