It seems to me that their biggest sin is having good policy preferences, in a party where the center of gravity is dogshit. None of the miserable state of these bills is on them. Their votes were meaningless, sure. But that was decided a long time ago. Vote for it, don’t vote for it. It’s not like I’m advocating for them to be lionized for it. I just don’t see what they’re doing wrong under the circumstances. If they had tanked the bill, sure, that’s material.
What they want to happen is more right than what’s happening, and half of the people angry at them for it largely agree with them (or say they do) about those policy preferences. It’s just a little funny to me, having had all of these conversations with moderates as their stated level of progressiveness has waxed and waned, to see how immediately furious they are at the people whose policy desires haven’t changed.
Those half also agree that doing something is better than doing nothing. What the squad doesn’t realize is that their choices are doing what Manchin and Seema want, doing nothing, or doing what the most liberal Republicans want. In this case we’ve seen the squad replaced by Republicans because they didn’t want to do what the conservative Dems want. If they are not careful the same will happen with the BBB and they will get replaced with Republicans again. If you support their policies you should want someone who is going to accomplish a many of them as possible.
We do? Just in the last 48 hours or so, provisions were added back, that had been previously removed. “What’s in these bills” keeps changing. I’d bet not all 535 members know, either.
They are making progressives look so dogmatic about their position that they not only come across as being unwilling to compromise but will go so far as to be spiteful.
I think the “squad” made a big misstep here. Once it’s obvious the bill was going to pass, they should have voted for it. They are now on record saying they did not want:
Their constituents to have safe, well maintained roads
To have safe, well maintained railways
To have safe, well maintained drinking water systems
To have safe, well maintained airports
A nationwide government funded EV charging network
$65bn for broadband for underserved people
$21bn for superfund clean up
In fact, given the history of legislation since the “squad” emerged, you can actually say that moderate Democrats, given the 0 significant bills on the topic passed by progressives, have done more to address climate change than the “squad.”
Strategically, in terms of representing the interests of their “faction”, I have zero issue with them playing hardball. But once the voting starts it’s a binary choice, and they are now on record being against a lot of things I don’t think they are really against. Most of them sit in safe districts, but they are much more vulnerable to attack from other Democrats now, and more easily undermined by opposition messaging as well.
As I said upthread, with something like this the normal way legislation works is it is understood that a lot of it is never going to make it to final passage. The issue here is that we know that no matter what, the opponents will always say it’s too much and will always find there’s something else to take out of it, so it is perfectly reasonable for supporters to want there to be something that the other side wants, that they can use to trade.
A way to achieve that historically has been to have One Really Big Package where we put in some things you really have to have and I can live with, in exchange for some things I really have to have and you can live with, and throw in a few nice-to-have things we can both live with to save face… but it seems they could not do this in the current state of the political and parliamentary landscape.
BTW, I think a big part of the problem with this whole ordeal is that there isn’t really a “normal way legislation works” anymore, and the future is extremely uncertain.
A lot of political fights are about next time and there probably isn’t going to be a next time that looks anything like this unless a lot of stars align in the same way in the future.
I think you’re selling short my point with this generalization - my point is that this is the attitude right now among people how have done 30+ years of gruntwork (I’m not one of them, just reporting what I’m hearing). I mean, those activists who have been community organizers etc. for longer than I’ve been alive, doing all the unexciting state-level organizing, who could be counted on in 2016 to say “don’t despair, we’re in it for the long haul”… those are the ones that I’ve (in my measly ~20 years of being involved) never seen this level of down/despondent or angry this month.
I dunno, I’ve seen lefties be fickle for my entire life, which is a good span longer than those 20 or 30 years, sounds like more of the same to me. “We didn’t get our way, time to quit voting for a few years and become less relevant again.”
And there’s an entire online industry devoted to spreading and promoting the idea that “voting is pointless because we never see REAL change enacted” and “it’s stupid to vote because the status que is baked in” and “I’m too cool to vote because I know that my vote makes no difference” and all the other familiar formulations.
Whether posted by GOP operatives or overseas adversaries, these dim-bulb memes always find lefties ready to parrot them.
Cite, please. I believe last year’s NDAA was the largest spending bill in history, at ~$740bn for a single fiscal year. It was passed over President Trump’s veto.
Reconciliation bill cost estimates are for a ten-year period, but in reality a new budget is supposed to be passed (and reconciled) each year. Please prove that the reconciliation bill currently at issue is priced at $7.4 trillion or more, or recant.
I was just talkjng about the raw size of the bill. Chill.
That bill,is full of fiscal smoke and mirrors anyway, such as introducing new entitlements but only funding them for 3-4 years in a ten year bill, knowing that once an entitlement is in place it’s almost impossible to kill.
The last outside estimate Imsaw for that bill if you fund everything for the full 10 years was 5.5 trillion, But that monstrosity of a bill changes daily, so who knows what the number is now?
The raw size of the bill… surely you don’t mean page count? Because the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2021, also a spending bill, was over 5,000 pages long. The text file was so large it caused technical problems that delayed the vote. The Build Back Better bill currently under consideration clocks in around 1,600 pages, I think.
Just curious, since talking about these things after they happen doesn’t tend to get me anywhere:
Now that the CBO has said the cost score for the other bill won’t be ready by 11/15, and given that the “moderate” Democrats’ pledge was that they would vote for it after they had the score, but no later than 11/15, which now can’t happen, and given that in any event their statement was very ambiguous about what information they were waiting for and under what circumstances that information would be sufficient…
if this is the first step in a process that results in the kind of administrative purgatory that has killed many a bill before this one, and the progressives ultimately don’t get the Build Back Better bill that they held out for and purportedly secured an agreement on, were they still in the wrong for holding out? Yes, right? It doesn’t matter what happens with the second bill, they should have just gone with the rest of the party? There’s no way they could have expected this kind of bureaucratic trash fire, so it doesn’t carry any significance to their political tactics if it does turn out that way?
Because the