The Economist - USA (2021-02-13)

24 United States The EconomistFebruary 13th 2021

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ter—mean that, in practice, it is not very

conciliatory to the minority party. The in-

centives are to instead stuff as many major-

ity-party proposals allowable under the so-

called Byrd rule—the strict and complicat-

ed rule adjudicating which policies are

allowed in reconciliation bills—while the

chance is available. “It’s very difficult for

the minority party to support a reconcilia-

tion package, just based on the structure of

the approach, which is to diminish their

involvement,” says Jason Grumet, the pres-

ident of the Bipartisan Policy Centre, a

think-tank. Even if a senator like Mr Rom-

ney were supportive of Democrats’ child-

tax credit reforms, for instance, he would

almost certainly balk at other features of

the legislation, like the proposed $350bn

bailout of state and local governments, and

vote against the entire package.

For that reason, both of the last signifi-

cant reconciliation bills—the Trump-era

tax cuts and an Obamacare-related law—

received no votes from the opposition

party in the Senate. In a sign of things to

come, the budget-resolution bill to start

this round of reconciliation was passed on

February 5th on strict party lines.

Reconciliation makes kingmakers of

conservative Democratic senators, like Joe

Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Si-

nema of Arizona. With them, Democrats

can achieve a sizeable chunk of their agen-

da. Without them, their efforts will go

down to defeat just as Republican efforts to

repeal Obamacare using reconciliation

did. Already they have started to flex their

powers. Mr Manchin has pushed for the

$1,400 cheques Mr Biden promised to go to

a more limited set of Americans. His scep-

ticism of plans, dear to progressives like

Bernie Sanders, to eventually increase the

federal minimum wage to $15 may end

them too. With Ms Sinema and six other

Democratic senators, Mr Manchin also vot-

ed for an amendment barring stimulus

payments to undocumented immigrants.

Progressives have launched some ef-

forts to berate them into changing. “Unfor-

tunately our senator, Joe Manchin, thinks

he knows better than both our president

and the Democrats in Congress. I guess Joe

just don’t know what it’s been like to live

through the pandemic,” claims one radio

ad airing in West Virginia from the No Ex-

cuses pac, a pressure group. So far, there

has been no discernible budging. Mr Man-

chin, who once released a campaign ad of

himself shooting a hole through Barack

Obama’s climate plans, will probably deter-

mine the outer limit of the president’s

clean-energy agenda too. He has favoured

investments in energy innovation like car-

bon capture, but remains lukewarm on Mr

Biden’s other climate proposals.

The promised repeal of the Trump tax

cuts, which may be proposed to pay for in-

frastructure spending, may also prove

hard. That is because it would require “268

of 272 elected Democrats [a majority in the

House plus 50 senators] to agree on the

same set of policy choices,” says Rohit Ku-

mar of pwc’s national tax-policy group, a

former deputy chief-of-staff to Mitch

McConnell. Because that degree of party

discipline is hard to achieve, Mr Kumar is

sceptical that Democrats will agree to in-

crease the corporate-tax rate from 21% to

28%, as Mr Biden campaigned on, or to in-

crease the tax rate on capital gains from

20% to 39.6%. Another likely result is that

traditional infrastructure spending on

roads, bridges and broadband may survive,

while the green-tinged bits on retrofitting

schools and houses and installing electric-

vehicle charging stations, may be culled.

Politicos pouring over obscure senato-

rial rules (one coming attraction will be fe-

verish discussion over the “Byrd bath”) can

sometimes miss that the rules restraining

Mr Biden are self-imposed. Three Republi-

cans could be conceivably picked off on

piecemeal bills, but gathering ten to avoid a

filibuster looks impossible in most cases.

Eliminating the filibuster, by a simple ma-

jority vote is thus appealing to some. “Over

my dead body,” Mr Manchin recently told

The Economist. Ms Sinema’s office has said

quite definitively that she is “against elim-

inating the filibuster and she is not open to

changing her mind.” That will push Demo-

crats towards a parliamentary manoeuvre

that is repellent to persuadable Republi-

cans. So much for bipartisanship.^7

“I

just believestrongly that Facebook

shouldn’t be the arbiter of truth of

everything that people say online,” Mark

Zuckerberg, the social-media boss, said

last year. Yet despite Mr Zuckerberg’s hope,

that is what Facebook has become. Like a

power company, Facebook can illuminate

certain voices, while pushing others off the

grid. The most high-profile example of the

social-media firm wielding its might was

in January, when Facebook kicked Mr

Trump off for stoking the riots at the Capi-

tol. (Twitter also suspended him.) Face-

book’s decision is currently under review

by the social-media firm’s internal jury, the

Oversight Board, which advises the com-

pany on thorny content issues, of which

there are plenty more.

On February 8th Facebook announced

that it was taking another stand on what

could not appear on its platform: false-

hoods about vaccinations. The company

will now remove posts and block groups

that claim vaccines make people ill or

cause autism; previously the company had

only demoted such claims, giving them

less prominence in users’ feeds and in

search results. Facebook and other internet

companies have been under pressure by

politicians and the press to do more to po-

lice anti-vax content since 2019, when

measles outbreaks in New York prompted a

flurry of nonsense. Covid-19 has given the

subject new urgency and attention.

In America social-media platforms are

not only tools for spreading misinforma-

tion but also for co-ordination. The anti-

vax campaigners who briefly halted immu-

nisations at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles

used a Facebook page to organise, says Alli-

son Winnike, boss of the Immunisation

Partnership, a non-profit that raises aware-

ness of vaccinations. Campaigners are also

employing social media to push anti-vax

bills in many American states, says Joe

Smyser, who runs Public Good Projects, a

non-profit focused on public health. For

example, one proposed bill circulating in

Kentucky tries to eliminate all vaccine re-

quirements for employees. Another aims

to create a pre-emptive opt-out in case co-

vid-19 vaccinations are ever required.

Just how much Facebook will actually

DALLAS

Facebook tries to pre-empt regulation by squeezing anti-vaxxers on its platform

Social media and anti-vaxxers

Likes and protein spikes

Group think