The Grand Illusion
The last days of the 117th Congress are dribbling away, and the remaining question is whether the Democrats will fumble the ball, so to speak, and subject the nation to a total mess in January, when Republicans theoretically take over the House of Representatives, with dubious leadership, if it can even be called that, given something like 170 of the 222 Republican members of the House are essentially election-deniers and the far-right wingnuts currently have enough votes to deny Kevin McCarthy the Speaker’s gavel. In short, there are even more Republican nay-sayers than ever before, and that doesn’t bode well for anything constructive.
Democrats ought to understand that NOTHING constructive will get done in the next six months, if not longer, given that the Republican nutjobs are focused on investigations and impeachments that will solve nothing, because, first, Hunter Biden hasn’t ever been a member of the Biden administration and his father never had any financial ties to his son’s business dealings, and second, any impeachment of either Joe Biden or any other administration official will go nowhere in the Senate, if it even gets that far.
For all that, and the Democratic rhetoric that they have a “framework” to work out an overall appropriations bill for the fiscal year ending in September, I have to say that I worry that the progressives and the more conservative Democrats will get hung up over pet projects and peeves and lose sight of what can be done while insisting on what cannot be done, especially in four days.
Yes, Biden and the Democrats have actually accomplished a lot, but much of that will be undone without an overall appropriations bill to fund some of those programs. Democrats also need to realize that they’ll be the ones held accountable if the money’s not there, and Kevin McCarthy would like nothing better than to gut programs and blame it on the Democrats.
So… will the Democrats come up with something sensible that can be passed, or will they attempt a massive and futile Hail Mary spending bill… and undercut all they’ve accomplished?
I’m not sure your ire should be pointed at the Democrats when the problem is really only two of them: Joe Manchin, who has to figure out how to get reelected in a Trump +20 state in the next cycle, or Kyrsten Sinema, who also has to figure out how to get reelected in a state where no one likes her after she went all-in with Pharma and financial industry lobbyists (or run for president, or whatever bizarreness has taken her in). Is those two that will be the driving factor in whatever comes out of this lame-duck session.
If we learned one thing in the last two years, it’s that the progressives make noise, but fall in line behind Biden. They won’t be the problem.
Also in Sinema’s case she’s trying to slowly slide republican to get support, because to be perfectly clear, she can’t get blue support anymore.
I’m in Phoenix, she’s hated, she’s seen as an absolute traitor and the reality is she was elected only because the alternative was a nutjob Trump supporter.
The state overall is Purple and it’s only purple because individual districts are still red enough to keep them in power on a state level. Anything that goes to the whole state falls Blue (if with narrower margins than I’d like).
I am convinced there is a cabal of Republican operatives that masquerade as centrist lobbyists and butter-up democrats with promises of Republican votes or higher office if they would just move to the middle. Invariably these pols lose in the next cycle when Republican voters vote for the real Republican and the disgusted Democratic base doesn’t show.
Sinema’s rollout of becoming an independent reeked of it. It read to me as either cynical contempt for the AZ Democratic Party, or the delusions of a narcissist who actually thinks she embodies John McCain. It reminded me a lot of that LeBron James press conference where he announced he was moving to the Miami Heat, all while referring to himself in the third person. Best of luck down there…