Daily Political Briefing
Aug. 24, 2021Updated Aug. 24, 2021, 1:00 p.m. ET
Aug. 24, 2021, 1:00 p.m. ETHouse Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her top deputies were still working on Tuesday morning to scrounge together the support needed to adopt the budget measure.Credit...Sarabeth Maney/The New York Times

Democratic leaders hope to resolve a bitter internal dispute and muscle their $3.5 trillion budget blueprint through the House on Tuesday, after they failed on Monday to pacify a group of moderates who have vowed to block the measure until a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure measure is passed.
Democrats privately huddled on Capitol Hill Tuesday morning to continue hashing out their differences over the plan, which if approved would pave the way for quick action by Congress to enact the bulk of President Biden’s domestic agenda, including a vast expansion of safety net and climate programs. But the fate of the blueprint was in doubt as a faction of conservative-leaning Democrats jockeyed with the party’s progressive majority for leverage.
“I’m sorry that we couldn’t land the plane last night, and that you all had to wait,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi said according to a Democratic aide who was familiar with the comments. She added, “I think we’re close to landing the plane.”
The House was scheduled to return at noon, with up to an hour of debate on the measure set to begin shortly after. Ms. Pelosi and her top deputies were still working on Tuesday morning to scrounge together the support needed to adopt the measure, after a frenzied day of negotiations with the conservative-leaning holdouts failed to produce an agreement.
Ten centrist Democrats have publicly refused to move forward with the budget before the infrastructure package passes the House, arguing that the broadly supported bipartisan compromise that passed the Senate this month — which omitted many of the party’s top priorities — should be enacted immediately.
But progressive Democrats, backed by Ms. Pelosi, have said they do not want to move forward with the infrastructure measure until the Senate approves far-reaching legislation to implement the broader budget plan, including universal preschool, paid leave, child and elder care programs and a substantial set of tax increases on wealthy people and corporations. Party leaders plan to push through that bill in the coming weeks using a fast-track process known as reconciliation, which would shield it from a filibuster and allow it to be approved on a simple majority vote, over unanimous Republican opposition.
In an effort to win over both factions, Ms. Pelosi and her leadership team on Monday proposed tethering the two items together, coupling approval of the budget blueprint with a measure to allow the House to take up the infrastructure bill in the future, as well as move forward on a voting rights measure that has broad support among Democrats.
Democrats were discussing the possibility of setting a House vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Sep. 27, as a way to assuage moderates eager to vote on the $1 trillion measure.
But that may not be enough to satisfy the moderates, including Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Henry Cuellar of Texas. Without their group’s backing, Democrats lack the support to win approval of the budget plan in the narrowly divided House, where they can afford to lose as few as three Democrats if Republicans unanimously oppose it, as expected.
Rank-and-file lawmakers have grown increasingly frustrated with the delay in passage of the budget blueprint. The standoff has exacerbated deep mistrust among liberal Democrats who fear the moderates may ultimately block the multi-trillion-dollar reconciliation package carrying the majority of their priorities. In a private meeting on Monday, Democrats fumed and warned that blocking final passage could upend Mr. Biden’s agenda.
“We cannot squander this majority and this Democratic White House by not passing what we need to do,” Ms. Pelosi told her colleagues, according to two people familiar with the remarks.

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Vice President Kamala Harris arrived in Vietnam on Tuesday.Credit...Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Vice President Kamala Harris was delayed Tuesday for more than three hours as she was departing from Singapore for Vietnam because of a report of a recent possible “anomalous health incident” in Hanoi, where she will discuss public health strategies and seek to bolster partnerships in the South China Sea, a crucial piece of President Biden’s strategy to counter the rising economic influence of China.
“Anomalous health incident” is how the Biden administration typically refers to cases of the so-called “Havana Syndrome” attacks, the unexplained headaches, dizziness and memory loss reported by scores of State Department officials, C.I.A. officers and their families.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Harris, Symone Sanders, assured reporters traveling with the vice president on her second foreign trip since taking office that her health was not affected.
“You saw her get onto the plane. She is well, all is fine and looking forward to meetings in Hanoi tomorrow,” Ms. Sanders said when pressed on the cause of the delay. She later added: “This has nothing to do with the vice president’s health.”
A State Department spokesman said in a statement that “after careful assessment, the decision was made to continue with the vice president’s trip.” The delegation arrived in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Tuesday night.
Before departing for the airport, Ms. Harris participated in a closed-door meet-and-greet with U.S. embassy staff. Members of the press corps traveling with her were already loaded into a motorcade awaiting her departure when they were abruptly sent back to their hotel rooms, before being summoned back to continue the trip.
Upon arriving in Hanoi aboard Air Force Two, Ms. Harris did not respond to a shouted question from a reporter about why she decided to continue on her trip in the wake of the report.

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President Biden in the White House on Sunday. He is holding talks with other Group of 7 leaders on Tuesday.Credit...Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Leaders of the Group of 7 nations are expected to press President Biden on Tuesday to keep U.S. troops in Kabul beyond Aug. 31 to complete a frantic evacuation of Americans, Afghan allies and others. But British officials were lowering expectations that Mr. Biden would go along with altering that deadline.
The president’s determination to end the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, coupled with a warning from the Taliban that they would not tolerate an extension, suggested that the leaders would face an uphill climb to change the timetable.
“I wish we had more time,” Britain’s defense secretary, Ben Wallace, told the BBC. “I think it is at the moment unlikely.” British troops, he added, had “literally hours to make sure everybody we can get through the gate.”
Prime Minister Boris Johnson will chair an emergency virtual meeting of G-7 leaders starting at 2:30 p.m. London time. It comes at a moment of acute strain in the trans-Atlantic alliance, with Britain and other NATO allies bruised by what they regard as the White House’s lack of consultation on the timing or tactics of the withdrawal.
Mr. Johnson spoke with Mr. Biden on Monday evening — the second time in a week — but neither the White House nor Downing Street alluded to an extension of the deadline in their accounts of the call.
“The leaders agreed to continue working together to ensure those who are eligible to leave are able to, including after the initial phase of the evacuation has ended,” said the British statement, which also cited a need for “diplomatic engagement to secure the progress made in Afghanistan and prevent a humanitarian crisis.”
While the evacuation will be the leaders’ most immediate priority, the aftermath of the withdrawal will also figure in the discussions, according to the British ambassador to Washington, Karen Pierce.
“What is the humanitarian response?” Ms. Pierce said. “What is the future engagement with Afghanistan for the West? Can we coordinate more resettlement of those Afghans who do manage to leave?” Britain, she noted, has committed to taking in 20,000 refugees from Afghanistan over the long term.
Other European officials said the meeting would be crucial to clear the air and prevent the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan from undermining other efforts in security and counterterrorism.
“The propaganda use being made of this online isn’t just in Taiwan, where China is claiming the West is untrustworthy,” said Tom Tugendhat, the chairman of the British Parliament’s foreign affairs committee. “It’s across Africa and elsewhere where we have commitments and contested space.”

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Vice President Kamala Harris delivering a speech at Gardens by the Bay in Singapore on Tuesday.Credit...Pool photo by Evelyn Hockstein

Vice President Kamala Harris sought to fortify the United States’ image as a credible ally on Tuesday by offering a rebuke of China during an address in Southeast Asia, an effort that comes as the White House faces growing questions about its reliability amid continuing violence in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan.
“We know that Beijing continues to coerce, to intimidate and to make claims to the vast majority of the South China Sea,” Ms. Harris said in Singapore, adding that what she described as China’s “unlawful claims” continued “to undermine the rules-based order and threaten the sovereignty of nations.”
The White House is aiming to refocus its foreign policy strategy on competing with China’s rising economic influence rather than on continuing to fight “forever wars,” such as the two-decade long conflict in Afghanistan. The chaotic effort to evacuate Americans and Afghan allies from Kabul has overshadowed the vice president’s trip, which began on Sunday in Singapore and will also take her to Vietnam.
Ms. Harris’s overseas trip, her second as vice president, gained heightened urgency in the days before she boarded Air Force Two. The journey had been seen as a chance to bolster economic and security ties with key partners in Singapore and Vietnam, a crucial piece of President Biden’s strategy in the South China Sea. But in the wake of the haphazard withdrawal from Afghanistan, her trip became the administration’s first test of the White House efforts to reassure the world that it can still be a trusted international partner.
That pressure is likely to increase when Ms. Harris arrives in Vietnam. Her senior aides have faced questions about the historical parallel between the U.S. evacuation of American citizens in 1975 from Saigon and the situation in Kabul — replete with scenes of desperate Afghans running behind U.S. military planes, and of American citizens, Afghan allies and their relatives crowded into the Kabul airport and stuck in limbo.

Doug Logan, left, the chief executive of the Florida-based company Cyber Ninjas, in Phoenix in April.Credit...Ross D. Franklin/Associated Press

A draft report on a much-ridiculed review of the 2020 election results in Arizona’s largest county has been delayed by a Covid-19 outbreak on the team preparing the analysis, the Republican president of the Arizona State Senate said on Monday.
The president, Senator Karen Fann, said in a statement that three people on the five-member team were “quite sick,” including Doug Logan, the chief executive of the Florida-based company, Cyber Ninjas, that is in charge of the review.
A portion of the draft was still set to be delivered to Ms. Fann on Monday, but the remainder will await the recovery of the three team members. Lawyers for the State Senate will begin reviewing the partial draft on Wednesday, Ms. Fann said, and more meetings will be required before the findings of the review are made public.
The statement offered no hint of the contents of the partial draft. Mr. Logan and others involved in the review have previously claimed to have found irregularities in the official results of the November balloting, only to see those allegations debunked by election officials.
Mr. Logan’s company began reviewing 2.1 million ballots and election equipment from Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, in April on orders of the Republican majority in the State Senate. Ms. Fann has said that the review was conducted to address claims of voter fraud by supporters of former President Donald J. Trump, though no evidence of widespread fraud exists. She has also said that President Biden’s narrow victories in both the county and the state would remain official regardless of the findings.
Ms. Fann and other supporters of the review have argued that it was thorough and nonpartisan. But a range of election experts and the Republican-led leadership of Maricopa County have denounced the exercise from the beginning, citing haphazard rules for handling and counting ballots as well as lax security.
Supporters’ claims of an impartial review have been broadly dismissed. Mr. Logan spread conspiracy theories of a rigged election in Arizona on Twitter last year; his firm recruited volunteer workers for the review through Republican organizations; and virtually the entire cost of the exercise has been shouldered by conservative groups supporting Mr. Trump.
On Monday, Ms. Fann said the draft report had been further delayed because images of mail-ballot envelopes that had been demanded from Maricopa County election officials were delivered only on Thursday. A final report will be released, she said, only after a final meeting “to continue checking for accuracy, clarity and proof of documentation of findings.”

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A North Carolina judge ordered the State Board of Elections to begin registering 56,000 people — disproportionately black — who had been barred from voting because they were on parole or under supervised release.Credit...Juan Diego Reyes for The New York Times

North Carolina must immediately allow felons who are on parole, probation or supervised release to register to vote, a three-judge panel in a state court said Monday.
The 2-1 ruling, in a state Superior Court in Raleigh, restores voting rights to a disproportionately Black group of roughly 56,000 people who are out of prison but are under some sort of supervision. Black North Carolinians make up 21 percent of the state’s population, but 42 percent of those on parole or supervised release.
The judges said they would issue a formal ruling explaining their decision later. Both the Republican-controlled State General Assembly and the State Board of Elections, which had defended the law in court, said they would await the court’s written opinion before deciding whether to appeal the decision.
The North Carolina State Conference of the N.A.A.C.P., the Protect Democracy Project and Forward Justice, a group pressing for equal treatment of minorities in Southern justice systems, had sued to overturn the law with three local groups that work with former felons.
The ruling “delivers on a promise of justice by the North Carolina N.A.A.C.P. a half century ago, that all people living in communities across the state deserve to have their voices heard in elections,” said Stanton Jones of the law firm Arnold Porter, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs. “And now, 50 years later, the voices of those 56,000 people will finally be heard.”
But State Senator Warren Daniel, the Republican chairman of the Senate’s elections committee, said the judges were ignoring a clause in the State Constitution that bars convicted felons from voting unless their rights are restored according to state law. “These judges may think they’re doing the right thing by rewriting laws as they see fit (without bothering to even explain their ruling),” he said in a statement. “But each one of these power grabs chips away at the notion that the people, through their legislature, make laws.”
The decision followed a trial that bared the history of the state’s disenfranchisement of Black people in sometimes shocking detail.
The law struck down on Monday, which was enacted in 1877, extended disenfranchisement to people convicted of felonies in response to the 15th Amendment, which enshrined Black voting rights in the Constitution. But in the decade before that, local judges had reacted to the Civil War’s freeing of Black people by convicting them en masse and delivering public whippings, bringing them under a law denying the vote to anyone convicted of a crime for which whipping was a penalty.
A handful of Black legislators in the General Assembly tried to rescind the 1877 law in the early 1970s, but secured only procedural changes, such as a limit on the discretion of judges to prolong probation or court supervision.
In court arguments, neither side disputed the racist origins of the law. But lawyers for the General Assembly and the elections board argued that changes in the early 1970s removed that racist taint, even if the consequences — depriving former felons of voting rights — had not changed.
Mr. Daniel also argued on Monday that the procedural changes approved in the 1970s laid down the legal route for former felons — who had completed their prison sentence and were no longer under any form of supervision — to regain voting rights, and that the court had no power to change it.
The plaintiffs said the law violated parts of the State Constitution guaranteeing the state’s citizens substantially equal voting power and declaring that “all elections shall be free.” Both clauses should apply to all felons who had completed their sentences regardless of their race, they argued. But the law’s obvious discriminatory impact on Black people, they said, was reason enough for it to be struck down.
The ruling on Monday was not entirely unexpected. The same three-judge panel had temporarily blocked enforcement of part of the law before the November general election, stating that most people who had completed their prison sentences could not be barred from voting if their only reason for their continued supervision was that they owed fines or court fees. The judges said that was an unconstitutional poll tax.

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People getting the Pfizer vaccine at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Brownsville, Texas, in June.Credit...Verónica G. Cárdenas for The New York Times

The full federal approval on Monday of a coronavirus vaccine for people 16 and older appeared to clear the way for local officials, private businesses and others who want to impose vaccine requirements to do so in some states that have banned them.
By giving its formal blessing to the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, the Food and Drug Administration lifted it out of the emergency-use category and effectively put it on par with other vaccines required by public health authorities, universities, employers and others.
At least three states that banned vaccine requirements by law or executive order — Montana, Texas and Utah — did so specifically because the three vaccines in use in the United States were being administered under emergency-use authorizations, not full approval.
Now one of the vaccines has that approval, undercutting that justification and potentially setting the stage for more of the kind of legal battles that have erupted around the country over the bans, often pitting cities, counties or school districts that want stricter vaccine requirements against governors who say they want to protect individual freedom.
The issue has grown more urgent as the pace of vaccination has slowed and as new cases, hospitalizations and deaths have risen sharply, driven largely by the highly contagious Delta variant. Many states that have banned vaccine requirements also have relatively low vaccination rates and are struggling with the latest surge in infections.
In Utah — where the Republican-led legislature passed a bill in March barring government entities from requiring a Covid-19 vaccine that was authorized for emergency use only — a spokeswoman for the state health department said the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine should no longer be subject to the restrictions because it now had full approval. State legislative leaders did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order that took effect in July, stating that “no governmental entity can compel any individual to receive a Covid-19 vaccine administered under an emergency use authorization.”
Last week, after the San Antonio Independent School District sought to impose a vaccine requirement for its employees, the state attorney general, Ken Paxton, announced a lawsuit against the district. Pedro Martinez, the district’s superintendent, responded with a statement on Friday saying he would “not compel any staff member to be vaccinated until the vaccines are fully approved by the F.D.A.”
Mr. Paxton claimed victory in a statement on Monday, saying his office had stopped the district from trying to “play by its own set of rules.” But it was not immediately clear what would happen now that the F.D.A. had granted the approval Mr. Martinez said he was awaiting. Neither the school district nor the offices of Mr. Paxton and Mr. Abbott responded immediately to requests for comment.
Montana’s vaccine-mandate ban stipulates that “an individual may not be required to receive any vaccine whose use is allowed under an emergency use authorization or any vaccine undergoing safety trials.”
Brooke Stroyke, a spokeswoman for Montana’s governor, Greg Gianforte, maintained that vaccine mandates remained illegal in the state. She said the F.D.A. approval of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine did not entirely invalidate Montana’s law, which also prohibits discrimination based on whether a person has been inoculated.

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Coronavirus patients at a hospital in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, last month. Haiti has averaged more than 500 cases per 100,000 residents in the past 28 days.Credit...Ricardo Arduengo/Reuters

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its health advice for travel to six countries it now considers to be “very high” risk given the rapid spread of the coronavirus and the Delta variant. It is suggesting that people avoid traveling to these countries altogether, or if they must go, to get vaccinated beforehand.
The six countries — Haiti, Kosovo, Lebanon, Morocco, the Bahamas and St. Martin in the Caribbean — have all had more than 500 cases per 100,000 residents in the past 28 days, pushing them into the C.D.C.’s highest warning category.
Several other countries, including Brazil, Britain and Georgia — which currently has the highest daily global average, at 126 new cases a day per 100,000 people, according to the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University — were already on the list.
The warnings come as the rapid spread of the Delta variant has upended travel plans for Americans amid a summer that many had hoped would include more freedoms thanks to high vaccination rates.
“Even fully vaccinated travelers may be at risk for getting and spreading Covid-19 variants,” the C.D.C. warns on its site. The agency also recommends against any international travel without full vaccination.
“The Covid-19 situation, including the spread of new or concerning variants, differs from country to country,” the agency says. “All travelers need to pay close attention to the conditions at their destination before traveling.”

A military transport plane leaving Kabul on Tuesday morning.Credit...Jim Huylebroek for The New York Times

President Biden on Tuesday told world leaders gathered virtually for a meeting of the Group of 7 nations that he is aiming — for now — to get American troops out of Afghanistan by his Aug. 31 deadline, but said there was still a possibility of extending that mission, a senior administration official said.
Military officials will start withdrawing the 6,000 forces in Kabul as early as this week or this weekend, according to an American military official, who said U.S. forces would continue to fly evacuation missions up til the last few days of the withdrawal. Then they will need to give priority to the remaining troops and equipment, and to any American citizens wanting to leave.
Officials said the military needs to start moving out within the next several days in order to meet the Aug. 31 deadline, given the logistics of moving troops and equipment. Officials said military officials could slow the departure if Biden extends the deadline.
In closed-door remarks with the world leaders, Mr. Biden told his foreign counterparts that every day that American troops stay in the Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, the risk escalates. He called the danger of a terrorist attack “very high,” according to a senior administration official.
The president reiterated his desire to complete the mission by the deadline, but he said withdrawal will hinge on completing the goal of airlifting all Americans and Afghan allies out of the country to safety.
For now, the president told the G-7 leaders, the mission is on track to be completed by the last day of the month. But he warned that if the Taliban did not cooperate — on Tuesday they vowed to reject any extension of Mr. Biden’s troop withdrawal deadline — that could change.
The world leaders have said they would urge the United States to delay its final exit from Afghanistan to ensure that all citizens of other countries could be evacuated safely.
The president and his team have said for days that Mr. Biden is considering whether the 6,000 troops securing the Kabul airport should stay past the Aug. 31 deadline to facilitate more evacuations.
Officials have said they are hopeful that won’t be necessary, but activists, lawmakers and representatives of other governments have expressed skepticism that all of the people seeking to flee the Taliban government will be able to do so by the end of the month.
The Taliban
warned Monday that there would be “consequences” if Mr. Biden chose to leave forces in their country beyond that date. And American military and intelligence officials have warned of a heightened danger of attacks from ISIS-K, an offshoot of the Islamic State in Afghanistan, and other terror networks.
The pace of evacuations has accelerated dramatically despite the chaos and desperation, mostly among Afghans, outside the airport. American officials reported Tuesday morning that 21,600 people were evacuated on Monday, and that 58,700 people had been flown out of the city since it fell on Aug. 14.
But Mr. Biden is in a bind.
If he orders an extension of the mission, he may be putting troops and diplomats in more danger. But conservatives have already accused him of being willing to “strand” Americans in Afghanistan by leaving before all of them have been evacuated.
That drew a sharp response on Monday from Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary.
“I think it’s irresponsible to say Americans are stranded,” Ms. Psaki said in response to a question from Peter Doocy of Fox News. “They are not. We are committed to bringing Americans who want to come home, home. We are in touch with them via phone, via text, via email, via any way that we can possibly reach Americans to get them home if they want to return home.”

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Source: New York Times

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