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Will the government shut down? Will President Biden’s entire agenda, crammed into two bills, pass in the House of Representatives? Will Republicans continue threatening to collapse the global economy for no good reason? Find out on this week’s episode of America: Normal, Functioning Country.
- Step one: Congress has to pass legislation to extend annual funding for the federal government, or many government operations will shut down at midnight on Thursday. Last week the House passed a bill to do just that. But they paired it with an increase to the national debt limit, and so Republicans in the Senate filibustered it today, because otherwise how would they take the economy hostage?
- Since the deadline to increase the debt limit is still about three weeks away, Democrats are likely to strip that provision from the funding bill. That should leave plenty of time to get it passed into law by the September 30 shutdown deadline, though it’s always possible Republicans will exploit Senate rules to delay passage, which would bring us to the brink of a shutdown, or just beyond.
- From there, things get murkier. Democrats can either play chicken with Republicans over the debt limit, or settle on a way to increase the debt limit with 50 votes. One, labor-intensive option would be to amend the filibuster-proof budget procedures they adopted to pass the Build Back Better agenda with 50 votes, and tack a debt-limit increase on to that bill. Another, much simpler option, would be to abolish the filibuster and increase the debt limit at their leisure.
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Speaking of Build Back Better, we should also know more about what the final bill will look like and if and when it will pass this week.
- Thanks to a commitment Speaker Nancy Pelosi made to a band of centrist Democrats last month, the House will vote on the Senate infrastructure bill on Thursday, the same day government funding is set to expire. That means there’s a pretty good chance the House will also vote on a finalized version of the Build Back Better act this week. House progressives have promised to vote down the infrastructure bill unless it passes in tandem with Build Back Better, with a commitment from Senate Democrats to adopt it in short order. As Pelosi explained in a letter to Democrats, “We are now working together with the Senate and the White House on changes to this historic legislation...which includes the Child Tax Credit, child care, paid family and medical leave, home health care, universal pre-K and more.”
- One minor advantage of using Build Back Better as a vehicle for increasing the debt limit is it’ll make it harder for the Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) or Joe Manchin (D-WV) to attempt any funny business like “voting down the biggest chunk of Biden’s agenda while doing a little curtsy thing.” It would also prevent the Senate in general from dragging its feet with Build Back Better, since the debt limit absolutely has to be increased by mid-October.
If we get through the week without a government shutdown, and with the bipartisan infrastructure bill off to the White House for Biden’s signature, it’ll be a pretty decent sign that the Build Back Better act will follow suit in October. Otherwise, we’ll have entered some really choppy waters.
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Urgent fights unfolding in Texas – join the ACLU today
Friend—
What's happening in Texas at this moment should concern all of us—whether you live in the state or elsewhere.
Gov. Greg Abbott called a special legislative session to order this summer, overtly aimed at reviving a slew of anti-civil rights bills that were blocked in the state's last regular session.
The bills in this new session attack voter rights, transgender rights, reproductive freedom, critical race theory, and much more. They're blatantly consistent with similar attacks that we've seen unfold across the states this year – and it has led many lawmakers to temporarily leave Texas to break quorum and block such bills from passing.
At this urgent time, alongside our Texas affiliate and advocates like you, the ACLU is moving fast—both at the legislature and in court—and we need advocates like you with us. Add your name today to join the fight.
Here's what you should know so far:
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Defending abortion access: As events continued to unfold in the legislature's special session, the ACLU and the ACLU of Texas filed a lawsuit with partners challenging Senate Bill 8—a blatantly unconstitutional law that bans abortion at six weeks, before many know they’re pregnant. The bill also authorizes private citizens to sue anyone who provides an abortion beyond six weeks, abortion funds that assist patients with paying for their health care beyond six weeks, and those who help someone get an abortion beyond six weeks, including clergy or counselors who advise patients and even someone who drives a patient to their appointment including family members, friends, and rideshare drivers.
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Safeguarding the vote: In the first two days of the special session, lawmakers made it clear that voter suppression was a priority by introducing two restrictive voting bills: Senate Bill 1 and House Bill 3. While our affiliate teams testified in the Texas House and Senate and joined grassroots efforts to push back against these extreme measures, the ACLU and the ACLU of Texas also began representing Mr. Hervis Rogers, a 62-year-old Black man who faces decades in prison after the state recently accused him of voting when ineligible for what was at worst an innocent mistake.
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Protecting transgender youth: In addition to abortion bans and suppressive voting restrictions, roughly a dozen pieces of anti-transgender bills have made their way into the Texas legislature again during this session, including several that would ban trans youth from their right to play school sports. While our teams on the ground work with fellow activists to fight against these bills, our legal team is also prepping to litigate if any of these cruel and unnecessary bills should become law, just as we have in four other states so far this year.
What happens in one state like Texas can have a ripple effect across all of them, especially at a time when lawmakers are clearly leveraging state law for their own anti-civil liberties agenda. We need you on our team as we keep fighting in all 50 states, D.C., and Puerto Rico – add your name today to join us so we can act quickly at a moment's notice, wherever we're needed.
In your state and nationwide, we will not stop being there for people's rights. And it's dedication like yours that fuels that fight. So please stay tuned and sign up to stay tuned on future fights.
Onward,
The ACLU Team
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The fact that Joe Manchin remains a key obstacle to enacting President Biden’s agenda is ironic, in the Alanis sense of the word, considering that Build Back Better is basically a recipe for all that ails his home state of West Virginia. The bill’s extension of Biden’s enhanced child tax credit, and its other child-care provisions, would be particularly valuable in a state where high poverty levels make it extremely difficult for working parents to raise their children. The tax credit alone could lift 23,000 West Virginia children out of poverty, and another measure to cap out-of-pocket child-care spending would more than halve weekly expenses for parents, which currently average $198 per week. The Century Foundation gave West Virginia (along with four other states) an F rating for its care policies, and the best way to keep it there would be for Manchin to gut or kill Build Back Better.
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Germany’s main center-left Social Democratic Party narrowly defeated outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right Christian Democratic Union in Sunday’s election, giving the SPD its first chance to lead the German government in almost 20 years, though it remains unclear who the next chancellor will be. The results were, in sum, a victory for the center-left, as both SPD and the smaller, allied progressive Greens party gained a substantial number of seats, but the splintering of support left neither of the major parties with a straightforward path to forming a majority coalition. Until this election, the SDP and CDU had governed in coalition, and SDP’s leader, Olaf Scholz, served as Merkel’s finance minister, suggesting the new government will not differ radically from the old one. But after Sunday’s results were tallied, Scholz called on CDU to step aside and enter the opposition.
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