Power Up: GOP proposal tests Biden’s bipartisanship as Democrats forge ahead with stimulus plan

Their approximately $600 billion proposal, while it’s less than a third of what Biden has called for, is testing the new president’s desire for a bipartisan deal. 

With the cooperation of exactly 10 GOP lawmakers, Democrats in the 50-50 Senate could hit the threshold necessary to pass the legislation under regular procedures. Democrats, who narrowly control the Chamber with Vice President Harris’s tie-breaking vote, are planning to use special budget rules to skirt the 60-vote requirement and pass Biden’s package that Republicans have panned as too costly with a simple majority. 

The White House said Biden is seeking a “full exchange of views” at today’s meeting but signaled they may be unwilling to curb the size of the proposed package: 

• “The American Rescue Plan — including $1400 relief checks, a substantial investment in fighting covid and reopening schools, aid to small businesses and hurting families, and funds to keep first responders on the job (and more) — is badly needed. As leading economists have said, the danger now is not in doing too much: it is in doing too little. Americans of both parties are looking to their leaders to meet the moment.”

It’s unclear whether this clique – led by Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) – will be the force to reckon with going forward, as keeping 10 senators aligned on an issue is no easy feat. But its composition does clearly signal the dynamics of this new era in Washington and the challenges facing a president who campaigned on reaching across the aisle but may have quicker options to get things done in a narrowly-divided Congress. 

• “The President spoke to Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer today; he is grateful that Congress is prepared to begin action on the American Rescue Plan in just his second full week in office,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement last night. 
• The proposal came together quickly: The group worked all day Thursday and Friday before the plan started to take shape on Friday night and Saturday, according to a GOP Senate aide. Biden spoke with Collins and accepted the request to meet.

NEW DYNAMICS IN THE SENATE, TOO?: The other Republicans on board are Sens. Rob Portman (Ohio), Bill Cassidy (La.), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitt Romney (Utah), Todd C. Young (Ind.), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Jerry Moran (Kan.), Mike Rounds (S.D.) and Thom Tillis (N.C.). 

• “They are all thoughtful and effective legislators which is quite the contrast from the show horse, firebrand Republicans that normally dominate the news cycle,” a GOP Senate aide who does not work for any of those lawmakers told Power Up about the group. “There’s really nothing in common, except they really are good legislators that reach across the aisle. It’s seriously a breath of fresh air.” 

• “Biden’s plan would send $1,400 payments to individuals with incomes up to $75,000 per year and couples making up to $150,000,” they note. Portman said the GOP plan “would lower those thresholds to $50,000 for individuals and $100,000 for couples. Instead of $1,400 checks, the GOP plan would propose $1,000 checks, according to [Cassidy]. Biden has said he is open to changing the structure of his proposed stimulus checks.”
• “The GOP plan would also reduce Biden’s proposal for extending emergency federal unemployment benefits, which are set at $300 a week and will expire in mid-March. The Biden plan would increase those benefits to $400 weekly and extend them through September. The GOP plan would keep the payments at $300 per week and extend them through June, according to three people with knowledge of the plan who spoke on the condition of anonymity ahead of an official announcement,” our colleagues report. 
• It also does not include measures included in Biden’s proposal that Republicans have argued are not essential at the moment — like increasing the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour. 
• Some areas of agreement: “The GOP plan would match Biden’s call to devote $160 billion to vaccines, testing and related health-care spending,” per our colleagues.  

But Democratic Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) threw cold water on the GOP proposal in an interview with the New York Daily News’s Michael McAuliff: “They should negotiate with us, not make a take-it-or-leave-it offer,” Schumer said. 

• “If the reports are true, it doesn’t have any state and local money in it. Look at that, just as one thing,” Schumer said.

Democrats, who just won the presidential race and flipped two Senate seats in Georgia, see passing a big bill as their responsibility to follow through on their campaign promises to deliver voters a new round of $2,000 stimulus checks. “The entire Democratic Party came together behind the candidates in Georgia — we made promises to the American people,” Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said on ABC News on Sunday. “If politics means anything — if you’re going to have any degree of credibility — you can’t campaign on a series of issues … and then change your mind.” (Biden is proposing $1,400 per person, but $600 checks were included in the last relief package in December.) 

• The GOP proposal has so far not deterred Democrats from plans to fast-track the process through reconciliation: “That would allow them to pass the measure with no Republican support and [Harris] casting the tie-breaking vote. Both chambers are expected to vote on a budget resolution — a measure that will formally direct committees in the House and the Senate to begin drafting the relief package, kicking off the reconciliation process — in the coming days,” the New York Times‘s Emily Cochrane reports. 
• But there have been some signs of disagreement over the specifics from the left, too: Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) expressed surprise after Harris made the media rounds in his state and Arizona where she urged voters in both states to support the package. Manchin has urged the White House to more narrowly target the $1,400 stimulus payments.

Sanders, who is about to assume control of the Senate Budget Committee, acknowledged in an interview with Cochrane that pushing through the minimum wage raise is “probably the most controversial of those proposals.” If the provision is included in the reconciliation package, it could also potentially be rejected by the Senate parliamentarian. 

• “Our first task is to get the ruling of the parliamentarian,” Sanders told The Times. “That’s what I would like to see and that’s what we are focused on right now.”
• Some Democrats, however, have signed on to stand-alone legislation for the minimum wage increase — although Sanders insisted that Democrats have “50 votes to pass reconciliation, including minimum wage, yes.” 
• “In totality, what Democrats are saying,” he said, is “we’ve got to support the president, we’ve got to address the crises facing working families and we’re going to pass reconciliation.”

SECOND IMPEACHMENT, NEW LEGAL TEAM: Former president Donald Trump announced that two new lawyers would be defending him – just days before the Senate trial which begins Feb. 9: David Schoen – a Georgia-based lawyer who represented the longtime Trump adviser Roger J. Stone Jr. and sex offender Jeffery Epstein – and Bruce Castor, a former district attorney in Pennsylvania. 

The announcement came amid the departure of five others including “Butch” Bowers, a well-regarded South Carolina ethics lawyer, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger report. “Trump wanted the attorneys to argue there was mass election fraud and that the election was stolen from him rather than focus on the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office,” CNN reported. 

FURTHER FRACTURING WITHIN THE GOP: Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), one of 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, “has launched a new political action committee, Country1st, that is designed to become a financial engine to challenge the former president’s wing of the GOP caucus and stand up against a leadership team still aligned with him,” Paul Kane and Amy B Wang report.

• Kinzinger said “the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol served as a final breaking point for the direction of the Republican Party, providing a stark divide between those who want to continue a path toward autocracy and those who want to return to traditional conservative values.”
• But the move was not without backlash: “Friends and family turned against him, and he was told he’s ‘possessed by the devil.’” Politico’s Myah Ward reported. 
• Key quote: “The reality is this: This is a time to choose … Let’s take a look at the last four years, how far we have come in a bad way, how backward-looking we are, how much we peddle darkness and division,” Kinzinger said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “That’s not the party I ever signed up for. And I think most Republicans didn’t sign up for that.”

The move signals further splintering within the GOP as they struggle with how to move forward in a post-Trump world.

• “Kinzinger also took shots at freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for her promotion of baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and was dismissive toward what he views as the weak leadership of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.),” my colleagues report. 
• He isn’t the only one: Sen. Portman, who recently announced he would not run for reelection, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that party’s leaders “ought to stand up” against Greene, suggesting that there should be “a strong response” to her recently resurfaced incendiary comments.
• Meanwhile, Greene seems to be relishing in her notoriety: “She tweeted Friday that she raised $1.6 million off all the controversy and told her 300,000 followers over the weekend that she just had a chat with a supportive Trump who has referred … to her as a “future Republican star,” Politico reports.

VACCINE ROLLOUT CONSEQUENCES: “Many states are trying to speed up a delayed and often chaotic rollout of coronavirus vaccines by adding people 65 and older to near the front of the line. But that approach is pushing others back in the queue,” Lena H. Sun Isaac Stanley-Becker and Akilah Johnson report. 

• “Delaying vaccinations for front-line workers, especially food and grocery workers, has stark consequences for communities of color disproportionately affected by the pandemic,” they write. 
• “As a result, workers who often face the highest risk of exposure to the virus will be waiting longer to get protected.”

Easier said than done: The Biden administration said last week that it was on the cusp of securing an additional 200 million doses of the two coronavirus vaccines authorized for emergency use in the United States, but the administration “is still trying to locate upward of 20 million vaccine doses that have been sent to states — a mystery that has hampered plans to speed up the national vaccination effort,” Politico reports. “They’re searching for new ways to boost production of a vaccine stockpile that they’ve discovered is mostly empty. And they’re nervously eyeing a series of new covid-19 strains that threaten to derail the response.” 

Key quote: “It’s the Mike Tyson quote: ‘Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth,’” one person with knowledge of the vaccine effort told Politico. “They are planning. They are competent. It’s just the weight of everything when you sit down in that chair. It’s heavy.”

While the pace of vaccinations is trending upward, concern over new variants is on the rise: Over the weekend, Maryland announced its first known case of the South African variant, which was identified in South Carolina last week.

COUP IN MYANMAR: “Myanmar’s military said it took control of the country and declared a state of emergency for a year, after detaining civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi and other leaders of her ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) in a predawn operation, staging a coup against the democratically elected government,” Shibani Mahtani and Kyaw Ye Lynn report. 

• The White House said it was “alarmed” by the reports and urged Myanmar’s military to adhere to the rule of law and release those detained, or face consequences. “The United States opposes any attempt to alter the outcome of recent elections or impede Myanmar’s Democratic transition, and will take action against those responsible if these steps are not reversed,” Psaki said in a statement. 

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