Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on Sunday rejected Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) counteroffer of a $1.5 trillion top line for the reconciliation package after progressives spurred the delay of the House vote on the bipartisan infrastructure, which buys Democrats more time to reach a deal on reconciliation amid moderates putting up a fight over its price tag.
I am less concerned about the hardworking people crafting this legislation than unscrupulous people using these processes for drama, falsehoods and “enemy” creation.
People working to craft this legislation are somehow made “equivalent” (BothSides) to GOP adolescents in business suits craving to wreck it all–and thus forestall needed policies–for party advantage.
Meanwhile, all of those people you think are Democrats have now made the philosophical shift to Progressive. Because, absent the trappings of Clinton-era liberalism, Democrats and Progressives are the same people.
Manchin, it turned out, didn’t really know much about what was in the bills. What he did understand, or at least his donors, is that West Virginia, which sits atop the Marcellus Shale formation, never had a plan to deal with the structural economic changes that would result from decarbonization. This has been coming for decades, but incumbent hydrocarbon producers have tried to come up with ways to recharacterize their resource extraction. It is a common source of corruption around the world, too much of a good thing is called a resource curse. Dutch disease is a structural economic distortion that results from overemphasizing a particular industry. If Joe Manchin would just clear his head a moment and see what these reforms mean in a non-distorted context, he would probably begin to talk sense. I agree with him that the US needs to take reducing government debt seriously, but it is hard to see how that happens without needed reforms.
Please someone tell me she went on to explain what is in the bill rather than simply slam Manchin.
Start with what you’re for,” Jayapal said. “And that’s what he’s asked them for. And then let’s come to the number from there. So, that’s how we’re thinking about it.”
The linked article, by Jonathan Weisman and Emily Cochrane, is pure NYT BS. They have constructed their own narrative on Biden, the “moderates” vs, “the progressives,” and the “concerned” Democratic senators, and all stories must be squeezed into that narrative. These two writers are so adept at making shit up that none who read them will ever know what’s true. And then the minor-league correspondents on cable pick up the narrative and embellish the BS. It’s no wonder the public doesn’t know or care. House Delays Vote on Infrastructure Bill as Democrats Feud - The New York Times (nytimes.com)
She and the other Democrats who support the bill - almost all of them - have been explaining what’s in the bill since forever. And they do it every chance they get.
I suspect that once we get past about 30 House members and 10 Senators, nobody really knows what’s in the bills. To way too many, this sort of policy crap gets in the way of real governance–bloviating at hearings, dialing for dollars, attending fundraisers, and going back home to shake hands at the Cattleman’s Association and Association of Plastics Manufacturers dinners.
I like that idea.
Maybe “America! For less than a billion dollars a day, we can have the same good things that all other modern industrial nations have!!”
