PRESENTED BY the Stop The HIT Coalition

Good morning! Here’s your Daily News for Wednesday, November 28.

1. Lame duck task: fund the government.

• Counting today, Congress has ten days to figure out how to fund the government.
• A continuing resolution keeping agencies funded at last year’s levels expires on December 7, meaning those agencies would run out of money if action isn’t taken.
• But, unlike previous shutdown scenarios, this one would be only partial.
• Congress already funded five of the twelve appropriations titles – including the massive Defense and Labor/Education/HHS/ ones – thanks to the budget deal Sen. Richard Shelby negotiated in August.
• Homeland Security; Agriculture/FDA; Commerce/Justice/Science; Financial Services; Interior/Environment; Transportation/HUD; and State/Foreign Ops remain.
• Of course, Homeland Security is the bugaboo because that’s where wall funding goes.
• President Trump wants $5 billion for the wall, and Republicans sound confident and dug in on delivering that. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says Democrats are willing to agree to $1.6 billion for “border security” and didn’t put a hard no on more.
• For his sake, Trump needs to get a deal done before the end of the year because he loses the Republican majority in the House come January.
• Interestingly, the rhetoric from GOP leaders McCarthy and Scalise reads as if they are already learning how to be a loyal opposition minority.
• Get that full story, plus the tweets from Manu Raju who interviewed Schumer, HERE.

2. More on infrastructure.

• You may have heard infrastructure funding is going to be a big topic in this upcoming legislative session.
• Lots has been written about the issue and lots more will be! That’s because it’s important and complicated.
• In today’s Advertiser, Brian Lyman gets into some of those complicating factors.
• First, it’s not all interstates and overpasses. Smaller county and city projects are big needs, too. And those contingencies tend to have lots of influence with their state lawmakers. How the eventual legislation deals with local allocation of funding will be decisive.
• Second, they might be a smaller minority, but Democrats still have plenty of votes and they could make a difference if Republicans end up divided over some sticking point.
• Brian has helpful input from Majority Leader Nathaniel Ledbetter, Minority Leader Anthony Daniels, Sen. Cam Ward, Association of County Commissions Executive Director Sonny Brasfield and League of Municipalities Director of Advocacy Greg Cochran, plus some important context from where the asphalt hits the dirt in Butler County.
• Give his story a read HERE.

A Message from the Stop The HIT Coalition

• Sen. Doug Jones: Don’t let Alabama small businesses and middle-class families get sacked by the 2020 Health Insurance Tax.
• Absent immediate action, the 2020 Health Insurance Tax will begin penalizing hardworking Alabamians on January 1, 2020 by driving up their cost of care as much as $450.
• Sen. Jones can help score lower premiums for Alabama’s 765,000 small business employees by supporting bipartisan legislation (S. 3063) to block the HIT in 2020.
• Ask Sen. Jones to help take S. 3063 to the end zone and support legislation to stop the 2020 Health Insurance Tax.

3. Health coverage isn’t following job growth.

• The conventional wisdom was that, as Alabama added jobs and increased wages, the rolls of the state’s Medicaid program would decrease.
• Makes sense, right? The more people who have jobs can get healthcare through work or afford it on their own. And Alabama is experiencing record low unemployment and record high employment! (Yes, those are different things)
• The trouble is, it’s not happening. At least not yet.
• That’s the story from Mary Sell, a veteran of the Capital Press Corps who is now writing for Carol Nunnelly’s independent startup Birmingham Watch.
• Fewer employers are offering insurance. Some jobs people are taking don’t pay enough to disqualify them for Medicaid. And, for those jobs that do pay enough to disqualify but don’t offer insurance, there’s a transitional period allowing beneficiaries to keep Medicaid coverage for 18 months. All these are factors at play.
• The situation creates a problem for the state’s budget writers in the Legislature who annually have to figure out how to fund the state’s barebones Medicaid program.
• Sen. Arthur Orr and Rep. Lynn Greer both acknowledge the problem at hand and discuss what they are seeing in more detail.
• Give her full story a read HERE.

4. Hoover protests move to mayor’s house.

• Protests over the police shooting of E.J. Bradford moved from the state highway to a neighborhood street Tuesday. Specifically, the street of Hoover Mayor Frank Brocato.
• The gathering outside Brocato’s home seemed to stem from several activists who had attended a memorial service at 16th Street Baptist Church in Downtown Birmingham.
• The group was intent on disrupting the mayor and his neighbors until they believe justice is done in the matter of the Thanksgiving Galleria shooting. Their message was “if we’re not comfortable, you can’t be comfortable.”
• ALEA is conducting an investigation of the shooting, including video from Hoover Police body cameras and the mall.
• Some activists hurled more provocative language at the mayor and at police, with one calling officers “domestic terrorists” and telling a black officer he “should be ashamed of himself.”
• Sean Ross from YellowHammer was there. So were Howard Koplowitz and Jonce Starr Dunnigan from AL.com.
• A camera crew from WBRC Fox 6 was also on hand and caught much of the action on video.

5. Skip Tucker: A Damn Yankee on the Slurry Line?

• Skip Tucker is back this week with more of his tales from Walker County.
• If you read Skip’s fun Halloween-themed stories from Old Pisgah Graveyard, you’ll remember the lovable troublemaker “D.T.”
• This time D.T. has some interesting run-ins with the law, plus a November interaction with a northern engineer who was down in Walker County working the coal mines.
• Southerners are hospitable, but don’t take kindly to condescension. Thus is was with D.T.
• Here’s an excerpt:

• Read the full column from ADN Featured Columnist Skip Tucker HERE.

Headlines.

Front Pages (images link to newspaper websites, which you should visit and patronize)