Citizen Cartwright

Sky won't fall: Senate passes, Biden to sign debt limit bill

The Senate vote Thursday night was 63-36 on the bipartisan legislation suspending the debt limit and imposing new spending caps, sending it to President Biden for his signature and ending the possibility of a government default.

 

As in the House, Democrats provided the most votes for passage, with 44 of them and two independents joining 17 Republicans in support; 31 Republicans, four Democrats and one independent voted no.

 

Biden is to address the nation at 7 p.m. Eastern time Friday.

 

The Senate vote came after an afternoon of closed-door talks to resolve a last-minute flareup over Pentagon funding among Republicans who said the debt-limit package severely underfunded the military. Senate leaders resolved the dispute with a formal statement that the debt-limit agreement “does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities.”

 

Biden had refused for months to engage with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy but finally did so after the California Republican managed in April to pass a GOP fiscal plan, spurring negotiations with the White House that produced the compromise.

 

McCarthy defied expectations and even earned grudging respect from White House officials while defusing the debt limit time bomb he planted by insisting on concessions in return for raising the nation’s borrowing limit, says an analysis by long-time New York Times reporter Carl Hulse.

 

The bar was low for McCarthy, known more for politicking and fundraising than for policymaking, after he struggled to win his post in the first place as House Republicans took control in January, the Times says.

 

In the end, he delivered an agreement that met his goal of cutting spending from current levels. But he managed to do so only with significant help from Democrats, who rescued him on a key procedural vote and then provided the support needed for passage. McCarthy exceeded his goal of winning the support of the majority of his members with 149 backing it, but more Democrats — 165 of them — voted for the bill than members of his own party, an outcome that will fuel GOP criticism that he cut a deal that sold out his own people, the Times says.

 

That's not the way powerful speakers of the past have typically accomplished their goals, says the Times.

 

But McCarthy "has been uncommonly willing to endure political pain and even humiliation — a trait that was on ample display during his 15-round fight for the speakership in January — while focusing on extracting a few marquee concessions from Mr. Biden that could allow him to claim victory and avert a default he plainly wanted to avoid, even if many of his members did not,” says the Times.

 

His allies gave him credit for taking on the White House and Senate Democrats and emerging with a positive result when most Democrats were expecting him to fail. White House officials and congressional Democrats had privately predicted that McCarthy would be unable to corral his extraordinarily fractious troops, and would therefore have no leverage in fiscal talks, allowing them to force through an increase in the debt ceiling with few, if any, concessions to Republicans, according to the Times.

 

McCarthy’s achievement still may come at a cost, the Times says. Far-right conservative Republicans remain outraged at the agreement he struck with Biden, saying it fell woefully short of what he promised and what Republicans committed to as they pursued the majority last year.

Debt limit bill passes House, goes to Senate

The House voted on Wednesday night to pass a painstakingly negotiated bill to suspend the debt ceiling, limit federal spending and avert a U.S. government default, securing a major win for the GOP and the White House, says The Washington Post.

The bipartisan vote was 314-117, with 71 Republicans and 46 Democrats voting no.

 

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says lawmakers may need to be in Washington through the weekend to get the legislation passed before Monday, when the Treasury Department says the United States will no longer be able to pay all its bills.

 

Nobody got everything they wanted, the Post says. Of course, that’s fundamental to compromise in a democracy. 

 

Many liberal Democrats opposed the bill, objecting to curbs on government spending and new work requirements for some recipients of federal food stamps and family welfare benefits. And far-right Republicans slammed the agreement for not securing more aggressive spending cuts. 

 

The agreement would keep nondefense spending roughly flat in the 2024 fiscal year and increase it by 1 percent the following year. It would suspend the debt limit until January 2025 — past the next presidential election.

The bill got the support of “a majority of the majority” in the final House vote, satisfying an informal GOP guideline against passing legislation mostly on the strength of Democratic support.

 

Here are details of what’s in the bill, from The Associated Press.

Reining in pharmacy benefit managers (who?)

The Federal Trade Commission sued on May 16 to block the merger of drugmakers Amgen and Horizon Therapeutics, saying it would enable Amgen to leverage the monopoly power of two top Horizon drugs, reports KFF (formerly KHN).

In its suit, the FTC said if it allowed Amgen’s $27.8 billion purchase to go through, Amgen could pressure the companies that manage access to prescription drugs — pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs — to boost the two extremely expensive Horizon products in a way that would inhibit competition.

The FTC also announced an expansion of a yearlong investigation of PBMs, saying it was looking at two giant drug-purchasing companies, Ascent Health Services and Zinc Health Services. Critics say the PBMs set up these companies to conceal profits.

The week before, the Senate Health Committee approved on May 11 bipartisan legislation sponsored by Chairman Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., a physician and the panel’s top Republican. The legislation (S 1339) is intended to increase transparency of PBMs, among other things.

Background
In a separate article titled "PBMs, the brokers who control drug prices, finally get Washington’s attention,” KFF discusses the role and relevance of PBMs (there’s a helpful four-minute video).

"Drug manufacturers claim that exorbitant PBM demands for rebates force them to set high list prices to earn a profit,” says KFF. "Independent pharmacists say PBMs are driving them out of business. Physicians blame them for unpredictable, clinically invalid prescribing decisions. And patients complain that PBMs’ choices drain their pocketbooks.”

"With PBMs driving prices, competition has had the opposite effect from what economic theory predicted Medicare patients would spend out-of-pocket on drugs, one large study showed. Over a five-year period, patients were paying 50 percent more for branded drugs that had competitors than for those that didn’t."

"All this makes the PBMs ripe targets for politicians of both parties," KFF says. "Yet the complexity and obscurity of their role in the drug marketplace have skeptics wondering whether legislation advancing in the House and Senate will actually help patients or lower prices at the pharmacy counter.”

The role of PBMs certainly IS complex and obscure. If you’re interested in diving deeper, I refer you to the KFF articles and to this Vox article.

Drug shortages

Thousands of patients are facing delays in getting treatments for cancer and other life-threatening diseases as drug shortages in the United States approach record levels, says The New York Times.

There are 238 items on the drug shortages list of the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists. 

 

“This is, in my opinion, a public health emergency,” says Dr. Amanda Fader, a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and a president-elect of the Society of Gynecologic Oncology, “because of the breadth of the individuals it affects and the number of chemotherapy agents that are in shortage right now.”

White House officials and members of Congress are grappling with an opaque and sometimes interrupted supply chain and quality and financial issues that are leading to manufacturing shutdowns, the Times says. They’re examining the underlying causes of the faltering generic drug market, which accounts for about 90 percent of domestic prescriptions.

 

Some shortages, like those of weight-loss drugs, are the result of high demand, while others have been attributed to overprescribing, including for antibiotics, or a lack of investment in potential alternatives.

The Biden administration has assembled a team to find long-term solutions for shoring up the pharmaceutical supply chain as the United States remains heavily reliant on medicines and drug ingredients from India and China. 

 

Officials have been debating possible measures including tax incentives for generic drugmakers and greater transparency around generic drug quality. The current incentives favor drugmakers with the lowest prices, which includes those that might cut corners — leading to disruptive plant shutdowns if the FDA requires a fix. 

 

The FDA, which employs a team of about 10 people who do the day-to-day work of mitigating and reporting drug shortages, has said it's seeking authority from Congress to get additional information about the drug manufacturing and supply chain.

 

Four Senate bills with bipartisan sponsorship could help get generic drugs to market more quickly by addressing tactics or loopholes causing delays, the Times says.

Bipartisan momentum in Congress for tech regulation

It's one of the few major policy issues where Republicans and Democrats generally align, says The Associated Press.

 

Tech rules have been gaining momentum on Capitol Hill amid concerns about China’s ownership of TikTok and as parents increasingly are worried about the effects of social media on their children, AP says.

 

Bipartisan debate has been going on for five years on antitrust legislation aimed at the tech industry, social media content moderation policies and the online spread of disinformation, according to Roll Call. 

 

And now there’s the issue of new artificial intelligence interfaces.

 

But bipartisanship isn’t enough, as Roll Call notes. Last year, the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted 53-2 to approve compromise bipartisan data privacy legislation. But the legislation died when the 118th Congress ended.

 

Nevertheless, any bipartisanship is to be celebrated in these polarized times.

 

The AP article has details of the bipartisan tech bills being pushed in the Senate and the House.

White House presses tech CEOs on AI, Congress races to get up to speed

Vice President Harris and other officials met at the White House on Thursday with the leaders of Google; Microsoft; OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot; and Anthropic, an AI start-up, as the Biden administration rolls out initiatives to ensure that rapidly evolving AI technology improves lives without putting people’s rights and safety at risk.

 

President Biden — who himself has tried out ChatGPT, according to officials —  stopped by the meeting.

 

“What you’re doing has enormous potential and enormous danger,” he told the CEOs.

 

The administration announced on Thursday an investment of $140 million to establish seven new AI research institutes. And the White House Office of Management and Budget is expected to issue guidance in the next few months on how federal agencies can use AI tools. 

 

The administration also announced an independent commitment by top AI developers to participate in a public evaluation of their systems in August at the Las Vegas hacker convention DEF CON. 

 

Meanwhile, "The planet’s fastest-moving technology has spurred Congress into a sudden burst of action, with a series of recent bills, proposals and strategies all designed to rein in artificial intelligence,” says Politico.

 

But "nobody on Capitol Hill agrees on what to do about AI, how to do it — or even why,” Politico says. “Longtime congressional inattention is compounded by a massive knowledge gap.”

 

“There is a mad rush amongst many members to try to get educated as quickly as possible,” says Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va. 

 

"While it’s somewhat unusual for the tech industry to want new regulations, the software lobby is eager to see Congress pass rules for AI,” Politico says. "That desire stems in part from a need to convince clients that the tools are safe — Chandler Morse, vice president for corporate affairs at software giant Workday, called 'reasonable safeguards' on AI 'a way to build trust.' But it’s also driven by fear that inaction in Washington would let less-friendly regulators set the global tone.”

House passes debt limit bill

The vote was 217-215 on Republicans’ bill to raise the debt ceiling while cutting spending and unraveling major elements of President Biden’s domestic agenda.

 

GOP lawmakers conceded that their legislation was headed nowhere, says The New York Times. Biden has threatened to veto it, and the measure is dead on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate. 

 

Without action by Congress to raise the debt limit, which is projected to be reached as soon as this summer, the U.S. government faces a potentially catastrophic default.

 

House Republicans regarded the vote as a crucial step to strengthen their negotiating position against Biden amid questions about whether Speaker McCarthy would be able to unite his conference to pass any fiscal outline at all.

 

McCarthy repeatedly had told his colleagues to ignore the substance of the measure, which would never become law, and instead focus on the symbolic victory of passing any legislation to show Biden they were serious about their demand for spending cuts, the Times says.

 

In supporting the bill, dozens of Republicans were casting their first-ever votes for a debt limit increase, says Roll Call.

In the end, just four Republicans voted against the bill: Tennessee's Tim Burchett, Florida's Matt Gaetz, Colorado's Ken Buck and Arizona's Andy Biggs. They said the bill wouldn’t reduce the deficit enough.

 

At the White House before the vote, Biden repeated that he wouldn’t negotiate over lifting the debt limit.

House GOP unveils debt limit plan

I don’t want to spend too much of your time and mine on the package released Wednesday, which The Associated Press says is not certain to pass the House, has “no chance” in the Senate and is intended to kickstart negotiations with the Biden administration.

 

This AP article details the House package’s provisions.

 

President Biden said on Wednesday that Republican lawmakers are threatening a default on U.S. obligations “unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have.” 

 

Meanwhile, the bipartisan House Problem Solvers Caucus on Wednesday outlined its own plan as an alternative to the GOP-only plan. It would outsource the task of finding ways to reduce the deficit in the short term to appropriators in a government funding bill and proposes that an independent commission be created to recommend long-term solutions, NBC News reports.

 

Here is the Problem Solvers Caucus' one-page summary of its proposal.

The dangers of freight trains stretching as far as 3 miles

Rail safety is in the headlines after a Norfolk Southern train passed sensors designed to flag mechanical issues and derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, in February. 

And lawmakers of both parties are calling for stricter rail regulations.

ProPublica says its reporting suggests the lawmakers should look at federal regulators’ response to the mounting warnings about the dangers of long freight trains.

In recent years, railroads have adopted a moneymaking strategy to move cargo faster, with fewer workers, on trains that are consistently longer than at any time in history, ProPublica says.

For generations, railroad workers considered a 1.4-mile-long train huge, according to ProPublica.

Now, driven by the efficiency goals of what's called precision scheduled railroading, companies are forgoing long-held safety precautions, such as assembling trains to distribute weight and risk or taking the proper time to inspect them, ProPublica says. 

"Instead, their rushed workers are stringing together trains that stretch for 2 or even 3 miles, sometimes without regard for the delicate physics of keeping heavy, often combustible tanker cars from jumping off the tracks,” says ProPublica.

The Federal Railroad Administration, the agency in charge of train safety, has said it lacked enough evidence that long trains pose a particular risk. 

But ProPublica says it discovered that the agency hasn't required companies to provide certain basic information after accidents — notably, the length of the train — that would enable it to assess the extent of the danger.

ProPublica says the agency told it on Thursday it's starting the process of requiring companies to disclose the train length for every reportable accident, a move prompted by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. 

"But there is no guarantee the regulators will succeed,” ProPublica says. "The FRA said it first needs to publish a notice of the new data-collection effort and ultimately the Office of Management and Budget would need to approve the measure.”

Across the country, state lawmakers have tried to cap the lengths of trains that roll through their communities, says ProPublica. Since 2019, in Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Georgia, Nebraska, Washington, Arizona and other states, lawmakers have proposed maximum train lengths of 1.4 to about 1.6 miles. 

"But every proposal has died before becoming law,” says ProPublica. "Opponents, which include Class 1 railroad companies [the biggest by revenue], claim that the efforts are driven by unions to create jobs and that the proposals would violate interstate commerce laws."

How the climate movement has matured, gotten action

Last, year, the United States enacted its biggest-ever investment to combat climate change: $369 billion.

And since last summer when the legislation's tax incentives became law, companies have invested nearly $200 billion in 126 clean energy projects in 33 states, says a Politico special report. 

But getting to this point took a change in public attitudes spurred by an equally dramatic change in strategy from the environmental movement; a mobilization of green groups, their donors, activists and elected officials; better policy; and a firmer grasp of what it would take to win in Washington, Politico says.

Doomsday warnings and punitive aspects of taxing carbon had choked off public support for action, Politico says.

Thus the current focus on the benefits of a climate program centered around green industrial policy: “Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, leading the world to a clean energy future,” as President Biden puts it.

Mother Nature also has been an effective lobbyist, focusing policymakers’ minds on extreme weather events.

Speaking of which, an Associated Press article cites experts saying America’s geography means it gets hit by stronger, costlier, more varied and frequent extreme weather than anywhere else on the planet. Two oceans, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rocky Mountains, jutting peninsulas like Florida, clashing storm fronts and the jet stream combine to naturally create the nastiest weather.