Good lord this. Short term gains are meaningless if they’re just immediately reversed.
Alienating your own voters to appease Republicans is what Democrats have been doing my whole life. In fifty years, moderation has succeeded at exactly nothing. Dems can pass the whole infrastructure bill through reconciliation. There’s zero chance a stand alone climate bill gets passed later. None. But sure, let’s go ahead and squander the one chance we have at doing anything remotely useful on climate. Brilliant.
Never mind that we’ve seen this play before and we already know the ending. Hell, Democrats just gave Republicans everything they asked for on the 1/6 commission and Republicans are going to kill it in the Senate anyway.
I don’t know if Democrats are feckless, incompetent or just plain stupid. There’s no debate that Republicans are now completely unmoored from reality, but Democrats insisting on dancing with them anyway is only a step behind.
(Yes I am pissed.)
Let’s be real: Republicans obviously don’t want Biden to pass anything . They want to string him along with fake promises of bipartisanship, running out the clock on the Democratic majority, until they get a chance at taking control of Congress in the 2022 midterms. If that happens, they will try to strangle the economy by demanding massive austerity every time the government needs to pass a budget or raise the debt limit — trying to create a recession that Biden will be blamed for, so that the Republican nominee (probably Donald Trump) will be elected in 2024.
This is exactly what Republicans like Sen. Chuck Grassley did the last time Democrats controlled Congress and the presidency — promise an illusory bipartisan compromise to make proposals worse and eat up time, then vote against them anyways. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell openly proclaimed his priority of winning above all else in 2010, and he’s saying the same thing now. “One-hundred percent of our focus is on stopping this new administration,” he said in early May.
Even more ominously, the Democratic conservative wing is finding more and more complaints about the tax hikes in the infrastructure bill. Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) doesn’t like the corporate tax hike. Reps. Cindy Axne (Iowa) and Ritchie Neal (Mass.) don’t like the inheritance tax increase on the ultra-rich. Sens. Bob Menendez (N.J.) and Mark Warner (Va.) don’t like the capital gains hike. A whole bunch of others want to cut taxes on the rich by repealing the cap on the deduction of state and local taxes.
This mobilization to keep down taxes on the rich is of course baldly corrupt, but it’s also characteristic of the Democratic personality. As a rule, the deciding votes in the party caucus are anxious, fussy, and above all terrified of doing anything. Their primary objective is to avoid blame, not accomplish things. Hiding in a closet while Republicans plot to gerrymander you out of power is a good way to lose, but at least you can generally avoid negative media attention and say “it wasn’t my fault,” even if it’s not true.
Blame the voters in your Community. It’s what they want. It’s who they vote for in primaries. It’s the effort they put into place.
Say what you want about the GOP, but their members show up.
As for what has been accomplished. Well, we still have the ACA. And next July, I should be getting money for having kids. So, I am looking forward to that.
No they can’t, not without at least attempting to show some good faith at negotiating and seeming to exhaust every possibility in that regard.
Thank you, this has been my TedTalk.
Fuck me, the excerpt you posted from The Week absolutely slaps.
Cowards to the “left” of me, traitors to the right!
Here I am, stuck in the middle with y’all.
Timex
2766
Isn’t there… Exactly as much of a chance of passing that later, as there is of passing a giant mega law that just lumps everything in the universe together?
You aren’t likely to get any republican sorry for the giant mega bill.
So what you seen to be suggesting is that you couldn’t even get DEMOCRAT support for that stuff… In which case, maybe it’s not good stuff?
If you need to lump stuff all into a single giant bill to even get the support of your own party, then maybe you aren’t doing it right.
If Democrats will support that stuff anyway, then it doesn’t really matter if it’s in a separate bill anyway.
And if you are able to pass SOME stuff, and show that you can get government to work? That will help democrats get elected. If more democrats get elected, you can do more stuff.
Governing isn’t something that happens via magic with snaps of the fingers. It’s work. It takes time.
CraigM
2767
You forget, that without 60 votes nothing gets voted on during Dem control.
Which apparently doesn’t apply to Republicans, since they voted on unpopular shit all the time. But no, without 60 votes for cloture, you’ll never have a floor vote for a climate bill. Reconciliation is the one way to bypass that apparently.
So
it does matter its a separate bill and
you can get everyone save Manchin and SInema on board. Hell maybe get those two on board as well, who the fuck knows anymore with them, but even with 100% dem support it would be DOA due to fillibuster.
How soon folks seem to forget that the other party has had trouble with a reconciliation bill as recently as 3 years and 9 months ago…
The sad thing if we have to show up in the generals for these blue dogs. We have to start primarying these folks out, and the Dem establishment is very good at gatekeeping out insurgents.
For primary challenges to work, minority communities and socialists are going to have to work together.
It just might have something to do with the way Democrats campaign too.
Again, Dem’s in the House gave everything Republicans asked for to get an agreement on the 1/6 Commission. How’d that turn out? “Good faith” negotiations do not work when one side rejects the entire concept. It’s not as if the Congressional calendar allows for much time dickering with a party that isn’t going to allow Biden to pass anything that might help Democrats. Republicans know that with even more extreme gerrymandering and after-the-vote suppression, they’re taking back the House and likely the Senate in 2022.
What do you think is a bigger lift? Getting ten Republicans to vote for a Democratic bill or getting two Democrats to vote for a Democratic bill?
How are these possibly related? McCain (rightly) hated trump and this was his fuckyou vote. Besides, that was a vote to take away peoples heath insurance, and the infrastructure bill is supposed to be improving peoples lives - you know, the thing Democrats are supposed to want - and doing something, anything to start fighting climate change which we have done jack shit about.
(Right after the IEA releases a report that maybe we ought to rethink starting new oil drilling, we get this. Yes I know, “Murkowski.” There’s never an end to the excuses.)
Thrag
2771
I want to believe this is all a dance to have the GOP clearly show what obstructionist fucks they are by having them block everything so Manchin and everyone else riding the bipartisan barbed wire fence can hop off and say “they forced our hand”! And finally let the filibuster axe drop. But the Democratic party does suck at this. Even worse, I increasingly fear Manchin believes his own bullshit.
I watched the interview some weeks ago where Manchin played “intuitionalist” and explained to the interviewer like he was five that the senate is supposed to give a voice to the small states. Which should be an argument against not for the filibuster since small states are already severely over-represented. Instead he used that argument to defend the filibuster. If the whole thing is just a show, why go there? Why not save that line of reasoning for why you are finally, reluctantly, your hand forced by circumstance and the partisanship of the other side, going to vote to weaken the filibuster. That it is not necessary because smaller states have huge, vast, greater than the founding fathers could have possibly imagined, disproportionate power in the senate. I’ve had a hard time holding on to faith since then.
I want to believe. I want to have the photo shop skills to paint Manchin in Kabuki makeup and replace the UFO in the X-files poster with his painted visage.
Timex
2772
David Roberts doesn’t actually know how to get anything done.
He just tells far left people what they want to hear. He just feeds you red (blue?) meat, the same way that idiots like Hannity or Carlson do for their viewers.
KevinC
2773
It’s understandable to get frustrated by Manchin but this is the state he represents.
I save my ire for the 50 Republican senators. I’m just thankful Manchin caucuses with the Dems, that seat is an R with anyone other than Manchin on the ticket and without him Mitch fucking McConnell is running the senate. He’s going to be way way to the right of most of the party and it’s pretty understandable when you look at that map.
Jesus dude. Settle down.
Sometimes people in threads respond to other ideas in a thread not related to you or your posts.
At any rate, here’s a nice tweet.
(Also: Joe Biden thus far has the most stable positive job approval ratings among American voters of any President at month 5 of his term in the post-war era.)
And before I toodle from this thread for a while, it’s worth a reminder: the 2018 Blue Wave mid-terms was fueled center-left Democrats winning in reddish-purple suburban districts. The 2020 presidential win was fueled by those same voters.
I often wish it were not so, but people across a spectrum of demographics–age, gender, HHI, education, ethnic heritage, religious belief, and sexual orientation–tend to magnetize towards stability and status quo, even when a case can be made that doing so may run counter to their self-interests. It has always been a thing that fear motivates people at the ballot box more than anything else. I wish that wasn’t the case, but it is the case. Has been the case. Will be the case in the next elections, too. And fear of change of any kind is always out there.
One party runs explicitly upon that dread fear of change – and solidifying societal hierarchies based on white nostalgia boomer fantasies as the main plank of what it does. And they have an easy time of it, because they can appeal to the lowest-common-denominator to people who turn out to vote in droves to do so.
The other party runs on trying to make change happen…and to get anything done, they’ve got to do all the heavy lifting politically. Maybe this group of Democrats isn’t up to that challenge, point taken. I’ll give them some more time at this point, either way. Because right now the Republicans appear to be misplaying the gains and momentum they enjoyed in the 2020 general.
We need to make our own story of fear- and use Trump for it.
If we can make the order above justice crowd more afraid of the Republicans than anything else, we’ve won.
We need to make Republicans seem dangerous and start a moral panic.
I don’t disagree with you on any of those points, but can’t a guy just want more… action on the part of the Democrats? I just want to have them a bit more in the face of the GOP. I don’t need them to be super progressive, or fight to socialize all medicine. (At least not right away.) I just need them to stand up for a Democratic system.
It can’t be good for morale when everyone starts publicly bemoaning our chances to accomplish anything or make gains in the mid-terms and beyond.
Thrag
2779
Among the many nice things in that video, it’s so nice to see a president in a properly tailored suit. I’m no fashion maven. I was born in a T-shirt and jeans and aside from weddings and bar/bat mitzvahs I have thus far remained in such vestments. Still it’s such a world of difference.
That must have been one surprised obstetrician.
