Maybe you haven’t noticed, but there’s a major shitshow going down with Democrats’ infrastructure push and, you know, keeping the government running.
And all this fight over reconciliation overshadowing that the government is on schedule to shut down at midnight tomorrow.
A sad time in the USA
Journalism is going down hill. ‘Shitshow’? Really?
Having said that……
Worth reading….
GOP lawmakers aren’t really any more unified on infrastructure than Democrats
Oh, I don’t know - I think they’re far more unified. It’s easy when the unification just involves saying ‘no’ to everything.
Calling a spade a shovel, if you ask me. Because it really is exactly as it was described. I don’t know how history will be written about this time-period, and s-show isn’t really an official term, but there’s just no other way to describe it.
History is written by the victors.
The GQP victors, should they succeed, will point to this time-period as the turning point that finally brought them to autocratic power in America, won them Congressional dominance in both houses in 2022 and installed T**** or his designee as POTUS in 2024.
The Dem victors can only hope that they point to the voters who said no to autocracy and put the Biden agenda into play.
Kill the BIF and say that they need time to work on the continuing resolution/debt ceiling raise. If Manchin/Sinema want to play the delay game with the Reconcilation bill, then we can do it with the BIF.
We knew this week was going to be a rocky one, and it is. Buckle up!
Nuke the BIF from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
It’ll just take hacking into the control system of the Jewish Space Lasers. Make it so.
So, apparently Biden has said he’s not going to beg or threaten anyone in order to get votes on the two infrastructure bills. However, he never said that Ron Klain wouldn’t. So, in the hope that Ron Klain spares a moment to read this, here is how to “encourage” Manchin’s support, as described in Senator Bob Casey’s press release below:
“Today, U.S. Senators Bob Casey (D-PA), Joe Manchin (D-WV), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) reintroduced the Black Lung Benefits Disability Trust Fund Act of 2021. The legislation calls for a ten-year extension of the current black lung excise tax that is set to expire in December 2021 to ensure that coal miners suffering from Black Lung Disease and their families have access to the quality medical care they desperately need. Without revenue from this tax, the Black Lung Disability Trust Fund will face insolvency at a time when the nationwide prevalence of black lung is increasing…”
No program is more politically potent in West Virginia than Black Lung workers compensation, and no program is so limited geographically as this one. As a practical matter it goes away on January 1, 2022 unless Congress takes action.
So, If Manchin signs off on a reasonably modified Big D Infrastructure bill, he also gets his 10-year Black Lung extension bill folded into it, and he is a hero back home. If he doesn’t, his Black Lung bill never sees the light of day, because there is no way that other Democratic Congressmen and Senators are going to give Manchin anything after he has screwed them on everything.
So, here’s hoping that someone in the WH knows how to threaten, even if the Big Guy doesn’t want to be tagged with it.
The D cave project has begun with the decoupling of the debt limit & government funding bill. D’s just do not know how to play hard ball.
What good is passing the funding bill if Treasury does not have the authority to borrow needed funds the funding bill requires? If House progressives want to retain leverage on suspension of the debt limit they will vote against the decoupling and point to the fact it was R’s who refused to pass the funding bill along with the debt limit suspension when they had the chance.
This is classic a game theory like Bamberg Truckers Game playing out in real life. R’s are only interested in lose-lose options where D’s fail. In the trucker game that means blocking the single lane road so no one can deliver the goods. They will gladly do nothing and cheer. Romney, Collins, Murkowski & the rest of the so called “moderate” R’s are all in on this strategy. Look at vaccine refusal. Rank & file R’s would rather get sick & die rather than give D’s a win on bringing the pandemic to a close.
So, if R’s want to bring us to the precipice why do D’s not allow them to dangle for a few weeks. Hold a coupled vote every day until the deadlines are breached. Then the true culprit will be obvious to all.
Because we still have time on the debt ceiling, and a government shutdown in the middle of a pandemic is about the dumbest possible thing to let happen.
That may get Manchin on board but Natasha Sinema is still a No.
Seems like a plan. Meanwhile, every day confidence in the United States’ financial situation drops. And the media continues to paint the fault 100% on “the Democrats.”
Raising the debt ceiling is unrelated to future spending.
It’s a legal acknowledgement that the federal government will repay the money it has already borrowed.
.
“Otherwise, we’ll be in a very scary standoff with no time left to rely on any solution other than either Republicans blinking or Manchin/Sinema helping reform or nuke the filibuster.”
Get rid of the filibuster. Then get rid of the debt ceiling. The only weird thing is that McConnell seems willing to force these things.
Great, give the GQP strategy tips…
And how, exactly, do you propose that these things get done?
Easy to say, but very hard to accomplish.
“we’ll be in a very scary standoff with no time left to rely on any solution other than either Republicans blinking or Manchin/Sinema helping reform or nuke the filibuster.”
Which is McConnell’s wet dream. You can claim it doesn’t matter to him all you want…that because he’ll just do it first chance he gets anyway, it’s a non-issue…but that’s not accurate. He wants the Dems to smear themselves in shit so the MSM will go nuts over it. They’ve got the memos circulating and the interview slots all lined up for going crazy all over the far-right and “regular” media gloating that they stopped the Dems’ socialist plots, halted our lurch towards big gov’t communism and made Biden a one-term do-nothing POTUS, all while excoriating the Dems for being so tyrannical and power grabby that they axed the filibuster just to “put the country into massive uncontrolled debt in an attempt to enact their tax and spend socialist agenda.”
Manchin and Sinema are turning out to be the two very worst people in DC and, if measured by their actions, more deadly enemies of the Dems and the American people than any Republican currently in Congress. They are literally handing the GQP 4 years of Biden being a lame duck who gets absolutely nothing done whatsoever.
And all of this is going to work wonders for the GQP because the MSM is going to play right. into. their. hands.