The Hill reports, Congress averts shutdown after vaccine mandate fight:
The Senate on Thursday night passed a short-term funding bill to avert a government shutdown after a dayslong fight over President Biden’s vaccine mandate threw the legislation into limbo.
Senators voted 69-28 to pass a stopgap bill to fund the government through Feb. 18. The legislation, which passed the House earlier in the evening [on a party-line vote] now goes to Biden’s desk where he has until the end of Friday to sign it.
Arizona Delegation:
House: (Yeah) Gallego, Grijalva, Kirkpatrick, O’Halleran, Stanton; (Nay) Biggs, Gosar, Lesko, Schweikert.
Senate: (Yeah) Kelly, Sinema.
The year began with Biggs and Gosar identified as organizers of the January 6 insurrection, all four of Arizona’s GQP members of Congress voted not to certify the Electoral College vote in furtherance of the coup plot outlined by Trump lawyers John Eastman and Jenna Ellis, making them accessories to the crime; all four Republicans have uniformly voted against every piece of pandemic relief and economic recovery legislation to sabotage these efforts; and they will end the year voting to shut down the government over anti-vaxxer insanity during a new surge of the pandemic. They will vote by December 15 to not raise the federal debt ceiling for debts incurred under the Trump administration and to default on the debt, in violation of their constitutionally prescribed duty to honor the full faith and credit of the debts of the United States. These saboteurs are enemies of America. They should be expelled from Congress, and be prosecuted for their roles in the January 6 seditious insurrection. Their traitorous actions shall not be normalized by a feckless news media.
The quick votes are a U-turn from Thursday morning, when the path to avert a shutdown was far from clear. Leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations committees announced a stop-gap deal, but hurdles remained in the Senate amid a standoff with a group of conservatives seditionists.
Those lawmakers wanted to use the short-term funding bill, known as a continuing resolution, to defund Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger businesses, federal employees and contractors, and the military. But the effort sparked quick Democratic backlash, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) hammering Republicans as “anti-vaccination.”
Even as Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) predicted that the government wouldn’t shut down, senators were locked in a war of words.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) warned that Republicans would bear the blame for a “Republican anti-vaccine shutdown,” while Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) — one of the senators pushing to defund the vaccine mandate — fired back, saying that a shutdown was “up to Senator Schumer.”
The path to an offramp slowly emerged on Thursday.
Marshall and Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) [a sedition leader] and Mike Lee (R-Utah) said they would agree to help speed up the funding bill if Democrats allowed [GQP anti-vaxxers] a vote on defunding Biden’s vaccine mandate at a simple majority threshold.
“I’ve offered a very simple solution, a very reasonable solution. … I just want to vote on one amendment,” Lee said.
Lawmakers waited throughout Thursday, when the Senate typically leaves Washington for the week, to see if Democrats would grant Lee his vote or if the [Tea Party] Republican would back down and instead settle for a vote on the vaccine mandate that Republicans will force next week under the Congressional Review Act.
Senators emerged from a GOP lunch warning that they weren’t close to a resolution with Lee, raising the specter that the shutdown fight would drag into Friday. But by roughly 5:30 p.m., end-of-week jet fumes appeared to have set in, with senators predicting a quick vote to pass the short-term funding bill.
Cruz told reporters that it “looks promising” that the conservatives would get their vaccine mandate vote on Thursday night, allowing the short-term government funding bill to pass shortly thereafter. And Schumer, while declining to discuss specifics, told reporters that the chances of a quick resolution to the funding fight was “looking good.”
Senators ultimately voted [on a party-line vote of] 48-50 on the GOP amendment, falling short of the simple majority needed for it to be added to the bill.
There was some drama after [prima donna Democratic diva] Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), [desperate for attention again], declined to say throughout Thursday if he would support the GOP proposal if it was allowed to come up for a vote.
If every Republican was present, the GOP would only need to peel off one Democrat — potentially Manchin — in order to include a provision cutting off funding for Biden’s vaccine mandate. But that likely would have sunk the measure in the House, with a shutdown looming.
In the end, Manchin voted against the GOP amendment and Democrats had wiggle room because two Republicans — Sens. John Thune (S.D.) and Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) — missed the vote.
Prima donna Democratic diva Joe Manchin will get another opportunity to damage Covid vaccination efforts and to appease GQP anti-vaxxers next week when Congress votes on the GQP anti-vaxxers’ resolution under the Congressional Review Act. Manchin to vote to nix Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger businesses:
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said on Thursday night that he is supporting a GOP effort to nix President Biden’s vaccine mandate for larger businesses, which is expected to get a vote in the Senate next week.
“Let me be clear, I do not support any government vaccine mandate on private businesses. That’s why I have cosponsored and will strongly support a bill to overturn the federal government vaccine mandate for private businesses,” Manchin said in a statement.
“I have long said we should incentivize, not penalize, private employers whose responsibility it is to protect their employees from COVID-19,” he added.
This ignorant West Virginia hillbilly should listen the scientists. COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates Are Working, Public Health Experts Say:
While COVID-19 vaccine mandates have sparked lawsuits and protests, the data shows that they’re working and increasing vaccination rates.
Some organizations have reported vaccination rates that jumped from less than 50% to more than 90%, according to ABC News. Workplace mandates have especially encouraged employees who were on the fence to get a shot.
“In general, vaccine mandates work,” James Colgrove, a public health professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, told ABC News.
When carrots don’t work, it’s time to bring out a stick.
Republicans will get another shot at Biden’s vaccine mandate next week, where they can vote to nix the regulation with a simple majority under the Congressional Review Act. McConnell, during an interview on [anti-vaxxer] Fox News, said that it had a “decent chance of passing the Senate.”
Even as Congress has managed to keep the government open through mid-February, they still face significant roadblocks to working out a long-term funding deal.
The [dysfunctional] Senate hasn’t taken up any of the fiscal year 2022 funding bills, while the House has passed nine.
Though top appropriators have met to discuss how to get a deal on full-year funding bills, they appear to have made little progress.
Asked if they weren’t willing to negotiate until Democrats dropped “poison pills”—policies that one party views as a non-starter — Sen. Richard Shelby (Ala.), the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, replied: “That’s our plan.”
The only “poison pills” are the attempts by Republicans to sabotage pandemic relief and economic recovery legislation to create chaos and failure for Democrats. This is their actual plan. They are not just undermining American democracy, these enemies of America are willing to burn it all down in their nihilistic belief that this works to their political advantage. This deeply sick behavior should not be normalized, or rewarded.
Paul Krugman writes, “How Saboteurs Took Over the G.O.P.”, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/opinion/republicans-government-shutdown.html
(excerpt)
This time, Republican obstructionists aren’t even pretending to care about red ink. Instead, they’re threatening to shut everything down unless the Biden administration abandons its efforts to fight the coronavirus with vaccine mandates.
What’s that about? As many observers have pointed out, claims that opposition to vaccine mandates (and similar opposition to mask mandates) is about maintaining personal freedom don’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny. No reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to endanger other people’s health and lives because you don’t feel like taking basic precautions.
Furthermore, actions by Republican-controlled state governments, for example in Florida and Texas, show a party that isn’t so much pro-freedom as it is pro-Covid. How else can you explain attempts to prevent private businesses — whose freedom to choose was supposed to be sacrosanct — from requiring that their workers be vaccinated, or offers of special unemployment benefits for the unvaccinated?
In other words, the G.O.P. doesn’t look like a party trying to defend liberty; it looks like a party trying to block any effective response to a deadly disease. Why is it doing this?
To some extent it surely reflects a coldly cynical political calculation. Voters tend to blame whichever party holds the White House for anything bad that happens on its watch, which creates an incentive for a sufficiently ruthless party to engage in outright sabotage. Sure enough, Republicans who fought all efforts to contain the coronavirus are now attacking the Biden administration for failing to end the pandemic.
But trying to shut down the government to block vaccinations seems like overreach, even for hardened cynics.
[W]hat seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause — and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.
The result is that one of America’s two major political parties isn’t just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; it’s actively working to make the country ungovernable.
And I hope the rest of us haven’t lost the ability to be properly horrified at this spectacle.