October 2021 Archives

Dear America,

A long time ago I saw an old film of Will Rogers doing his little rope tricks as he issued his political comic commentary.  Among the things he said was this: I am not a member of any organized political party; I'm a Democrat.  It was a joke, but today, it isn't very funny.  Even the leadership of the party doesn't see any humor in what the progressive contingent of the party is doing.  They are holding up a bill that left The Senate with bipartisan approval.  That should have been enough...the bipartisanship...to garner the votes of a bipartisan majority in The House, but even if not, the Democrats should have been able to carry the day with just their slim margin of hegemony.  But they couldn't do it.  The progressives are holding out for everything they want, and they won't accept even a broadly approved portion of it.  They'd rather hold their own party cohorts feet to the fire, risking getting nothing and sending the party reeling into broadly felt ignominy among American voters than take part of what everybody wants...damn the consequences.

President Biden, an inveterate politicians and an emeritus senator in particular, has been plying his experience against the problem.  But it's like herding cats...herding the cats into some rational solution of the problem by pointing out to them that by turning their noses up at the half loaf they can have right now, they are giving up the prospect of controlling the congress as a whole with impunity and making the next three years go down in history as the pax democraticus that they should want to be known for in the bargain.  Instead, they are flexing what they see as some ideological muscle, which is actually a partisan mental defect that everyone but them sees as such.  And then of course there are the two Democrat senators, Sinema and Manchin.

There is no smaller margin of control for a party in The Senate than the one currently held by the Democrats, who have fifty senators and the Vice President in office.  Under the rules of The Senate, that's just enough that when the Republicans obdurately refuse to approve anything the Democrats want, whether we, America, want it or not (at least in a budget bill), the Democrats can squeak it through with the vote of Kamala Harris as she, the Vice President, gets to cast the deciding vote when there is a tie.  But are those two senators willing to sacrifice self-interest in the name of the common weal, those two myopic fools?  Of course not.  Sinema wants to think she's a rebel, and she thinks this recalcitrance sets her apart as some romantic kind of rebel.  Manchin, on the other hand, wants to keep collecting money from the coal mining industry for his future campaigns.  The coal industry oligarchs don't want to see the environmental aspects of Biden's "Build Back Better" bill happen, so Manchin, toady that he is, won't vote yes on the reconciliation (budget) bill.

In summary, the Democratic progressives in The House are interdicting the passage of their president's bipartisan infra-structure bill that passed in The Senate, and two misguided Democratic senators are preventing passage of the companion "Build Back Better" reconciliation bill because, while they see the merits of most of the bill, there is something that each of them doesn't like, for the sake of which they are willing to sacrifice everything else.  And both the house progressives and the two would-be senate renegades are willing to sacrifice the political future of their party, and thus of the party's platform, just so they can prance and pose like the dilatants that they are.  

It's infuriating.  There is so little between the future that all of us...and them...want, but so much of it is irreducible ego, that the future looks bleak instead of bright.  After Trump, and in light of the menace that he still represents, you would think that rational people would be willing to say yes to most of what they want rather than court disaster as they are doing now.  But as noted above, they're Democrats, and they apparently haven't learned to say yes when someone makes them a good offer.

So come November 2022, I will vote Democrat again, only because voting Republican is endorsing the moral didacticism and pedantry of their ethos, which is coupled with a complete lack of principle that belies the virtue of their creed.  As a consequence, when the Democrats lose next year, they will learn nothing from it because they will have retained their base constituency by default, and not only they, but all of us, America, will lose.  No matter how much history the party learns, they still insist on repeating the past.

Your friend,

Mike 

Dear America,

I think that Senators Manchin and Sinema like being senators, and probably for a variety of reasons.  They like the prestige, the power, the money (somehow, though they make only $174,000 a year, a lot more than you and I do, more than half of the members of Congress are millionaires), the perquisites and probably the fifteen weeks a year of vacation they take--they only work between 150 and 175 days a year whereas the rest of the working world works about 250.  The Biden "Build Back Better" and infra-structure bills, aimed at diminishing that gap between their lifestyles and ours, are popular with us, but they won't vote for them.  Note that the bipartisan infrastructure bill is favored by 64% of us and opposed by only 24% while the Biden BBB bill is popular with 62% while only 30% oppose it.  In that light, consider that Sinema won her Arizona seat by just over 2% and Manchin won his in West Virginia by just over 3% in 2018 and ask yourself, how can they expect to get reelected in 2024?  These bills are central to a series of national goals: making prosperity more accessible to more of us who are lower down in our economic caste system; retrieving our national prosperity from the effects of the pandemic; modernizing access to our information technology and making it accessible to everyone regardless of location or affluence; reestablishing our nation's economic and technology hegemony, and much more, including climate change and enabling those of us who don't make much money but have children who need care to keep our jobs.  Both bills relate to our collective future, so their obdurate refusal to support them must be secondary to something else that they think will save them; what is it?

There are a couple of things.  First, West Virginia, with 1.8 million people, gets as many senators (2) as does California, with nearly 40 million people.  That gives conservative, rural West Virginia as much power over the direction of the nation as largely urban, recently liberal California has.  This skewed representative-power distortion is required by the constitution, and it has the same effect on the electoral college, which is how Donald Trump became president.  He and the Republicans like to talk about winning elections, but in 2016 for example, they won almost nothing.  (They lost the popular vote, two senate seats and five seats in The House, and really won nothing but the electoral college, yet retained control of The Senate and took the presidency.)  The relevance of those facts for Manchin and Sinema is that we don't really have as democratic a system as we Americans pat ourselves on the back for having, and thus they have the power to chose our national destiny.  The point is that the majority of the American people does not control our destiny; an electoral minority based on geography does...with, they suppose, impunity.  The Democrats have won more votes than the Republicans across the nation in every senatorial election cycle but one over the past thirty years, yet the Republicans have controlled The Senate nine times to only seven for the Democrats.  But the problem isn't just the constitution, which tends to give The Senate a rural slant. There's "gerrymandering" too.   It's redistricting for house elections, gerrymandering, more than anything that is preventing legislative progress.  Manchin and Sinema are wielding disproportionate power in The Senate, but The House has an unrepresentative proportion of Republicans who are as recalcitrant as Manchin and Sinema, all in partisan univocal league preventing us from augmenting our common weal.  While the Democrats have the numbers to pass the bills, they don't have the consensus.  They need some Republicans...just a few...but the party speaks for all of the Republicans, and merit on the issues doesn't count for them.

Manchin has a constituency that will vote for him because of his willingness to take an irrational interest in the coal industry.  He thinks he has impunity for his refusal to do what the majority in the nation wants because the majority in his state is also oriented by its bond to a moribund industry: coal mining.  And he may be legitimately banking on parochial loyalty, but Sinema is a different story.  There is talk of primary challenges in Arizona's Democratic nomination process over her refusal to take a position consistent with her previous, green orientation on BBB.  Her fate may literally be hanging in the balance relative to her refusal to support that bill out of ostensible concern about the national debt, especially in light of the linkage of those bills to reversal of the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the most affluent people and entities in the nation.  Arizona gets more liberal every day, and here she is going in the opposite direction.  She won't stand for reelection until 2024, but when the issue is as big as the on the table today, the enemies she is making won't forget any time soon.

In the final analysis, both Manchin and Sinema won by narrow margins the last time they ran for the Senate, so they are vulnerable.  So what?  Their fellow Democrats may start reminding them that they need the party if they are to stay where they are.  Schumer and the leadership may show some resolve and decide, since they want to play politics, let's play.

Your friend,

Mike