In War on Vaccines, GOP Turns to Unemployment Benefits

DC: U.S. Capitol, Supreme Court
Graeme Sloan
By Yuval Rosenberg

Happy Thursday! Or not so
happy for Facebook and shareholders in its parent company, Meta,
which saw the worst one-day crash in stock market history, wiping
out $251 billion in value. Here’s what else is happening as we
await another massive winter storm.

Congress Prepares for Shutdown Fallback

Congress is heading for its third stopgap spending bill for the
fiscal year that started just over four months ago.

Facing a February 18 deadline to extend government funding and
prevent a government shutdown, congressional appropriators had
reportedly hoped to make some progress this week toward an
agreement on a spending package for the rest of the fiscal year
that began in October. But negotiations on the long-delayed funding
bill have been slow, with Democrats and Republicans still divided
over key issues.

“We haven’t resolved anything yet,” Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL),
the top Republican on the Senate Appropriations panel,
told reporters Thursday.

The two sides haven’t yet settled on topline spending levels, as
Democrats push for a larger increase in non-defense spending while
Republicans continue to insist on “parity,” or equal-sized
increases for the defense and non-defense portions of the
budget.

“Right now, we are going back and forth with offers between the
Democrats and Republicans and we're hoping to reach a deal on a
topline very soon on that,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said
at her weekly press conference Thursday.

Roll Call’s Lindsey McPherson
reports that Republicans on Wednesday proposed a
larger boost to the defense budget than 5% increase approved on a
bipartisan basis in the annual National Defense Authorization Act,
which would put total Pentagon and security spending at $778
billion.

Another stopgap: There’s no deal on topline spending
numbers at hand. “Am I optimistic? Probably not at this point,”
Shelby told reporters. “But I’m not glum. Not yet.”

Without an agreement, and with the February 18 deadline
approaching, lawmakers will almost certainly need to fall back on
another stopgap extension, known as a continuing resolution. “Even
if appropriators could reach a deal on defense and nondefense
toplines in the next few days, they would still need time to hammer
out spending levels for the individual 12 bills and all the policy
details under them,” McPherson writes. “That’s a massive task that
would be difficult to negotiate in less than two weeks, let alone
draft finalized text for and pass through both chambers.”

The question is how long that stopgap measure will last — and
the answer will depend on how much progress appropriators can make
in the coming days.

The bottom line: Each side has reason to want to reach a
deal. While the prospect of a full-year continuing resolution
extending funding at fiscal 2021 levels holds some appeal for
Republicans, many also want to provide the Pentagon with a funding
increase and the flexibility that would come with new
appropriations. Democrats, meanwhile, are eager to fund their
agenda and show some progress. Much of the spending authorized
under last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, for example,
requires lawmakers to pass the annual spending package. And
Democrats are pushing for additional pandemic relief funding, which
may be unlikely without a larger agreement.

GOP Lawmakers Use Unemployment Benefits in War on Vaccines

A
new report from the left-leaning Century
Foundation explores how conservatives in some states are turning to
the unemployment system to reward workers who quit their jobs after
refusing to obey vaccine mandates.

Although there is some variation in how the rules are applied,
workers who quit their jobs typically are ineligible for
unemployment benefits. In addition, refusal to comply with an
employer’s reasonable requirement is tantamount to misconduct,
which is a legitimate cause for firing, and workers fired for cause
don’t usually qualify for benefits.

But as part of the Republican Party’s war on both private and
public mandates — shaped in part by a suspicion of vaccines among
many Republican voters — some GOP-led states are changing the rules
to allow vaccine refusers to collect unemployment benefits.
Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas and Tennessee have all passed new
laws along those lines, and Nebraska has done so through policy
guidance. Another 15 states are considering such legislation.

Ironically, many of these states sought to cut off unemployment
benefits early last summer, ending federal programs that provided
enhanced and extended benefits during the pandemic. “These states
withdrew support for individuals suffering unemployment directly
because of COVID-19, but now suddenly want to provide UI benefits
to those who were fired or had to quit because they voluntarily
choose to increase the chance of infection for themselves and their
coworkers,” the report says.

Writing in November about the situation, The Washington Post’s
Catherine Rampell savored the irony. “All spring and summer,
Republicans cried bloody murder about how too-generous unemployment
benefits were supposedly discouraging Americans from returning to
work,”
she wrote. “Expanded jobless benefits were
creating welfare queens, they argued, and driving labor shortages
and hurting small businesses.”

Now, some red states are happy to reward a refusal to work, as
long as it’s in the name of vaccine resistance. The benefits of
such rewards, however, are difficult to determine. “[T]he policies
being enacted seem, at least at this point, about sending a
political message rather than delivering additional benefits to
large numbers of residents,” the Century Foundation report says.
“Sadly, though, in endorsing vaccine refusal, these policies also
undermine public health and work toward making the pandemic all
that much more lethal.”

Quote of the Day: What Manchin Wants

“That’s music to my ears. Deficit reduction, inflation,
being fiscally responsible — sounds like something we should be
talking about!”

– Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), whose objections to Democrats’ Build
Back Better Act have derailed the bill, in an interview with

NBC News, on discussions in his party on adding
deficit-reduction measures to a new version of their legislation in
order to attract his support. Manchin told NBC that his priority
for the bill is to “fix the tax code” and he supports clean energy
measures and some proposals to expand health care coverage. But
some of Manchin’s tax ideas could run into resistance from Sen.
Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who scuttled proposed tax rate hikes in an
earlier plan.

Chart of the Day: Closer to Normal

New jobless claims fell to a seasonally adjusted 238,000 last
week, the Labor Department said Thursday, boosting confidence that
the omicron variant of Covid-19 and the economic drag it created is
in rapid decline. The report “tells us that the hit to the labor
market from the Omicron variant is short-lived,”
said Gus Faucher, chief economist at PNC Financial
Services Group. “Even if we do see job losses in January we should
expect to see job gains return in February.”

Economist Tuan Nguyen of the consulting firm RSM said the
current trend suggests that the unemployment benefits data will
soon return to pre-pandemic levels. “Not a surprise as omicron
crests, new filings for jobless benefits dropped in the last 2
weeks of Jan,” Nguyen
tweeted. “We will likely reach 2019 level this
week.”

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