India heat wave ‘tests the limits of human survivability,’ and Manchin sabotages climate efforts
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This week in Congress is limited to this week in the Senate, as the House is having a district work period, following the surprise trip by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and a small delegation of House Democrats to Ukraine. “Our delegation traveled to Kyiv to send an unmistakable and resounding message to the entire world: America stands firmly with Ukraine,” Pelosi said in a statement following the meeting.
“[Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy] conveyed the clear need for continued security, economic and humanitarian assistance from the United States to address the devastating human toll taken on the Ukrainian people by Putin’s diabolic invasion—and our delegation proudly delivered the message that additional American support is on the way, as we work to transform President Biden’s strong funding request into a legislative package.”
Pelosi’s statement points to one of the big fights of the day, the week, the month: aid to Ukraine and whether or not she and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer try to pass an additional $10 billion to combat COVID-19 with that bill. With the House out until March 10, that’s being back-burnered a bit while the Senate clears out some other stuff.
Other stuff largely consists of a Republican enforced marathon after the Senate finally voted to officially go to a House-Senate conference on the sweeping competitiveness bill both chambers passed weeks and weeks ago. There will be more than two dozen—28 in fact—procedural votes to instruct the Senate conferees on the bill. It has been decades since this many motions to instruct have had to be dealt with in the Senate, Schumer said, noting that “many members on both sides of the aisle have a stake in seeing this bill finalized.” Meaning, they’re spending hours and hours of floor time on (mostly) Republicans officially telling conferees what should and shouldn’t do in negotiations with the House.
The Senate comes in late Monday, and will do some housekeeping with a Treasury nomination. A slight hiccup on nominations is Colorado Democrat Michael Bennet’s COVID-19 diagnosis. That could delay any close confirmation votes this week in the 50-50 Senate, since there probably won’t be any Republicans willing to play nice and give up a vote on behalf of their colleague.
Speaking of Republicans not playing nice, with help from a few Democrats, the bipartisan gang that is supposedly negotiating the substitute for voting rights and election reform legislation is still putatively meeting on the Electoral Count Act legislation. It’s a good idea, but not enough to make the real reforms necessary to save our democracy and ensure that the next presidential election is free, fair, and clean. Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema made sure that couldn’t happen.
Speaking of whom, Manchin is also hard at work making sure real, substantive climate legislation doesn’t happen, either. That’s happening while the very lives of millions of people in India and Pakistan have been endangered by an unprecedented heat wave. “We don’t have a heat action plan and there are gaps in planning,” Chandni Singh, a climate expert with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said. “You can only adapt so much. This heat wave is testing the limits of human survivability.”
So of course Manchin is spearheading another bipartisan gang ostensibly to negotiate a climate and energy bill everyone can agree to, but in reality to make sure that the Democrats can’t address it in the budget reconciliation bill they’ve still got at their disposal. That was the mechanism they were going to use to pass the big climate/social policy Build Back Better plan before Manchin killed it. He’s been stringing Schumer and President Joe Biden along by hinting he’d be willing to use that reconciliation package to do both climate and new taxes. Now he’s reneging on that and saying the process, which can pass with a simple majority vote and can’t be filibustered, saying it “is for taxes,” period. He says he’s “committed to an energy-climate bill that makes sense for the United States of America.”
What he’s committed to, as usual, is enriching himself. Manchin has been trashing the idea of a tax credit for purchases of electric vehicles for months, most recently calling it “ludicrous.” He’s instead pushing for more credits and investment in hydrogen. Specifically, he is pushing for a new hydrogen hub—funded by the infrastructure law he helped craft and shove through at the expense of climate legislation—in West Virginia. A hub that would be filed by waste coal, the stuff that Manchin has built a family fortune on. Manchin’s big idea for electric cars is having them fueled by burning very dirty coal (supplied by him) to create hydrogen.
Just like he managed to pry the climate change and social spending part of Build Back Better away from infrastructure last year, in order to pass the infrastructure law that could now end up making climate change even worse while lining his own pockets, he’s using the bipartisan gang format to kill of what’s left. Except not really. Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) sums it up. “They’re just not capable of that,” meaning Republicans and good-faith negotiations. “There’s literally nothing happening in the bipartisan effort. One Republican senator showed up at one meeting.”
One of the people who talks to Manchin is sounding kind of fed up. “If you get a bipartisan [climate] bill you can do outside reconciliation, it’s fine,” Montana Democrat Jon Tester said. But what they need to do is “prioritize on need. And I can tell you right now, in the area of housing and childcare, there’s incredible demand out there that’s not going to be solved by the private sector if we do nothing.” The stuff Manchin does not want to do.
Even if anything happens with Republicans, just as with infrastructure, it won’t do enough on climate change. It’s not like senators don’t know that. “What I worry about is doing something that is not significant, and people will say ‘We’ve dealt with climate,’” said Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). “My perception is that there are very few Republicans who are prepared to tackle that crisis in a way that’s appropriate.” But they’re all held hostage by Manchin (and Sinema).
So, anyway, that’s what is happening this week on Capitol Hill. Same as it ever was.
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