“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
— President Biden, in an address to the nation, speaking directly to the unvaccinated.
“We’ve been patient, but our patience is wearing thin. And your refusal has cost all of us.”
— President Biden, in an address to the nation, speaking directly to the unvaccinated.
On July 4th, President Biden said the country was “closer than ever to declaring our independence” from the coronavirus. That turned out to be false as the highly-contagious Delta variant surged — mostly through the unvaccinated population.
At 5:00 pm ET, Biden will outline his new plan to encourage — and even mandate — vaccinations in an effort to end the pandemic.
Leave your reactions in the comments.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer told NPR that he will retire on his own terms.
Said Breyer: “When exactly I should retire, or will retire, has many complex parts to it. I think I’m aware of most of them, and I am, and will consider them.”
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“President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil is temporarily banning social media companies from removing certain content, including his claims that the only way he’ll lose next year’s elections is if the vote is rigged — one of the most significant steps by a democratically elected leader to control what can be said on the internet,” the New York Times reports.
“The new social media rules, issued this week and effective immediately, appear to be the first time a national government has stopped internet companies from taking down content that violates their rules.”
A new SurveyUSA poll in California finds 54% opposed to recalling Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), while 41% support a recall.
“The United States and Mexico restarted high-level economic talks Thursday after a four-year pause as top advisers to presidents Joe Biden and Andrés Manuel López Obrador expressed eagerness to make headway on issues important to both nations such as infrastructure, trade and migration,” the AP reports.
“President Biden is announcing sweeping new vaccine mandates Thursday that will impact tens of millions of Americans, pushing all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workforces to be inoculated or face weekly testing,” the Washington Post reports.
Associated Press: “The expansive rules mandate that all employers with more than 100 workers require them to be vaccinated or test for the virus weekly, affecting about 80 million Americans. And the roughly 17 million workers at health facilities that receive federal Medicare or Medicaid also will have to be fully vaccinated.”
“Biden is also signing an executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government — with no option to test out. That covers several million more workers.”
CNN reports companies could face thousands of dollars in fines per employee if they don’t comply.
“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the proxy voting rules that the House implemented because of the pandemic, a tool that Republican lawmakers have taken advantage of themselves,” NBC News reports.
French Health Minister Olivier Véran announced that starting next year France will offer free contraception for women up to the age of 25, Axios reports.
From today’s White House press briefing with Jen Psaki:
REPORTER: Can the Department of Labor or anybody else compel major employers, large employers, to force the vaccine mandates on their employees?
PSAKI: Yes. Stay tuned. More to come this afternoon.
President Biden is expected to address the nation at 5 p.m. ET.
Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “We’ve said before that the Republicans were favored to win the House majority next year, both because of redistricting and also because of the usual midterm trend that breaks against the party in the White House, among other factors. Following the completion of this redistricting preview, we have not changed our view on that.”
“We did our own back-of-the-envelope projections of the House and anticipated some aggressive (but not maximally aggressive) gerrymandering by both Republicans and Democrats, where applicable. We also assumed a somewhat neutral political environment, which very well may not end up being the case – in all likelihood, Joe Biden’s currently net-negative approval rating needs to rebound for there to be even a neutral environment next year as opposed to a Republican-leaning one.”
“Anyway, we got a GOP net gain of roughly a dozen seats, more than the five-seat improvement they need from the 2020 results to win the House majority. This is a deliberately modest outlook, and Republicans could easily blow past it next year, while there are also scenarios under which Democrats are able to minimize those GOP gains and perhaps even save their majority. But our default expectation has been, and remains, a Republican House takeover next year.”
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL.) indicated that she is planning to vote against the provisions under consideration in the House Ways and Means Committee’s markup of portions of Democrats’ $3.5 trillion spending bill, citing concerns about the legislative process, The Hill reports.
Punchbowl News: “This legislation is still likely to get through the committee, and Murphy seems open to still supporting it at some point. But her announcement highlights that Democratic members are pretty peeved over the fact that they don’t have more information — like scoring and budgetary offsets — on the massive $3.5 trillion package they are being asked to support.”
Workers removing the Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond yesterday were expecting to find a time capsule from 1887 buried at its base, the Washington Post reports.
“According to reports from the period… the capsule was crammed with 60 items. Most of it was Confederate memorabilia, Lee family history and the like. But Brumfield discovered one intriguing item on the list: a picture said to show President Abraham Lincoln in his coffin. If it’s in there, and if it survives, that would be a tremendous find, he said — one of only a handful known to exist.”
Former Vice President Mike Pence will join Fox & Friends for an interview on Friday morning, his first national TV appearance in nearly a year.
Despite Donald Trump’s claim that Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) was also endorsing Harriet Hageman (R) in the GOP primary against Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), Lummis’s comment to the Washington Examiner indicated otherwise:
“I’ll tell you, I’ve known Harriet Hageman for decades. She is a fabulous choice for President Trump — and I’m just leaving it at that. Take my statement at face value. That’s all I’m saying.”
New York Times: “Just as millions of families around the United States navigate sending their children back to school at an uncertain moment in the pandemic, the number of children admitted to the hospital with Covid-19 has risen to the highest levels reported to date. Nearly 30,000 of them entered hospitals in August.”
Nate Cohn: “As they’ve grown in numbers, college graduates have instilled increasingly liberal cultural norms while gaining the power to nudge the Democratic Party to the left. Partly as a result, large portions of the party’s traditional working-class base have defected to the Republicans.”
“Over the longer run, some Republicans even fantasize that the rise of educational polarization might begin to erode the Democratic advantage among voters of color without a college degree. Perhaps a similar phenomenon may help explain how Donald J. Trump, who mobilized racial animus for political gain, nonetheless fared better among voters of color than previous Republicans did, and fared worse among white voters.”
The Cook Political Report has a new map to track which incumbents (or retiring incumbents’ districts) are most at risk in the redistricting process.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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