Unfortunately, the bills need that to be more like 98% (and 100% of the Senate) to pass.
We’re working on it! There’s no extreme urgency. Hopefully it will be this month.
The problem is, for now, it’s being tied to the debt ceiling, so that’s why there really is a sense of urgency. There’s going to be a decoupling, and that’s when I think we’ll see just how bad the intra-party rift is. I really don’t know at this point how bad it is - I don’t think anyone knows.
Obviously there’s tension and frustration, which can push back legislation months, as we saw in the case of ACA when Max Baucus and others ended up torpedoing the public option (at least I think it was Baucus?). But, the bill ended up getting done because there were enough moderates who saw it in their interest to do it. And progressives began to accept that if you ain’t got the votes, you ain’t got 'em (as @Martin_Hyde pointed out earlier).
If we use that history as our model for forecasting what happens next, we could see negotiations on a significantly delayed but larger combined infrastructure package that, if it passes at all, would almost surely be a hyper-partisan passage. But pass it could. We’d potentially lose some of the GOP supporters who voted for the original $1.5T bill. Threading that needle is going to be hard. How do you get the Jayapals of the world to accept that they’re just going to have to accept a considerably smaller bill while managing to get the moderate Dems to circle the wagons
It seems unlikely that Manchin and Sinema would budge, but the fact is their voters want infrastructure. I also have a strong feeling that the economy is about to get knocked around again in Q4 and Q1 2022. I don’t mean another great recession, but bottleneck inflation and energy prices are very real concerns. And the stock market is just way, way overvalued. If there’s a downturn that’s only going to ratchet up the pressure to do something for constituents.
Cite that it’s tied to the debt ceiling? AFAICT there is no such linkage. IIRC the parliamentarian ruled that the debt ceiling could be addressed in a separate bill.
Indeed, it can be addressed in a separate bill, but McConnell is effectively linking it to increased stimulus. The Dems don’t have unlimited reconciliation options, which makes this complicated.
But the debt ceiling reconciliation is “free”. It doesn’t count against any of the others. At least, based on my understanding of the ruling.
I think Dems lack a compelling “over-arching” message that is suitable for mass political marketing; but it has little to nothing to do with their being “multiple voices” in the party. The GOP always has a cacophony of voices as well, really all American political parties have since the dawn of time.
The Democrat big structural weakness isn’t that they have lots of opinions and views being expressed–even the more homogenous GOP still has that, it’s that the Democrats are running the standard playbook of left-of-center pro-globalization parties everywhere. It’s one where you avoid “simple platitudes” and paeans, you avoid populist politics and rah rah stuff in favor of focusing on appealing to people’s “better instincts” and trying to make the argument that you’re the more competent administrators.
The problem is politics isn’t the right venue to appeal to better instincts. Most Western governments have at least enough dysfunction in them that marketing yourself as the “capable administrator” is usually a losing proposition versus people who can excite voters, and platitudes are what foists a sense of team building and camaraderie.
The reason you are focused on the “divergent voices” out of the Democrats but were apparently unaware or didn’t think about the same thing that happens in the GOP all the time is because the Democrats lack that front and center “central voice”, the Republicans have it, and when you have it, the differences don’t get the headlines.
I think we’re saying the same thing re: the GOP central voice and the Democrats’ lack of the same.
And maybe the difference is that, and that the Democratic infighting seems to be about what the party’s policies should be, while the GOP seems to be more about how well someone measures up to the party’s policies/ideology or about someone’s dissent.
The problem is that Democrats are trying to push through sweeping, country-changing legislation while the Senate is 50-50 and the House majority is razor thin and half the country opposes what they are doing.
Other sweeping legislative changes such as the New Deal and the Great Society were passed when Democrats had huge majorities and widespread public support for what they were doing.
When the Great Society passed, Democrats had a 68-32 margin in the Senate and a 295-140 margin in the House. For the New Deal it was 70-23 in the Senate, and in the House it was 322-102.
It’s incredibly hard to make sweeping changes without a mandate. And it should be. If Democrats pass this on a straight party line vote, you’re just going to see the Republicans work to undo it all when they inevitably take control of the House and Senate again - probably in a year.
The razor thin vote margins say that Biden should be what he promised - a moderate ‘caretaker’ President focused on rebuilding the norms that Trump squashed. I understand Progressives think this may be their only moment for a ‘big win’, but it’s not. If they succeed in getting this rammed through it will just create more division in the country.
Or look at it another way: Trump almost beat Biden despite all of his flaws. A better Republican candidate would likely have beat him. And if Trump hadn’t blown up the Georgia elections with his antics the Republicans would be in control of the Senate even with Trump losing.
It is unprecedented for a party to make gains in the House and Senate while their candidate loses the Presidency, but that’s what Republicans did. That tells you the main problem was Trump himself, not the desire for a more progressive America. You progressives are trying to ram major changes through that the American people never signed on for. Proceed at your peril.
Besides, the bill is terrible and wildly irresponsible in the current economic climate. Printing another 4.7 trillion dollars for a gigantic gab-bag of progressive wish list items and new entitlements when the current ones are unfunded and debt has exploded in the Covid era and inflation is rising and supply chains are straining is just crazy. Medicare alone had a cash shortfall of $405 billion last year, and at current trends will be bankrupt in 2026. How about fixing that first?
And if your spending and taxes cause stagflation, the primary victims will be minorities and the poor. Maybe that’s one of the reasons minority support for Biden and the Democrats is cratering.
Naah. Democrats should do Democratic priorities when they have the chance. Otherwise, what’s the point to gaining that power?
Four things:
-Half of America doesn’t oppose the infrastructure plan.
-This bill doesn’t involve spending trillions in a single year. It’s a long-term bill that isn’t going to have that massive an impact on the economy as a whole in the short term that it will be a significant driver to inflation.
-The details seem to change all the time, but the plan is to pay for the bipartisan part of the bill mostly through repurposing unspent funds, and to pay for the reconciliation through new taxes. They are not making money out of thin air or even planning on going into significantly more debt to pay for this.
-Biden didn’t run as a moderate and he certainly didn’t run as a caretaker President. He ran on a platform that was ambitious when it came to climate, infrastructure and investing in the economy. The healthcare platform he ran on was much more transformative than the combination of the subsidies in the stimulus package and the medicare expansion in this bill. Even the Republicans (especially including Trump) ran on government investment into the economy. Biden being able to succeed at a very ambitious infrastructure bill would be a huge win after the GOP sold people on their own infrastructure bill and failed. Biden isn’t opposing a party that doesn’t want to invest in the economy or fund infrastructure projects. He’s opposing a party that wanted to invest that money in different things and failed at executing their own vision.
We forget that even though we’re a two-party system, there’s still coalition building that takes place. There are factions within the party; it just looks cleaner on paper because there are effectively, save for a few independents, either Rs or Ds.
I’m in a weird position because I really don’t agree with a lot of the progressive agenda, but as a conservative I also don’t agree with Sam’s takes which I don’t really think are ideological, they frankly just seem single-mindedly partisan–also point of order, the Republicans did not gain Senate seats in 2020, they lost them.
While I don’t think America is as far left as AOC, I do think most of the country wants to see things like affordable prescription drugs, control of our spiraling climate change crisis, repairs to physical infrastructure, paid family leave (which is a norm in the entirety of the developed world), and frankly I’m not even sure there is a great conservative counterargument to any of them. Political conservatism doesn’t, or shouldn’t, mean a desire to destroy the environment. Everything conservatives care about gets fucked over by a fucked planet, just as much as this is true of liberals.
But our government has become not a government that “protects minority opinions” but one that is outright dominated by them. The foolish political coalition that controlled America in the second half of the 19th century deliberately carved out new States to “stack the Senate”, in a time when the long term repercussions were not well considered. Because of that we’re stuck in modern times with ten Senators from extremely low population, extremely white, extremely conservative States that represent less than 2% of America’s population but have 5x the power of states like California, Illinois, New York, Texas, Florida etc. It’s an embarrassment. The original nature of the Senate was to address very specific concerns about the original 13 colonies and their disparities in size. It is and was unconscionable to go on and exacerbate that issue by admitting extremely low population new states, particularly in areas like Big Sky country and the Great Plains where we knew dense populations like those found on the coasts would never be attained.
Also because of a poor decision back in the 1920s to permanently fix the number of House districts at 435–even as the population of the country has more than doubled since then, has left those same states that are massively overrepresented in the Senate, even more overrepresented in the U.S. House than they should be.
Gerrymandering has let politicians chose who gets to vote on them, which has turned most races in our country into uncompetitive coronations. These means there’s a government that has very little accountability to its people. The power of incumbency also tends to make America a gerontocracy, our Senate is a global embarrassment and is on par with the Roman Curia in how much it is dominated by borderline senile old people–except even the Curia excludes letting the oldest of Cardinals vote on the new Pope (recognizing past a certain age you should not have as much say in a future you won’t live to see.)
In most countries someone who won like Biden, while they wouldn’t have a dominating mandate (he won by 4.4% of the popular vote, a good lead but not a huge one) would have a clear mandate to govern on his platform and would have the powers in the legislature to get that platform implemented. The design of the U.S. system of government is a sclerotic, untenable disgrace and it should be recognized Biden’s and the Democrat’s single biggest problem isn’t lack of persuasion but lack of ability to govern despite consistently getting more votes, because our sclerotic, antiquated system allows a stubborn minority to block all functions of government–a situation you can find in almost no other country on earth. Even other First Past the Post countries like Britain and Canada at least have safeguards against recalcitrant minorities (the biggest one being they can always hold new snap elections of election result truly means an ungovernable situation.)
But if you study the matter carefully, you will notice that the problems that affect the U.S. in terms of inequality is systemic. That is, both political parties which are seen by some as liberal or conservative work for the rich, which in turn fund the military industrial complex, control much of the U.S. economy, and provide credit to people who see themselves as conservative, liberal, and so on, and yet are dependent on an economy which itself is driven by consumer spending, increasing borrowing and spending, onerous foreign polices, etc.
The problem is that most of the leftist I know also think Lenin, Trotsky, and Che Guevara were on to something good. As far as I can see, they’d burn everything to the ground and replace it with something much, much worse.
Meanwhile, countries like China are gaining over those like the U.S., while those like the U.S., such as the Philippines, floundered.
But those are socialist principles, i.e., more regulations and safety nets. Meanwhile, another aspect of liberalism involves more freedom, which include liberal democracy and free markets, or the opposite of those principles.
That’s what I wanted to demonstrate, and yet I was accused of strawmanning.
I don’t know if China is a shining example of Marxist spirit these days. China wouldn’t be doing so well if they hadn’t steered towards more of a free market economy.
I’m not sure what you mean here. I’m not denouncing liberalism here. Leftist and liberal is not the same thing. The leftist I know really, really dislike liberals.
Who are these “leftists” you know? Because Bernie Sanders is pretty much the far left of the Democratic Party and the “leftists” you describe are waaaaay to the left of him. Remember that America does have an actual Communist Party, where this tiny fringe largely reside.