Even though it’s only their second day in the White House, the Biden administration is already running at full speed. On Thursday, the newly sworn-in president is aiming to pass sweeping executive orders geared towards speeding up the vaccine rollout effort and putting a stop to the pandemic as soon as possible.
By the end of April, Biden’s team wants to see 100 million vaccines administered. Likewise, they’re aiming to get every school in the US reopened in that timeframe. An expansion of testing facilities and an increase in vaccine availability are both top-level priorities for Joe Biden going into the first one hundred days of his presidency
Defense Production Act
President Biden is expected to use the Defense Production Act to compel some manufacturers to begin producing the items that are expected to be bottlenecks in vaccine distribution. Those include needles, glass vials, stoppers and other packaging that is required to bottle vaccine doses. Many manufacturers who create these products have expressed readiness to switch to producing federally-mandated products to help with the vaccination effort.
Biden’s team admitted that this plan would only work if their massive $2 trillion COVID relief plan passes Congress. Thankfully for them, Democrats now control both the House of Representatives and the Senate. However, the Senate majority is the slimmest it could be: the upper chamber is split 50-50, with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker. This means that Democrats would have trouble getting a 60-person, filibuster-proof majority but could use budget reconciliation, which needs only a simple majority, to pass some legislation.
There is only one problem with this strategy: Democrats have no room for inter-party disagreement. If even one Democrat in the caucus breaks rank and no Republicans do the same, their legislative agenda will struggle.
Targeting the Filibuster?
Some pundits have suggested that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer might gain from moving to end the controversial filibuster. Ironically, it would only take 51 votes to put an end to the modern filibuster, which would largely unlock Democrats’ entire agenda. All of their legislative promises would suddenly become possible, assuming they presented a united front against the minority in the chamber.
This scenario has Republicans worried. In the Obama Administration, current Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell earned the nickname “the Grim Reaper of Legislation” by never allowing any bills he didn’t explicitly approve of to come to the floor. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, some Democrats would like to see Schumer push through their own agenda without regard for what Republicans will think of their methods.
