House Democrats Struggle for Votes to Pass $3.5 Trillion Budget Plan

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 are set to huddle privately on Capitol Hill at 9 a.m. 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 Bidens 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 partys progressive majority for leverage.
The House was scheduled to return at noon, with up to an hour of debate on the measure set to begin shortly after. Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California 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 partys 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. They were also discussing promising the moderates a date this fall to take up the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
But that appeared insufficient to satisfy the moderates, including Representatives Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Henry Cuellar of Texas. Without their groups 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.
When asked after midnight whether she would commit to a date to take up theinfrastructure package, Ms. Pelosi said, Well see tomorrow, wont we now?
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. Bidens 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.
Emily Cochrane
Read moreA draft report on a much-ridiculed review of the 2020 election results in Arizonas 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. Logans 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 Bidens 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.
Michael Wines
Read moreNorth 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 states 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 courts 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 Senates 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 theyre 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 states 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 Wars 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 states 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 laws 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.
Michael Wines
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