Discussion about this post

User's avatar
King Beauregard 👂's avatar

"The reason Biden's agenda is split into two chunks in the first place is that conservative Democrats in both houses — especially Manchin — wanted to have at least some part of the bill that could be passed with Republican support."

I'd really like a citation on this, that they're doing the two bills simply out of a fetish for bipartisanship. Because I find "bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake" is mostly a myth that allows people to demonize establishment Democrats without actually understanding what's going on, and I bet that's what's happening here.

I seem to recall -- but can't find a good link -- that when this started, the notion was that we use the bipartisan bill to pass the parts that aren't eligible for reconciliation, and use reconciliation for the rest. It sounds a lot more plausible to me than holding that Biden said, and I quote, "durrr, I want to make bills harder to pass because I'm big and stupid and I eat my own boogers and I like to smell my own farts". Which is pretty much what is required to believe that the bipartisan bill was written for literally no good reason.

Now, I could be wrong; maybe the bipartisan bill was completely unnecessary. But even if it was, it passed in the Senate -- it got the bipartisan support it needed -- so I guess it worked.

Expand full comment
susan_g's avatar

So, John Denver f'd up the lyrics.

Expand full comment
431 more comments...

No posts