Manchin deals another blow

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View in browser Inside Washington  Written by Andrew Naughtie | July 15, 2022 Nope Surging inflation, spiraling gas prices, horrific gun violence and the stubbornly persistent Covid-19 pandemic have dragged the Biden administration into a state of deep frustration – but among the human adversaries to the president's agenda, none looms as large as Joe Manchin. And last night, there came a reminder of just how obstructive the Senate's least sympathetic Democrat can be.   Having single-handedly blocked his own party's massive budget reconciliation package, Build Back Better, Mr Manchin has now been given a lead role in formulating a new iteration. According to multiple reports, he has told other Democrats he will only support a much narrower deal than expected, making clear that he will not vote for anything that includes efforts to fight the climate emergency or imposes taxes on the wealthy or corporations.   If no bill can be produced in short order, the Democrats will be left almost empty-handed headed into the final furlong of the midterm elections. And if one is ultimately put through with the party's core values hacked out of it according to Mr Manchin's wishes, many of their voters will be left asking yet again what the point of it all really is. Of all of the endangered Democrats up for re-election in 2022, Senator Catherine Cortez Masto is perhaps the most anonymous.   Despite the fact she served two terms as Nevada's attorney general, was hand-picked by the late Harry Reid to succeed him in 2016 and ran the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in the 2020 cycle that saw her party take control of the chamber (if only just), the first Latina Senator does not cut the same profile as her paradoxically soft-spoken but big-mouthed predecessor.   In a state that narrowly voted for Joe Biden and where he has only a 43 per cent approval rating, being an anonymous Democrat is a risky situation, since the lack of a unique brand means it will be harder for her to draw distinctions with an unpopular president. And Nevada has been trending rightward in recent years, driven mostly by working-class Latinos moving to the GOP.   But Ms Cortez Masto might just have been a lifeline last month when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade.   Abortion rights are incredibly popular in Nevada – 62 percent of its residents support abortion rights – and elective abortion is legal up to 24 weeks in the state, though the procedure can be performed afterward in cases of life or health risk, according to the Guttmacher Institute.   Ms Cortez Masto's Republican opponent Adam Laxalt – himself a former state attorney general and the grandson of the late former governor and senator Paul Laxalt – has sought to use the fact that abortion is legal in the state to make it a non-issue in the race. But Ms Cortez Masto clearly sees an opportunity to capitalize on it.   On Thursday, she and fellow Democratic Senator Patty Murray tried to pass legislation that would have allowed for travel across state lines to seek an abortion. As she told your dispatcher on Wednesday, she proposed the legislation because multiple states are moving fast to limit a woman's right to seek an abortion, variously criminalizing those who do or making it possible to bring civil actions against them or against providers in states where abortion services are in fact available.   Clearly Ms Cortez Masto will have known that the legislation would never pass via unanimous consent. Sure enough, Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma, one of the Senate's most conservative Republicans, objected, effectively killing the bill.   But afterward, the Nevada Democrat – not known for her verbosity – delivered a fiery floor speech defending the legislation.   "Ultimately," she said, "we made that decision as a state if women want to travel to my state to seek services, and providers want to provide services, and employers want to help them travel, to let them do that."   She also took exception to people who said that this essentially amounts to trafficking pregnant women.   "That is so offensive. But I am not surprised, because in this day and age, some of these radical ideas coming out of this Congress miss what is happening across the country", she said.   Mr Cortez Masto clearly thinks protecting abortion rights as a chance for her to define herself, not unlike Mr Reid did in 2010 when his opponent Sharron Angle said pregnancy from rape was a chance to turn a "lemon situation into lemonade", contributing to a victory won when many thought the then-majority leader was dead on arrival. Surveys in Silver State have often earned pollsters a bronze or worse, so actual numbers are scarce. But a recent KLAS TV-The Hill-Emerson College poll found that Ms Cortez Masto leads Mr Laxalt 44 to 41 per cent. And on Thursday, she reported she had raised a whopping $7.5m – a war chest that looks like she hit the jackpot at the Bellagio. Reading list John Bowden: Will Joe Biden's trip to Saudi Arabia affect US gas prices? Sunny Hundal: Russia is about to play its most dangerous cards – and the west is not ready . . What else you need to know today Arriving in the West Bank as his Middle East tour continues, Joe Biden came bearing hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to the distributed variously to Palestinian hospitals in east Jerusalem, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, and other humanitarian schemes and peacebuilding efforts. However, onlookers have warned that peace between Palestine and Israel is not something that the US can simply "buy". For now, Mr Biden is committed to a relatively traditional approach to the peace process; standing alongside Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, he declared that a two-state solution remains the "best way to achieve equal measures of security, prosperity, freedom and democracy for the Palestinians as well as Israelis". With Israel facing yet another election however, Mr Biden acknowledged that he would not be instigating peace talks between the two sides this time around. A breakthrough of sorts, however, has been achieved in the form of a deal between Israel, Saudi Arabia and Egypt that would resolve a long-standing dispute over a pair of islands in the Red Sea and allow Israeli aircraft to transit through Saudi airspace for the first time in history.   As an insurrectionist who carried a Confederate flag to the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 gets 5 months in jail, a judge has rejected Steve Bannon's latest attempt to forestall his contempt of Congress trial. Mr Bannon, who on a 2020 recording released this week showed predicted exactly what Donald Trump would do after losing the election, was found in contempt after refusing to cooperate with a subpoena from the 6 January select committee, though he recently made an offer to do so. Meanwhile, it has been reported by the Department for Homeland Security that the US Secret Service deleted text messages from January 5 and 6 of 2021 shortly after an agency internal watchdog requested them. A spokesman responded saying the deletions were inadvertent, claiming that in January 2021, the service "began to reset its mobile phones to factory settings as part of a pre-planned, three-month system migration. In that process, data resident on some phones was lost".   Los Angeles county is edging towards the threshold of Covid-19 transmission that would trigger a new mask mandate. The nationwide surge being driven by the BA.5 variant has seen daily death figures in the county rise to an average of 14 per day over the last week, with more than 1,200 people in hospital with the disease. Overall, the county remains in the "high" transmission category, meaning the seven-day average of new Covid-related hospital admissions is at 10 per 100,000 residents.   The fallout continues from a deeply ugly incident in which Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was sexually harassed by a right-wing social media figure outside the US Capitol. The congresswoman told reporters after the incident that she did not feel safe in and around the building, which she said "is not a place that is designed to protect women". (She also described the fear she feels as members of Congress and Capitol Police officers sympathetic to 6 January rioters still have not been held accountable.) The man who videoed himself harassing her, Alex Stein, is a right-wing rabble-rouser of minor note who describes himself as a "professional troll". And finally For all the talk of a post-truth world, there are still those among us who continue to believe that The Truth Is Out There. They have been galvanized in their beliefs over the last few years by eerie footage of "unidentified aerial phenomena" spotted by the US military – and now, members of Congress have voted to implement a better reporting system for such encounters. With lawmakers in both parties seriously worried about the possibility of unknown military technology being used in US airspace, the aim is to make sure service members who spot sinister and unexplained objects can report them without fear of being stereotyped as delusional. Articles available exclusively to subscribers Andrew Buncombe: How Brittney Griner became a pawn in the US-Russia geopolitical war Other newsletters you might like Morning Headlines Weekdays, 8am (UK time) Written by Joe Sommerlad Sign up Health Check Every Thursday, 7am (UK time) Written by Rebecca Thomas Sign up News you can trust The Independent has a 100% NewsGuard trust rating Find out more . Let me know your thoughts on Twitter @AndrewNaughtie or email. 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