Thursday, June 22, 2017

THIS WASHINGTON

► KOMO News — Third overtime session begins with shutdown looming — The second special session ended with no agreement and lawmakers immediately went into a third overtime session with June 30 as the deadline. The governor is asking majority Republicans in the Senate to come to face-to-face bargaining session with House Democrats. The Republicans said the negotiations are fine the way they are.

ALSO at The Stand — Day of Action TODAY against state shutdown — Join demonstrations Thursday in Federal Way, Lakewood, Spokane, Puyallup, and Kirkland.

MORE coverage in today’s (Everett) Herald, Seattle Times, and from AP.

► In today’s Olympian — Threat of shutdown looms as Legislature heads into triple overtime over budget — On Thursday, about 32,000 state employees will start getting notices warning them they could be temporarily laid off next month.

TRUMPCARE

► In today’s NY Times — Senate GOP leaders unveil secretive bill to repeal the ACA — It would phase out the extra money that the federal government has provided to states as an incentive to expand eligibility for Medicaid. And like the House measure, it would put the entire Medicaid program on a budget, ending the open-ended program that now exists. It would also repeal virtually all the tax increases imposed by the Affordable Care Act to pay for itself, in effect handing a broad tax cut to the affluent, paid for by billions of dollars sliced from Medicaid, a health care program that serves one in five Americans, not only the poor but two-thirds of those in nursing homes… The bill, drafted in secret, will circumvent the normal Senate committee hearing process and go directly to the floor for a vote, likely next week, after 20 hours of debate.

► From NPR — Republicans’ proposed Medicaid cuts would hit rural patients hard — For the hundreds of rural U.S. hospitals struggling to stay in business, like Pemiscot Memorial Health Systems in one of the poorest areas in Missouri. And looming cuts in Medicaid could make survival a lot tougher… A rural hospital closure goes beyond people losing health care. Jobs, property values and even schools can suffer. Pemiscot County already has the state’s highest unemployment rate. Losing the hospital would mean losing the county’s largest employer.

LOCAL

► In today’s Seattle Times — Once again, Seattle minimum wage fails to make the sky fall (by Jon Talton) — Focusing on restaurants, the sector with the most minimum-wage jobs, a new University of California-Berkley study found that employees were enjoying higher pay while overall employment levels have not been affected. So far, the predictions of doom have not come to pass. Seattle’s economy outperforms nearly every peer in the country. And the step-up to a $15 minimum wage has not made the city stumble. Indeed, by the “virtuous circle” theory popularized by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer, people with better pay spend more, helping businesses and their employees.

► From KOMO News — Seattle company paying $70K salaries to employees expands, workers see housing boom — The Seattle business owner who got national attention two years ago for giving all his employees at least $70,000 salaries may have a new reason to celebrate– his company, Gravity Payments, is seeing growth and his employees a “housing boom.”

► In today’s Seattle Times — Seattle Police Dept. body cameras are stalled over contract talks — More than a month after a federal judge approved the Seattle Police Department’s long-awaited proposal to equip officers with body cameras, the timing for the rollout remains clouded amid tense labor negotiations.

BOEING

► From Reuters — Boeing wins hot Paris order race — After a show in which both manufacturers did brisk business under a sweltering sun, Airbus said on Thursday it won 326 net new orders and commitments while rival Boeing said its total was 571.

THAT WASHINGTON

► From Huffington Post — Trump is in the perfect position to dramatically remake the courts — Trump inherited a whopping 108 court vacancies when he became president — double the number of vacancies Obama inherited when he took office. The main reason he gets to fill so many seats is Republicans’ years-long strategy of denying votes to Obama’s court picks.

NATIONAL

► From Reuters — For thousands of U.S. auto workers, downturn is already here — Layoffs at GM’s Lordstown, Ohio facility and at other auto plants point to a broader challenge for the economy in Midwestern manufacturing states and for the Trump administration. The U.S. auto industry’s boom from 2010 through last year was a major driver for manufacturing job creation. The fading of that boom threatens prospects for U.S. industrial output and job creation that were central to Trump’s victory in Ohio and other manufacturing states.

The Stand posts links to Washington state and national news of interest every weekday morning by 10 a.m.