| | | | | |  | | By Renuka Rayasam | Presented by |  | | | | 
Annette Choi/ POLITICO | GOING UP — "Thousands of child care providers closed their doors during the pandemic. At the end of last year, 1 in 4 facilities remained closed . The collapse of the child care industry affected the labor market, with more than 10 percent of parents, primarily women, forced to leave their jobs to take care of their children. Although some facilities have reopened in the new year, many are operating on thin margins and decreased, unstable enrollment. The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, found that the cost of center-based child care — as opposed to family child care — jumped by 44 percent. "Prices were bumped up the most in Georgia and Louisiana, with 115 percent and 111 percent increases, respectively. CAP found that the increased costs were driven in part by the new health and safety protections for both children and staff." — Graphics reporter Annette Choi, in "Covid's toll on infrastructure, by the numbers," coming to POLITICO Thursday as part of the next issue of Recovery Lab, a new project from POLITICO examining policy challenges on the way to recovery. Thursday's issue focuses on how the pandemic changed how we think about infrastructure.
| | | | A message from Emergent BioSolutions: At Emergent, we make things you never thought you'd need — until you do. Until you need to counteract an opioid overdose. Or need protection against smallpox, anthrax, cholera, or botulism. And now, we're in the fight against COVID-19. At Emergent, we take on public health challenges and work to help protect public health. And that's why We Go. | | | Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. We're off on Monday, May 31, for Memorial Day! Reach out with news, tips and ideas for us at rrayasam@politico.com, or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
| | | WHAT TEXAS TELLS US ABOUT 2022 — Texas lawmakers have passed bills this legislative session that would ban abortion after a fetal heartbeat is detected, allow handguns to be carried without a permit, and require professional sports teams to play the national anthem. Yet with less than a week left, the Republicans who control both chambers haven't passed a state budget or a response to the deadly winter storm that crippled much of Texas in February. The Texas legislature is a peculiar place — lawmakers meet for 140 days every other year, and rules are designed to keep bills from passing. But the bills that do get committee hearings and floor votes are an indicator of how Republicans in the country's largest conservative state anticipate the election dynamics of next year. If the past 130-ish days are any guide, Texas Republicans are very, very confident of their prospects heading into the 2022 midterms. "Republicans feel like they are holding all the cards in 2022," James Henson, director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas, told Nightly. Many of the bills passed this session, like the handgun legislation, regularly get introduced but rarely make it to the floor, he said, to shield state lawmakers from tough votes. That changed this year. "The agenda is being dominated by the reactionary wing of the Republican party, and leadership are going with it," Henson said. Republican lawmakers maintained their statehouse majorities across the country in 2020, despite President Joe Biden's win and lots of Democratic money. Now these legislatures hold the keys to congressional redistricting in 22 states. "We don't know what their districts will be, but they will try to make them as red as possible," campaign reporter Ally Mutnick told Nightly. In Texas, it's clear that statehouse Republicans are catering to GOP primary voters rather than worrying about general election threats from Democrats. Only 34 percent of Texans support unlicensed carry, for example, compared with 59 percent who oppose it, according to an April University of Texas/ Texas Tribune poll. Not long ago, the politics of Texas seemed on the cusp of political change. Democrat Beto O'Rourke came close to beating Republican Ted Cruz for a Senate seat in 2018 and, that same year, Democrats won a dozen seats in the state House. In response, Republican state lawmakers spent their 2019 session funding education and cutting property taxes, barely taking up controversial abortion legislation like they do most years. Then Donald Trump won Texas by almost 6 percentage points in 2020. Biden fell short of Democratic expectations, and Republicans maintained their majorities in the statehouse. No prominent Texas Democrats seem eager to challenge Gov. Greg Abbott or Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. But for the first time since he's run for governor, Abbott will face a truly competitive primary. Republicans in Texas are betting hard that voters will reward them for prioritizing gun-rights legislation over preparing the electrical grid for winter. They might also be trying to lure Trump voters to the polls even when he's not on the ballot, Ally said. But the Texas session also taps into a larger debate about which party the culture war helps the most. When Republicans take up bills around transgender rights or abortion, they force Democrats to take tough votes, too. Along the U.S.-Mexico border, for example, there are still anti-abortion Democratic state lawmakers. There's a chance that the strategy could backfire. That happened in 2018, a year after Abbott called a special session to debate a bill prohibiting transgender people from using bathrooms that correspond to their gender identity. That November, Democrats got as close they've gotten in years to winning statewide races in Texas, and they picked up Congressional and state legislative seats. Statewide, Biden's approval rating in April roughly matched that of the Republican governor, Abbott, with 44 percent approving strongly or somewhat of Biden and 43 percent approving strongly or somewhat of Abbott.
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| — Biden: Intelligence community split on Covid-19 origin: The president said today that the U.S intelligence community is split between two origin theories for the Covid-19 pandemic, though he notably did not detail the two theories. The president's statement did note that he had ordered a review of the pandemic's origins, "including whether it emerged from human contact with an infected animal or from a laboratory accident." Facebook will also no longer take down posts claiming that Covid was man-made or manufactured, a company spokesperson told POLITICO today. — 8 dead in shooting at California rail yard: An employee opened fire today at a rail yard serving Silicon Valley, killing eight people before ending his own life, authorities said. The suspect was an employee of the Valley Transportation Authority, which provides bus, light rail and other transit services throughout Santa Clara County, the largest county in the Bay Area, authorities said. — Bipartisan highway bill advances in Senate: A proposal to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on highways advanced through a Senate committee today even as negotiations on a much bigger package continued to struggle — offering a possible off-ramp for Congress to make some progress on infrastructure this year. The bill approved unanimously by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee would allocate $311 billion over five years for roads and highways. — Granholm sells holdings in electric bus maker after GOP criticisms: Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm sold her holdings in electric bus maker Proterra this week, DOE confirmed to POLITICO today, following criticism from Republicans that she might be profiting from the administration's push for electric vehicles. — Karine Jean-Pierre becomes second Black woman behind White House briefing podium: With today's appearance, Jean-Pierre — the principal deputy press secretary — became just the second Black woman to ever take the podium and the first since Judy Smith did so in 1991 under former president George H.W. Bush. She's also the first openly gay spokeswoman to field questions in the briefing room.
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| | | FLUSH WITH DEMAND — Nightly's Tyler Weyant writes: Memorial Day is coming up, and like millions of Americans, I'll be traveling, visiting with friends I haven't seen in more than a year. But, while perusing the local paper in our destination of Portland, Me., I was met with some crappy news: Maine has a shortage of porta-potties. While Edward D. Murphy's article in the Portland Press Herald might seem at first to be merely a springboard for puns like that one, the supply of portable toilets nationwide mirrors a nationwide story across multiple industries. Among the headwinds facing the dwindling national strategic reserve of porta-potties, according to Karleen Kos, executive director of the Portable Sanitation Association International, the portable toilet trade association: A shortage in plastics to make portable toilets, thanks in part to international petroleum market instability and the winter Texas freeze. Shortages in truck drivers to deliver both new toilet units to companies and rented units out to sites. And a demand for both toilets and handwashing stations brought on by Covid safety concerns. In Warrenton, Va., Potter's Potties owner Bucky Potter said his Northern Virginia business has seen these trends on the ground, with manufacturers warning of raw material outages for new toilets, paired with a springtime increase in rental inquiries of 60 percent, double the usual seasonal increase. Beyond the shortages, Kos sees an industry that may be able to — why not — clean up its image. The public will expect a higher level of maintenance and cleanliness post-Covid, she said. "People have varying opinions on portable toilets, but most often people see them as a necessary evil. They don't see them as a respected alternative," she said. "The idea that you would clean a toilet at a big box store hourly, but you would leave a plastic box with a tank in it unattended for a week at a time, that's why portable toilets sometimes aren't very pleasant." This is often a budget issue, Potter said. Construction sites, for example, have OSHA regulations that require a toilet for every 10 full-time workers, and will therefore go with the cheapest option, regardless of quality. If OSHA were to lower that requirement to 5 workers for every toilet, he said, which some local governments did during Covid, or increase sink regulations, it might help change the public's perspective. Still, when it comes to portable toilets, people are just looking for a decent, dignified moment. "Nobody is asking for gold lamé gildings in their toilets," Kos said. "They just don't want it to be unpleasant." Nightly asks you: Portable toilets aren't the only thing there is a shortage of, as news stories come out seemingly every day bemoaning a lack of items from Chick-fil-A sauce to gasoline. What pandemic shortages have you seen in your community? Send us your answers on our form, and we'll include select responses next week.
| | | 'STATE-SPONSORED HIJACKING' — Ryanair 4978 started like any flight, until the plane was forced to land in Minsk at the behest of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko to arrest a dissident journalist. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, POLITICO Europe's David M. Herszenhorn talks about why the EU and the US might have to rethink their responses to the incident.
| | | AN OXFORD DEBATE — Today saw the first public airing of a bitter dispute between AstraZeneca and the European Commission — backed by the 27 EU member states. The fight began back in January, when the drugmaker announced its first delivery delays and resulted essentially in a divorce between the two once-optimistic partners months later. The EU's lawyers argued that the company didn't try hard enough to supply the EU and now needed a judge to get the company to hurry up. AstraZeneca's lawyers countered that both parties were well aware that they were signing a contract for a brand new coronavirus vaccine that would be difficult to produce on a global scale, let alone gain approval from regulators. Often, the hearing descended into a back-and-forth spat over whether the Anglo-Swedish company betrayed its EU contract by giving more doses to the U.K. Under gilded paintings that depicted one man sitting on a throne and stabbing another man in the back, a rotating group of EU lawyers pointed to how AstraZeneca delivered 37 percent of the doses it promised to the U.K. but only 18 percent of the EU's contract. Still, it was unclear what all the fighting in a courtroom would achieve. The Commission argues its case is to secure more doses as soon as possible, but its lawyers also included financial penalties — €10 per dose per day each vaccine is delayed — if a court rules in favor of the EU but AstraZeneca is unable to stick to a three-month postponed schedule. And AstraZeneca, which has tried to be the main producer of vaccines for the world rather than the world's wealthiest, questioned why the bloc needed so many vaccines immediately.
| | | | SUBSCRIBE TO WEST WING PLAYBOOK: Add West Wing Playbook to keep up with the power players, latest policy developments and intriguing whispers percolating inside the West Wing and across the highest levels of the Cabinet. For buzzy nuggets and details you won't find anywhere else, subscribe today. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | OBAMA'S REGRETS — Former President Barack Obama said today that while he was "wildly enthusiastic" about the resurgence of activism during his presidency, he often felt limited by "institutional constraints" that kept him from commenting on federal investigations into certain killings, including of the Black teenagers Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. Obama said that, unlike Trump, he followed the notion that the Justice Department was independent, Myah Ward writes. "I did not in any way want to endanger their capacity to go in, investigate and potentially charge perpetrators, which meant that I could not come down or appear to come down decisively in terms of guilt or innocence," Obama said in a virtual gathering with the My Brother's Keeper Leadership Forum, where he discussed a year of activism following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. Obama said he was proud of how his administration reshaped the Justice Department's approach to these problems, but added that he found it difficult to convert "passion and concern" into political action, not only at the federal level but also at the state and local levels, where many criminal justice and policing decisions are made. "Because keep in mind, in 2012 I won. But I didn't win congressmen, and we didn't win a bunch of governorships back. We didn't win a bunch of state legislators back," Obama said. "And so, all the reform initiatives that we were coming up with, and the ideas that had been generated, we weren't able to translate into as bold a set of initiatives as I would have wanted." Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.
| | | | A message from Emergent BioSolutions: At Emergent, we make things you never thought you'd need — until you do. Until you need to counteract an opioid overdose. Or need protection against smallpox, anthrax, cholera, or botulism. And now we're in the fight against COVID-19. At Emergent, we take on public health challenges. For over 20 years, we have produced therapies and vaccines to help protect public health. And that's why We Go. | | | | | | | Follow us on Twitter | | | | Follow us | | | | |
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