Lemonade 🌻🌻🌻

Legislative Update:  While the usual crowd of Republican crazies including a cast of presidential wannabees, extreme MAGAs, a Nazi policy espousing foreign leader and the FG himself spoke at the latest in an endless stream of CPAC’s conventions, Senate Democrats legislated.  They finally passed their much awaited, and sometimes feared dead, reconciliation bill.  Instead of the large Build Back Better “wish list” one that they’d bandied about earlier in the year, this bill, shrewdly renamed the Inflation Reduction Act, is scaled back, focused on the environment and health care with some offsetting tax reform provisions.   On the environment front, the bill includes $300 billion for energy and climate reform.  On the health care front it allows the federal government to negotiate the price Medicare pays for certain expensive drugs while also putting an annual cap of $2000 on Medicare beneficiaries’ out of pocket drug expenditures and a $35 per month cap on their insulin costs. It also extends the Affordable Care health care subsidies through 2025. The bill originally extended the $35 insulin cap to include those with private insurance but because the Senate Parliamentarian ruled that doing so would violate the incomprehensible rules of reconciliation, that extension needed 60 votes, rather than 50, to be included. Seven Republicans including Dr. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Cindy Hyde Smith of Mississippi, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Dan Sullivan of Alaska voted to include the insulin provision in the bill but 43 others including three doctors, Roger Marshall of Kansas, John Barrasso of Wyoming and the always obstructive Rand Paul of Kentucky, who really should have known better and the maybe not so terrific as he wants us to believe Mitt Romney, who for the record also opposed the Veteran burn pit health care legislation, voted against doing so. One of the Senate naysayers was Iowa’s Joni Ernst, who talked about the importance of capping insulin prices during her 2020 reelection campaign. Looks like Ernst believes that towing the party line is more important than helping her constituents.  Worth noting, the average price for a unit of  insulin in the US is $98.70 versus $6.94 in Australia, $9.08 in France, $11.00 in Germany, $12.00 in Canada $14.4 in Japan.

Offsets:  On the pay for side, the bill creates a 15% minimum tax for corporations making $1 billion or more in income, a provision that is expected to bring in $300 million in revenues, and since Arizona Senator Sinema wouldn’t support getting rid of the carried interest provision, it now includes a 1% excise tax on corporate stock buybacks, a provision that, at least according to those who compute these things, will actually raise more revenue than closing the carried interest loophole.  The bill now moves to the House where Nancy’s crowd is expected to easily pass it, not because they’re pleased that it fails to address all the things they want, but because they, at least enough of them, are pragmatic enough to know that something is better than nothing and it represents a much needed win going into the mid-terms.  And to be fair, the Act is a big win for President Biden, Senate Leader Schumer and the Democratic contingent. Say what you want about Kyrsten Sinema and her moderate colleague Joe Manchin, and many progressives have, but the timing of their cooperation and probably even their efforts to trim the bill, together with the Supreme Court abortion ruling, may help save the Democrats’ hide in the midterms, well maybe. The environment matters and that $35 cap on insulin is a big deal for those who’ll benefit and for those with impacted family members.  Republicans who will take full credit for anything their states and districts get from the bill are already out on Twitter and the airwaves calling it inflationary and socialist but maybe, just maybe their opposition to extending the insulin savings provision will come back to bite them because that opposition, like their opposition to the burn pit legislation that ultimately passed, is kind of hard to defend.  But then again, who knows anymore.

Abortion Politics: Speaking of things that bite, while it’s great that Kansas voters refused to allow their state to strip reproductive rights from its constitution, legislators in Indiana just voted for a super restrictive abortion law.  A few corporations including pharma giant Eli Lilly responded by saying that because they expect the law will make it harder to recruit skilled professionals they’ll now be growing their business in friendlier locales. That’s great, but where was Lilly before the legislation was passed?  Speaking of unfriendly locales, Florida’s Governor DeSantis continues to spin out of control.  Last week he suspended Hillsborough County’s twice elected state attorney Andrew Warren,  after he said that he wouldn’t enforce the state's 15-week abortion ban and condemned laws criminalizing gender-affirming health care. DeSantis isn’t the only Florida politician who’s off the rails.  Over the weekend, speaking at the CPAC convention Senator Marco Rubio, who is facing Central Florida Democratic Congresswoman Val Demings in the midterms, blamed George Soros and all those evil globalists for all of the country’s ills.  To be clear, by Soros and globalists he’s obviously dog whistling Jews, a hateful bigoted position to take anywhere but particularly odd given Florida’s demographic make-up.  But then again, Florida’s other Senator Rick Scott wants to cut both Medicare and Social Security so who knows?

Viral Musings:  Joe Biden is back.  Two negative COVID tests in a row and he’s ready to roll despite all those calls, amplified by the likes of the NY Times’ Maureen Dowd and some in his own party for him to throw in the towel and say that he’s not going to run in 2024. You’d think that they’d wait until after the midterms to go there but Democrats tend to eat their own and the NY Times was all in on the #ButHerEmails parade so apparently not. That said, a few clever folks have turned the MAGA Go Brandon FU slam around recharacterizing into a Dark Brandon meme, depicting a heroic, sunglass donning Biden action figure, as a way to celebrate his recent multiple legislative victories because when you’ve got lemons, might as well make lemonade.  As to viruses, while COVID is here there and everywhere collaborating with the weather gods to maximize flight cancellations, the focus is now also on Monkeypox and polio. According to Bloomberg, it’s worth noting that though its effectiveness wanes over time, those who received a smallpox vaccine before 1972 when vaccinations were stopped due to the eradication of the disease, still have some protection against the worst effects of Monkeypox and everyone, except of course the original anti vax crowd and too young to be vaccinated yet babies have received polio vaccines.