The danger I’m seeing is that the stimulus a) doesn’t get passed at all or b) gets a weaker ‘bridges and roads’ stimulus only. I’m glad the House Dems are not folding. This may not get done but if it doesn’t get done it’s because ‘centrists’ go too low.
That’s an important distinction because the COVID relief programs are pretty much set to expire and there’s pressure within the Fed to start discussions on tapering. We’re heading into next year with some bottleneck-induced inflation, but worse than that, energy inflation (much higher crude oil and natural gas prices) could be a very real thing, not to mention slower growth in Asia. All of these in tandem point toward markets that could face a reckoning toward Q4 2021 and/or Qs 1 and 2 in 2022.
And I’ve not even hit on the possibility of debt ceiling, which I think will ultimately be dealt with by centrist Democrats trying to meet radical Repubs halfway. So if that happens, then there goes your high target stimulus, and maybe with it, the low target ‘bridge and roads’ stimulus as well.
Gallup now has Biden 10 points underwater. I guess that’s one answer to the OP’s question. And that’s with 90% approval among Democrats. Independents have dropped from 61% in January to 37%. That’s a devastating drop among swing voters, and the lowest rating among independents of any President other than Donald Trump since Gallup started polling. Republicans have dropped from 12% to 6%, meaning he’s losing the neverTrumpers as well.
The bad thing isn’t the poll drop, which he theoretically could recover from, but rather the timing. There’s some really critical legislative shit about to go down, and Biden’s going to struggle to command any kind of influence on anyone, be they Manchin or AOC, when it comes to ironing out differences. A few months ago, when he was riding the vaccine pre-delta wave, it might have been a different story. But he’s as much a bystander to what takes place in congress as he is an influencer, maybe more the former than the latter. Americans don’t tolerate the perception of a weak president well.
Barring a colossal fuckup we’re still getting two bills. The worst that can happen is reconcilliation is 1B-something and some of the big stuff like climate and medicare expansion get cut out of it.
We’re in an absurd stage of this process but the entire caucus has stuff they want in these bills and they’re not going to let them die completely. These bills have a lot of support from special interests in spite of special interests hating some of the climate and healthcare stuff. The problem is that with people like Sinema capable of pulling this crap no one is actually going to compromise when the other side could turn around a week later and say the deal is off unless they get more - so as a result everyone is going to wait until the 11th hour.
The biggest issue in the midterms is going to be whether GOP led states can get all of their voter suppression and gerrymandering in place or whether an actual VRA will get passed to mitigate that.
The economy is extremely shaky but the polarization of the country and the divided opinions on our current era are probably going to mute the effect. The economy is clearly not as bad as it was a year ago, so it’s more of an issue of extreme uncertainty about the recovery than a new crisis. And I don’t think this is the same as 2010 because of how different the political landscape is - the Democrats couldn’t point to GOP-led states on basically as a reason for the slow recovery but they’ll have a much easier time this time around.
This I’m extremely concerned about. Has the GOP said what they want, or is it just a blanket move to try to block the debt ceiling? Obviously this and the VRA are both things worth killing the filibuster over and part of me thinks that the impact of defaulting on debt on the economy might make senators more willing to at least make some changes to the rules. I honestly have no idea what a gang-of-20 deal would look like. The Democrats can’t reasonably agree to give up on any of the recent policies they’ve put in place or anything in the infrastructure bills, and I can’t think of another issue that is depoliticized enough that a Democrat could offer it up to the GOP and save face.
The Republicans are going to hold on the debt ceiling - they absolutely will let the crisis come. McConnell, who is as cunning a political animal as there’s ever been in US history, has already gamed this out. He’s counting on centrist democrats to fold and start an intra-party war between the centrists and the progressives, and I trust his ability to make political calculation far better than my own.
And at that point, it’s an open question of how badly the moderate Republicans want the original stimulus package, and then another open question is to what degree would jilted progressives be willing to work with moderates of both parties to pass anything. We’re looking at the potential for a complete blowup of Biden’s agenda, and with a broken, dispirited, and very weak looking Democratic party in the face of multiple growing crises.
Hitler’s party struggled through much of the 20s, particularly in the initial aftermath of the Putsch. But they regrouped and rebranded themselves as a more legitimate version of its earlier self. What they needed was an opportunity to delegitimize the opposition, and they found it in the Depression and hyperinflation of the late 1920s Weimar Republic. That’s what radical Republicans are doing now. They’re waiting for mayhem. Except they’re not just waiting; they’re perfectly willing to bring about its arrival sooner if they can.
Republicans are taking a big gamble if they’re putting ever more of their eggs into the putsch basket. In the interim three years they could instead wind up alienating an even greater number of voters who might otherwise consider voting for them and suffering a '24 electoral defeat too massive to overcome with the planned legislative shenanigans.
I think that Mitch is playing a dangerous game here (besides the obvious dangerous game he’s playing with the economy). Part of the reason that the filibuster has lasted this long is that there’s never been a “do or die” moment for its elimination. If the economy starts tanking due to a US debt default, that moment could arrive. Remember that the ability to “invoke cloture” and shut down a filibuster was only created in 1917 – previous to that, there was no procedural way to overcome a filibuster. It came over Republicans filibustering a measure to arm merchant ships in the midst of World War I, whom Woodrow Wilson branded, “a little group of willful men” and accused of obstructing war efforts. Crowds burned filibustering Senators in effigy over it.
If Mitch is gonna go down this path, Democrats need to go full blast on him. Call him a traitor. Keep the Senate in session 24-7 with no other business than the debt limit. And if the Republicans manage to hold tight (I have my doubts) when shit really hits the fan, are Joe Manchin and Kristen Sinema really going to let the economy crumble to save the filibuster?
People overrate McConnell’s genius. His main smart ideas were realizing that all of these time-honored senate traditions were stupid and would crack under pressure, and that if the entire GOP caucus circled the wagons the media wouldn’t figure out how to blame any one Republican for the dysfunction in congress.
He’s been using the same playbook for over a decade at this point. If the democrats don’t realize what’s going on this time it’s on them. They only have to negotiate with any GOP senators on this by choice - defaulting on their debt is obviously something worth nuking the filibuster over and everyone knows it.
My radar may be off, but to clarify, I think it’s going to end up being like it always has been: more so brinkmanship and the threat of crisis than an actual debt default crisis. But it could get to the point where we get our credit rating taken down a notch or two.
I don’t think it’ll be a full-blown crisis because I think that centrists Democrats will be the first to fold 'em. They’ll basically side with Republicans and refuse to support the progressive proposals, and it’ll be on the progressives to decide how long they want to keep fighting the good fight. McConnell doesn’t want a default but he’s probably calculating that if there’s the threat of a default or even a short-term default, the GOP will get blamed, but so will Democrats.
He’s calculating that most voters are know-nothings and that independent voters, which are really beginning to sour on Biden, will blame both parties, not just the GOP. He figures they’ll blame the Republicans for refusing to budge on fiscal tightening and they’ll blame the progressives for trying to cram in stimulus in the form of social spending. And sadly, I think he’s probably making the right calculation.
McConnell’s genius is knowing his voters better than Democrats knowing theirs. Keep in mind this is a senator who used an expansion of healthcare as a weapon against Obama, and beat him over the head with it again and again and again. When they were in the majority, the actually did nearly default and lowered the credit rating of the US. And did Republicans pay a price? Nope. They got even nastier, and they were rewarded for that nastiness time and time again.
Sure, they lost in 2018 and 2020, but that had more to do with Trump’s incompetence and constant outrage than McConnell, who has already positioned the Republicans to take over again in 2022 and beyond. And this is despite many within the Trump wing of the party signaling a desire to remove him from power. McConnell is evil, but he’s a straight up political badass
I would ascribe that more to a failure of imagination and lack of willingness to make tough decisions on the part of the Democrats than the genius of McConnell. This is a fool me once, fool me twice situation.
They don’t have the votes to overcome a filibuster to change the filibuster rule.
There is an arcane method where the majority outright lies about what the rule says, and thus do not follow it. That is what Biden doesn’t want to do, possibly because he feels it will hurt his Republican and/or independent constituency. (I’m not able to find any polling on public opinion of the “nuclear option” itself.)
Also, a question about the procedure. Would Kamala Harris have to vote against herself? Is that allowed?
example.
cloture vote on debt ceiling bill fails, 50-50 (cloture requires 60 votes per Senate rule twelve)
Majority Leader (Schumer): I raise a point of order that under rule twenty-two, the vote on cloture is by majority vote.
Presiding Officer (Harris): The point of order is not sustained by the rules of the Senate.
Majority Leader (Schumer): I appeal the ruling of the chair.
vote on whether rule twenty-two says cloture is by majority vote: 50-50
Kamala Harris would then have to cast the tiebreaking vote, against her own ruling.
The filibuster is part of the Senate Rules, not legislation, and so can be changed by majority vote in the Senate.
Schumer could declare, on failure of cloture, that the debt ceiling is governed by reconciliation and so not subject to the 60-vote threshold. Harris could then call for a vote to decide uphold or decline Schumer’s objection - again, a 50-vote threshold here. If Schumer’s objection is upheld, then reconciliation can be used for debt-ceiling legislation.
The problem here is Democrats, not Republicans. Too much hand-wringing and garment-rending over whether this is some sort of bridge too far.
I don’t want to get into too much minutiae (which has been gone over in other threads), but the filibuster isn’t so much “in the rules” as it is a consequence of the Senate rules and how they’ve been interpreted. Also, Schumer wouldn’t need to object to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation – that’s clearly already permissible, and is Democrats’ Plan B for doing so.