What? We have an adult in the whitehouse? Fuck! This will not stand!
Trump’s press secretaries made a habit of deflecting by saying they would follow up — and then never doing so. The press understand that the press secretary isn’t going to have all the answers, especially this early in an Administration. As long as Psaki follows through on the follow up, she’ll be light years ahead of Trump’s press flunkies.
Maybe, just maybe, the Press Secretary was distracted by a huge internal eyeroll at being asked that question.
"In October, Joe Biden said during an ABC News town hall that there are “things you can’t do by executive order, unless you’re a dictator.”
Biden made the comment in response to questions about his plan to raise taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations. He did not say all executive orders were emblematic of a dictatorship, but indicated there are appropriate and inappropriate uses of the executive power.
Since he took office Jan. 20, Biden has published 21 executive orders. None of them change federal tax policy."
She has already done that, and despite eenerms characterization of being “a wee bit over her head”, she’s already shown the ability to field a wide array of questions–many of them purely intended to criticize Biden or advance an agenda rather than genuinely seek information–with aplumb and despite the large number of executive orders and diverse agenda of the Biden-Harris administration. That the questions and answers are often repetitive is just the nature of the medium; the White House daily pressers are, as previously noted, primarily exercises in propaganda and signaling for both the administration and many of the journalists in the press pool (e.g. all of the questions on Thursday regarding the “GameStop controversy”, which is a purely regulatory issue for the SEC and has nothing to do with economic policy as a whole as set by the White House), and most of the actual content presented could be condensed into a 90 second news clip.
Stranger
Nitpick: “aplomb”
OMG. I nitpicked Stranger. 
<head explodes>
Jen Psaki was the guest star on NPR’s Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me! this morning. Cool and charming.
I like her, but I want to send her a barette to hold back her hair. Or she should tuck it behind her ear. She messes with it constantly. Distracting and makes her look very young.
will we get this virus beaten by fall? do we have the medical infrastructure to deliver 400-500 million injections?
if we beat this virus before the holiday season that will be wonderful. of course then sadly some new mutation may emerge that is resistant to the vaccine.
Wesley: it’s beginning to look like that Covid will end up something like the flu. The flu kills 40,000 people on average in the U.S. per year and each year you need a new booster shot yearly to protect against new variants. So you can’t say the flu has been beaten, but on the other hand you can say it doesn’t dominate the economy and people’s lives.
So the current Covid vaccines will massively knock down the current high levels of infections, booster shots will deal with new variants and the declining effectiveness of the vaccines over time and new drugs will substantially decrease the symptoms of those people who do get Covid and hasten their recovery.
…
[Rob] Portman [Ohio] had previously warned the Biden administration of moving forward on a new round of relief legislation without GOP support, saying it “poisons the well.”“My hope is that we won’t go down this path of trying to circumvent the supermajority and just jam something through,” Portman told NPR’s Susan Davis. “I think that would set the tone for the administration that would be really problematic for the country and frankly, bad for the Biden administration.”
That is an open and blatant threat. Not surprising at all. “The Democrats better drop to their knees or we’re going to block everything they propose!”
I say, what good does it do to have even this slim majority if the Dems don’t use it in the next two years to improve the lives of the public? The Republicans don’t compromise. Giving in now just leads to the expectation of more giving in later. Cf. Obama administration. I say jam it through!
What say y’all?
“That’s a nice country you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”
Stranger
I think the best tactic is thus:
- Separate bills down to one issue each. Democratic priorities are popular when considered individually. It’s easier to focus the messaging as well.
- Bring each bill up to vote. Privately pressure wavering Democrats. Publicly pressure Republicans going against popular opinion. If a bill passes, great. If it’s filibustered, hold off for a bit.
- Pick the most popular of the filibustered bills. Ramp up the campaign in favor of it. If Republicans still filibuster, make the case that the filibuster needs to go. And then get rid of it.
- Pass the rest of Democratic bills on simple majorities.
- Campaign for re-election in 2022 as the “got stuff done” Congress.
Single issue bills often don’t pass. Consider the Agriculture bill. Rural members of Congress strongly support farm support programs. Urban members aren’t interested. Urban members strongly support the Food Stamp program. Rural members don’t have much interest in welfare programs.
So you put the two together and the Agriculture bill has no problem passing.
Eliminating riders and other forms of ‘logrolling’ seems like one of those things that should make the legislative process more honest and less prone to corruption and back room dealing, but in fact in what is a de facto two party system with a large ideological divide and little concession to the necessity of governing to the benefit of everyone instead of just their majority constituency, compromise-by-amendment is practically the only way to effectively share power and give significant minority polities some influence on the system. If we had a system that encouraged multiparty alliances there would be ways for minority interests of various convergent values and goals to share legislative power and push through bills that don’t necessarily have broad appeal but that could gain majority support via open political compromise, then there wouldn’t be such a need for this ad hoc system of ‘compromise’ which essentially consists of sneaking legislation through.
But…we don’t. And in an era where one party views its duty as essentially obstructing any legislation from the opposition party even if they don’t actually disagree with the fundamental principles, the lack of mechanisms by which plurality interests can advance their issues and agendas results in the almost total logjam we’ve seen for the better part of two decades. Virtually the only time we’ve seen actual bipartisan support for an issue is in response to fear of looking unpatriotic (e.g. the PATRIOT Act) or being shamed into doing the right thing (e.g. the Zadroga Act).
Stranger
In some states, the Governor has a line-item veto, which allows for elements of a package bill to be vetoed individually. This is meant to serve as a check on pork, but can give the Governor an excessive amount of power, because line vetos are very hard to override. I recall at least one instance where the Governor of some state claimed that the state Constitution was written so loosely that it gave him the authority to strike individual phrases, even words, from a bill, which is the pinnacle of absurdity.
Back in the 1990s, Congress passed a law giving the president a line-item veto, but it was struck down in the courts. There might be a way for it to make sense, but such a rule would have to be very carefully crafted to prevent the President from having too much say over the legislative process.
The line item veto was indeed a potential disaster for precisely the reasons you outline, and the Supreme Court struck it because it violated the intent of separation of powers. The stated intent was to reduce ‘pork-barrel spending’, which again sounds like a good thing in theory but results in less ability to compromise in practice.
There exists the notion that we can pass some set of increasingly restrictive laws or procedures to make the political process more fair (for some arbitrary definition of ‘fair’), but when you have one or both parties engaging in activities specifically intended to obstruct or subvert essential democratic principles, no amount of rule-lawyering is actually going to prevent malfeasance. This is why Biden has to make a genuine show of asking for bipartisanship, and also needs to exercise the authority he has to get around obstructionism and insurrection, and hold those responsible for it accountable in the public arena.
Stranger
The Democrats can use their House and Senate majorities to reform our politics, guarantee voting rights and enhance our democracy. Or they can surrender to an anti-majoritarian, money-dominated system, and allow the more accessible approach to voting created during the coronavirus pandemic to be destroyed.
This means that the party must recognize that the Senate filibuster, contrary to happy myth, does not promote bipartisanship or constructive compromise by requiring most bills to get 60 votes. No, in the face of a radicalized Republican Party, maintaining the current filibuster rules means abandoning any aspirations to a legacy of genuine achievement.
Sorry, there is no third way here. Yes, Democrats could avoid a complete repeal of the filibuster by getting rid of it only for certain categories of bills — for example, those related to voting rights and democratic reforms. But living with the status quo means capitulating to obstruction. Democrats have only 50 votes plus Vice President Harris’s tie-breaker. They will never get 10 votes from a GOP that can’t even find a way to exile white-supremacist extremists from its ranks.
…
Last week, the Brennan Center for Justice reported that, “In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year.”
…
The Democrats have to push through their legislation. Some Republicans may work with them but not enough to accomplish anything. The Dems only have two years to get anything done.
A year and a half, if they’re to have any hope of holding Congress.
This time around, I think (I hope?) at least they’re well aware of it.
They will probably not hold the Senate after 2022 in any case.
Although the Republicans have 20 seats up for election versus the 14 that Democrats currently hold, all but three of those previously won by margins of >5%, whereas Democrats have four seats that were won by margins of >5%, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire having won in 2016 by a margin of less than 0.1%. The margins and wins in 2020 were lower than polling indicated, and unless you think there will be a sea change in the next two years the past performance is probably a best case estimate, with reality being somewhat less favorable. Given the loss of a single seat will shift the majority, the Magic-8 Ball comes up “Outlook not so good.”
Stranger
Too soon to tell.
A lot of things might happen, in a year and a half; some of which we probably haven’t even thought of yet.
He never said that.
Politico, who I thought was liberal, ran an article on this subject with a headline asking if Biden was telling the truth about bipartisanship. Apparently, to the media, bipartisanship means doing what the Republicans want.