Garland has constraints; he enforces laws, he can’t make them. Mueller had fewer constraints but the thought of laying out a case for a U.S. president being a traitor was just…asking a lot. The problem we have is one that voters can solve. And once voters ‘solve’ the problem, legislators have to have the courage of their convictions to act. We don’t live in a time for moderation or bi-partisanship or compromise. We have possibly one election cycle left to save democracy.
And that, unfortunately, may still be true for the foreseeable future.
Not the last step in the road, but a major milestone. We can now stop listening to Senate-gang-of-whomever rumors and go back to hand-wringing about Sinema and Manchin re the reconciliation bill which is next.
(Boy that $1T tag is misleading. This bill is only $305b in new spending, the rest is redirected from other things like UI payments that red states sent back.)
Politically, this really is a huge win for Biden, who campaigned on being steady, “average Joe” who will get things done and make improvements. Infrastructure is exactly the kind of “normal” thing the gov’t used to be pretty good at (cf: interstate highway system), and delivering this bipartisan bill is exactly the kind of governing that people wanted after Trump’s insanity.
Sure, I suspect the bill could be better in many ways, and Democrats are working on part 2 to make that happen, but getting part 1 across the finish line in the Senate is great optics for Biden.
And that’s why he needed to get something through that is likely to have visible results on the ground (yeah, yeah, I know that is yet to be seen…) BEFORE tackling the voting rights legislation. Otherwise, it would be, “All the Democrats care about is getting elected!” Of course, that is all the Republicans do care about…
Finally after seeing 208 Infrastructure Weeks come and go in the previous administration, Biden and the Democrats delivered the goods. Republicans will no doubt respond by shutting the government down over the debt ceiling.
They haven’t yet. They passed a big milestone for the bipartisan bill in the Senate, and it will likely pass the House eventually*. But “delivered” is premature.
*Pelosi is insisting on having the reconciliation bill before submitting the bipartisan bill to the house, so things will grind on into September at least.
True enough but I think the odds are good that the reconciliation bill passes and once that happens it’s all a formality. This is the first Infrastructure Week in 4 1/2 years that might actually bear fruit.
Now that I’ve said that Joe Manchin is being Joe Manchin again and trying to throw sand into the gears. It would be so nice if the Dems gain a couple seats in 2024 so they can tell him to go suck eggs.
Yup. Manchin will do his thing, he’ll get maybe a $300b sop as prize, and we’ll continue. And Sinema will swan about in circles.
Is that number correct? Given that the Rs have been in control of at least one house of Congress for a full decade, has any thing positive on this count gotten through in the past ten years?
I don’t know but damned if I know of any infrastructure bill getting through in the previous administration, or for that matter in the Obama years.
There was some kind of infrastructure-related thing in the early part of the Obama administration, back when it was a 3-D house/senate/wh. It had to do with the big market-plop recovery effort. Then the obstructionists-who-like-to-break-everything got control of the House and it turned into a fuck-Barack-fest.
I found this Atlantic article talking about passing a 305 billion dollar bill in late 2015.
Unsurprisingly, three of the Pubs who voted against this bill were Cruz, Rubio, and Paul.
Also, this quote from the article:
Several plans from Republicans would cut federal infrastructure spending, although it is the current GOP frontrunner, Donald Trump, who has spoken the most about the need to upgrade the nation’s outdated infrastructure.
In a sense, Congress passes an “infrastructure bill” every year – the annual federal budget that funds plenty of federal programs that fund infrastructure projects. The bill cited in the article is the surface transportation reauthorization, which has to be passed every five years. What’s novel about this latest bill is that it’s the first bill in a while to invest significant additional resources into infrastructure, and to do so across a broad range of so called “hard infrastructure.”
I have to agree with the headline: the Biden administration has been delusional about Afghanistan. Don’t get me wrong, there weren’t a lot of good choices there - I get that. What concerns me is that, apparently, there were some in the administration who really and truly believed that we’d pull out and the Afghan government would hold up.
Come on, there’s no way anyone believed that. Maybe they said it publicly or even pretended to believe it behind closed doors in order to rationalize the withdrawal. But no one truly believed it.
My point is, it’s pretty evident that they believed the Afhgan government would hold up better than this. They didn’t expect Afghanistan to fall into Taliban hands this quickly; otherwise they wouldn’t have risked the embarrassment of a quick post-withdrawal collapse. I agree that they most likely - like everyone else - assumed that the nation’s government would collapse eventually, but not this fast.
To be clear, Joe Biden did not lose Afghanistan, but the manner in which we pulled out and the administration’s assessment of the Afghan forces and stability of its government was appallingly inaccurate. He’s setting himself up to look very weak in the face of the Taliban and China.
Sounds like, possibly, some major tactical errors. But the broader strategy of “it’s been 20 years, time to GTFO” is sound. And I’m not sure if there would have been a good way to GTFO without “losing” to the Taliban. Getting TFO is still the right move.