The House has convened and is considering H.R. 51 – The Washington, D.C. Admission Act. The bill would grant statehood to Washington, DC, a Democratic priority that faces obstacles to final passage even with the party now in control of both chambers of Congress and the White House. House Democrats passed the bill last year in a historic vote that marked the first time either chamber of Congress had advanced a DC statehood measure. But it did not advance in the Senate, which was controlled by a Republican majority at the time. Now Democrats are pushing again for its passage and the legislation is expected to pass in the House but still faces an uphill fight in the Senate, where it is unlikely to get enough Republican support to clear a 60-vote threshold for passage. HR 51 was introduced by Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s nonvoting House member and a longtime advocate for statehood and has strong support of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California.)
The Senate met at 10 a.m. and resumed consideration of S.937, COVID–19 Hate Crimes Act. The Senate will vote on three amendments before final passage is expected today. The White House strongly supports the legislation.
At noon, Republican senators will unveil their counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal, while the president continues to solicit bipartisan opinions on the massive package. Senators Shelley Moore Capito (R-West Virginia), Roger Wicker (R-Mississippi), Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania), and John Barrasso (R-Wyoming) will hold a press conference to present their framework. Republicans have concerns about Mr. Biden’s $2 trillion proposal, arguing that it contains too many provisions that are unrelated to traditional forms of infrastructure, such as funding for home care for the elderly and disabled and electric cars. Republicans are also balking at Mr. Biden’s proposed method of paying for the package — a corporate tax rate increase from 21% to 28%, as well as a new global minimum tax for multinational corporations. The Republican plan claims to be fully paid for by user fees and other offsets and won’t raise taxes and is an opening bid in a broader negotiation, not the final product. But $600 billion is far from the roughly $4 trillion proposal that the White House has floated and everyone acknowledges that significant concessions would have to be made on both sides to get anything that could pass in the middle. Right now there are several piecemeal infrastructure bills making their way through Congress and some of them — like legislation to rebuild America’s water system — are bipartisan. The water bill is getting a vote as a test of bipartisanship and while it’s not clear how or if it would be passed as a standalone bill and signed by the President or even passed out of the Senate and then included in the larger infrastructure package, it’s a good example of how Democrats are trying to show there is some bipartisan support out there for specific areas of infrastructure.
This morning on Earth Day, at the first day of the virtual Leaders Summit on Climate, President Biden declared America “has resolved to take action” on climate change and called on world leaders to significantly accelerate their own plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or risk a disastrous collective failure to stop catastrophic climate change. Participants in the summit include Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, among many others. In a show of renewed commitment after four years of the Trump administration’s climate denial, Mr. Biden formally pledged that the United States would cut its emissions at least in half from 2005 levels by 2030. Barely three months into Mr. Biden’s presidency, the contrast with his science-denying predecessor, Donald J. Trump, could not have been more striking. Mr. Biden’s target of 50 percent to 52 percent by the end of the decade calls for a steep and rapid decline of fossil fuel use in virtually every sector of the American economy and marks the start of what is sure to be a bitter partisan fight over achieving it. The two-day summit comes at a time when scientists are warning that governments must take decisive action to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. The consequences of exceeding that threshold includes mass species extinctions, water shortages and more extreme weather events that will be most devastating to the poorest countries least responsible for causing global warming Officially, nations that are party to the Paris agreement are obligated to announce their new targets for emissions cuts in time for a United Nations conference in Scotland in November.
Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry said the creation of a net-zero economy will require a strong public-private partnership, noting that “governments alone cannot possibly find all the necessary investment” to meet the task of a net-zero carbon future.
Full Schedule from State Department
A Proclamation on Earth Day, 2021
Adam S. Olsen, Washington, D.C.
