Lacking enough leverage to dictate terms to the party, centrist House Democrats will be forced to decide whether to be team players, or sink President Biden’s entire economic agenda in a fit of pique. So far, nine of them have come out as pique-curious.
 

• In a Thursday letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, these centrists threatened to derail the budget process (and thus the bigger, more progressive half of Biden’s Build Back Better plan if the Senate infrastructure bill doesn’t pass first. “We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law.” Why would they make this demand? Because if the bipartisan infrastructure bill becomes law, they’re free to stab the rest of the party in the back and whittle down or kill the bigger, better bill.


• Who are these moderates? Great question! They are Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-GA), Kurt Schrader (D-OR), Filemon Vela (D-TX), Ed Case (D-HI), Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX), Jared Golden (D-ME), Jim Costa (D-CA), and Henry Cuellar (D-TX). These your reps? Call their offices. Remember their names. Tweet at them in all caps.
   
• Why are we so mad at them? Because with such narrow margins in the House, and Republicans thirsting to tank Biden’s presidency, nine Democratic votes are enough to be determinative. A budget resolution eventually has to come to the House floor for a vote for the bigger piece of Biden’s agenda to become law, and if they make good on their threat, it won’t. 

Fortunately, Pelosi doesn’t plan to give in to these demands.
 

• Her aides say she remains committed to the original plan of passing both bills, and that there aren’t enough votes to delink them and pass just one. (House progressives have just as much leverage as moderates at the moment, because their votes are necessary to pass anything, too.) And as speaker, Pelosi should be able to sequence the votes at a time of her choosing, in a way that makes the centrist’s threat untenable. 
   
• Still, the threat underscores how fragile the whole Democratic agenda is. The glue holding the whole thing together is that failing to pass anything would be a political fiasco, far worse for centrists than taking a tough partisan vote. But that could change if the political climate in the country changes. Just this week Biden rolled out a new pitch for both bills, mindful of rising public concerns about inflation. If those concerns don’t go away, the centrist appetite for cutting the legs out from under his agenda could grow. 
   

Technically, both progressives and centrists are making threats. But the progressive threat is designed to assure Biden’s entire agenda passes; the centrists’, rather unsubtly, is meant to kill most of it. In addition to all the harm that would cause the people Build Back Better is meant to help, it would also spark a war in the Democratic caucus at the worst possible time. Leaders can’t cave to the threat, and should remember the nine who made it.

Exciting news! The What A Day squad is growing. Josie Duffy Rice is joining as What A Day co-host alongside host Gideon Resnick and recently announced co-hosts Tre’vell Anderson and Priyanka Airibindi. Josies’s first episode drops Monday, and honestly we can’t wait for you to tune in. To make sure you don’t miss out, subscribe to What a Day wherever you get your podcasts!

Don’t look now, but it’s beginning to look like the 20-year war in Afghanistan may have been a very expensive failure. The Taliban seized another Afghan city on Friday morning, and now controls at least half of the country’s 34 provincial capitals just weeks before the U.S. completes its withdrawal of troops. Only three major cities, including Kabul, are still under government control, and probably not for long: Senior Afghan officials and demoralized military forces have been surrendering en masse, accelerating the Taliban’s campaign. The U.S. has called on the Taliban to spare the embassy when they descend on Kabul, and the embassy has instructed staffers to start destroying sensitive documents ahead of their evacuation. As always, the key thing to remember here is that if Donald Trump had presided over the troop withdrawal, it all would have gone perfectly.

• Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and his wife hadn’t bought or sold stock in an individual company for at least 10 years when she suddenly bought shares of Gilead Sciences, a coronavirus drug maker, three weeks before the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic. 
   
• The FDA has authorized third doses of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines for some immunocompromised people, like folks who have received organ transplants. Some 1.1 million Americans have already gotten unauthorized booster shots, according to an internal CDC report.
   
• Justice Amy Coney Barrett has denied a request to block Indiana University’s vaccine mandate, to the sputtering fury of MAGA World. 
   
• Flash floods in northern Turkey have killed at least 31 people, with dozens still missing.
   
• Postmaster General Louis DeJoy purchased up to $305,000 in bonds from the investment of USPS board chair Ron Bloom, a Democrat whose support DeJoy needs to make his dream of a shittier Postal Service a reality, and who has coincidentally declined to call a vote to fire him.
   
• Here’s a fun nightmare scenario to consider: Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) loses his recall election, 88-year-old Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) refuses to step aside before a GOP lunatic takes over, Feinstein then takes a single sip of an alcoholic Mountain Dew, Gov. MAGA gets to appoint her replacement, and the Democratic Senate majority is gone. California voters, assemble!
   
• John Rizzo, the CIA lawyer who sanctioned the torture of suspected terrorists and drone strikes that killed countless civilians, has died at 73.
   
• Months of emails between Fox News and Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) office reveal the network’s concerted effort to make him a star. 
   
• NASA’s still plugging away at its Trump-era plan to land on the moon in 2024, but that seems likely to change any minute, seeing as how its new spacesuits won’t be ready until 2025.

Three in 10 Americans adults remain unvaccinated, according to the latest survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, but they don’t all look like Chet Hanks. The biggest group of vaccine holdouts—about 14 percent of the adult population—say they definitely won’t get the vaccine, and that number has stayed pretty steady for months. (Though it’ll be interesting to see if the Delta variant moves the needle.) That group is overwhelmingly white and majority Republican: The Chets Hanks, if you will. Ten percent of eligible adults are still in the “wait and see” camp, whether out of fear or access barriers, and that’s a much more diverse group that’s gotten way smaller over time. The vaccination gap between counties that voted for Biden and those that went for Trump has been growing as the “wait and see” group shrinks, and the result is an unvaccinated population that’s now heavily composed of Americans on a steady diet of misinformation, who believe the vaccine poses a bigger health risk than the virus. Thanks, Tucker!

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A federal judge has left the CDC’s new eviction moratorium in place, rejecting a challenge from a group of Alabama landlords.

The first round of child tax credit payments slashed hunger rates by nearly 24 percent, according to new data. The second round went out today!

The Loudoun County, VA, school board voted to adopt a policy requiring teachers to address students by their preferred names and pronouns, and ensuring that trans students have access to school programs and facilities.

This is a great read on Illinois’s new law preventing statements made in restorative justice programs from being used in court, a key protection for those programs to work.