This was a rather strange week in Washington politics because the biggest story actually happened almost an entire week ago. The lack of big news since then isn't really all that surprising, though, considering Congress is (once again) off for a week -- meaning little-to-no news from Capitol Hill. But before they scarpered off on vacation last weekend, the House managed to actually pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill late Friday night. This is an enormous legislative victory for President Joe Biden and overshadowed all the other events of the week.

Of course, because they're Democrats, there was some drama surrounding the vote. Nancy Pelosi convinced most of the progressives to go ahead and vote for the bill, with the solid promise that she would bring the House version of the Build Back Better bill up for a vote the week of November 15th. The "moderate" faction swore they'd vote for it then -- as long as it proved to be revenue-neutral (or "fully paid for"). This was a serious climb-down from what the progressives had been demanding all along, which was that both bills would have gotten a vote on the same day in the House, and that the Build Back Better bill had already passed the Senate.

Six progressives refused to go along with Pelosi's promise, and voted against the infrastructure bill last Friday. But 13 Republicans voted for the bill, which pushed it over the finish line. More on these 13 in a moment. This means that over 30 Republicans in both houses of Congress supported the bill -- including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell -- making it about as bipartisan as you can get, these days.

That was important to both Joes -- both President Biden and Senator Manchin. Biden ran on the whole concept of "making Washington work again" and "bringing people together," and the passage of this bill puts a very big feather in that particular cap. Manchin insisted on taking months and months over the summer to hash out a bipartisan bill, and he got his wish in the end.

If these were normal times, of course, such a bill would have easily gotten overwhelming support in both houses of Congress (probably 90 percent or better voting for it), because who can really be against better roads and bridges? Sadly, the answer to that now is: Donald Trump's Republican Party. Trump halfheartedly tried to get an infrastructure deal multiple times during his time in office, only to have the entire effort wind up being the punchline of a joke ("Infrastructure Week"). Biden actually got it done, in less than 10 months. So of course, Trump is now angry. Which brings us back to those 13 House Republicans. Politico had a pretty good rundown of the Republican reaction to the bill's passage:

It's the party against critical race theory, "woke-ism" and vaccine mandates.

And now, it would seem, the Republican Party is against bridges and roads.

The ferocity of the reaction against the 13 House members who voted with Democrats on the House-passed infrastructure bill appeared to signal a new stage in the party's evolution, marking the GOP as so reflexively anti-Biden that even spending on infrastructure -- an issue that Donald Trump once obsessed over as president -- is too radioactive to support.

It's a hardening of the party that's already shaping its approach to the midterms, ensuring not only that Republicans up and down the ballot will be running against the sitting president, but that they will not support anything that might help Biden improve his sunken public approval ratings in the interim.

And they'll punish any moderate Republicans who do.

"That's the way the place works now," said former Rep. Tom Davis, a Virginia Republican who served as National Republican Congressional Committee chair. "That's what we have devolved to."

In the days since the House vote, the 13 Republicans who voted with Democrats for spending on roads and bridges -- once among the driest, most bipartisan exercises on the Hill -- have been savaged by Trump and his allies, who called the defectors "traitors" and suggested they could be stripped of their committee assignments.

At least one of them, Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan, said he received "nasty" death threats -- which hardly stopped his Trump-endorsed primary opponent, Michigan state Rep. Steve Carra, from piling on.

"This man stabbed Donald Trump in the back," Carra wrote in a fundraising appeal on Tuesday. "Let's crush him."

Some of the backlash against the 13 was fanned by their colleagues. One of them, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), tweeted out office phone numbers of the wayward Republicans.

Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-N.C.) threatened retribution. "Vote for this infrastructure bill and I will primary the hell out of you," he wrote.

"Some elements of the party," said Ed Rogers, the veteran Republican lobbyist and strategist, "keep finding new ways to define Republicanism: 'Do you think Trump won the election? Do you think everyone who voted for the infrastructure package is a sellout and has done great harm to flag and country?'"

He said, "I hope it's a fever that will break."

We're going to file that last comment under "Wishfully Delusional Thinking." Because it won't. That fever is just going to keep building. And it's becoming violently dangerous (emphasis in original):

The Republican Party has a violence problem.

Or perhaps "problem" isn't quite the right way to put it, if that implies that there are negative political consequences for the role that violence -- and more importantly, the threat of violence -- plays in the party's political identity and the way its officials encourage and channel the urges of their supporters.

There may not be negative political consequences, or if there are, then they are minor enough that the party will tolerate them, given the benefits it gains from tacitly (or not so tacitly) encouraging and even fetishizing violence as a reasonable tool to use to achieve political ends.

To see what I'm talking about, let's take a quick tour around the day's news.

In new audio released by Jonathan Karl of ABC News, Donald Trump is asked about his supporters chanting "Hang Mike Pence!" on Jan. 6 as they rampaged through the Capitol in search of the vice president. Trump was unconcerned, both because he thought Pence was "well-protected" and because the protesters were justified in their rage: "It's common sense" that Pence should have attempted to overturn the results of the election so Trump could remain president, he said, so the rioters' pursuit of Pence was understandable.

And of course, they were looking for Pence because Trump himself told them that the vice president should be the focus of their anger: As he watched rioters break into the Capitol on television, Trump tweeted that "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution." Ever since, Trump has tried to recast that assault not as an attack on American democracy but as a legitimate response to him losing the election.

In other news, members of the House are debating what to do about Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Ariz.), who recently tweeted an animated video in which he is depicted killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.). Gosar's defense is that the video was merely a symbolic representation "of a battle between lawful and unlawful policies."

Meanwhile, in Kenosha, Wis., the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, who became a hero of the right after he went to a protest with an AR-15-style rifle and killed two people, is nearing its end.

And if you're a Republican who does so much as vote for a bipartisan bill to bring infrastructure spending to your district, you can expect death threats. The quickest way for Republican candidates to demonstrate their bona fides is by shooting guns in an ad.

The thread running through all these events and controversies is the belief that liberals are so wicked that violence and the threat of violence are reasonable responses to the possibility of them getting their way. Right along with that belief is a fantasy, that of a man (almost always a man) who rather than being an ordinary schlub at the mercy of a world in which he has no power is actually bursting with testosterone and potency, someone who can and perhaps should become a killing machine.

That's the story of the Jan. 6 rioters, who believed they could break down doors and smash windows and the American system of government would bend to their will.

This is dangerous, dangerous stuff, in other words. And yet, Republican leaders prefer to just ignore it and pretend it is not happening. The highest-ranking Republican in the House, Kevin McCarthy, has been asked numerous times this week what he thinks about Gosar's video tweet -- which depicts him killing a fellow House member and then attacking the United States president with two swords -- but McCarthy remains mum. Silence is consent, in this case.

Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, has called for a formal investigation and Democrats have introduced a censure resolution. Gosar refused to apologize and actually came out and defended the video, first with a staffer dismissively stating: "Everyone needs to relax," and then with Gosar himself attempting to explain the video as "a symbolic portrayal of a fight over immigration policy," which no one not named "Paul Gosar" believed for a second.

Throughout it all, McCarthy and the entire rest of the Republican leadership in both houses of Congress has stayed silent. Imagine what they'd be saying if a Democrat had dared to post a video like that attacking Trump, if you will. This isn't just hypocrisy, folks, this is dangerous incitement to violence.

Thirteen Republicans thought spending some money on roads and bridges and seaports and airports and broadband and replacing lead pipes sounded like an entirely reasonable thing for the federal government to do, so they voted for it. They are now getting death threats -- from their own party's voters. This kind of intraparty purge is historically frightening, and yet once again the Republican leadership hasn't said a single word condemning their own base's actions.

There's always a lot of talk about "slippery slopes" in politics. But we've never seen such a clear (and dangerous) example. The entire Republican Party is on a slippery slope which descends straight toward: "Screw the rule of law -- might makes right should be the law of the political jungle!" After all, the party's de facto leader is where these ideas have originated. The cowardliness of all the congressional leadership is due to their abject fear of provoking the rage of their narcissistic leader. So it is to be expected that the GOP is going to slip a lot further down this frightening and dangerous slope until anything changes.

Let's see... what else is going on in politics? Oh, speaking of Republicans reverting to fascistic behavior, a Virginia school board member thinks we should bring back book-burning. No, seriously. And yet they will turn right around and denounce Democrats for supporting what they call "cancel culture." Irony is not just dead, it's absolutely been mummified over in Republicanland.

And finally, a bit of comedy to close on. Well, that's the way we read it, at any rate. Mitch McConnell -- the guy personally responsible for denying a Democratic president a Supreme Court pick, remember that? -- wrote this knee-slapper for the Washington Post editorial page, on the subject of the sanctity of the Supreme Court. No -- really!

Seriously, this just has to be comedy, right, Mitch? You were going for some sort of dryly/wryly ironic New England humor sort of thing? There's just no other sane way to read it, since of course we all remember all the "institutional vandalism" which permanently damaged the rule of law that you yourself did -- so there's just no way in Hell you could have meant any sane person to take any of this seriously. Right, Mitch?

[President Joe] Biden may have wanted to appear that he was sidestepping the issue by merely setting up a commission to study it. Don't be misled. This was radical and unacceptable presidential behavior, part of a larger campaign to make independent judges feel as though they are on probation. This attack on the separation of powers comes from the same liberals who became hysterical whenever Attorney General William P. Barr made a routine decision on a mundane subject.

The Biden commission's draft report was another attempt to appear moderate while doing radical things. The commission criticized the crudest form of court-packing -- the simple addition of seats -- but pivoted to an approving discussion of another idea that is barely less radical: canceling justices' life tenure.

Do not be fooled. Even as the political left tries to spin the cancellation of life tenure as a half-step back from an even crazier opening bid, term limits would still be institutional vandalism. If a Republican administration came anywhere near flirting with such a proposal, the outrage from liberals would have been deafening.

. . .

The Senate exists to defeat shortsighted proposals and protect our institutions from structural vandalism. That is our job. The American people need their judges to do theirs: follow the law wherever it may lead, independent and unafraid.

Biden campaigned on unity and moderation. He won a close victory with an evenly split Senate and negative coattails in the House.

As this month's elections confirmed, Americans did not hand Democrats any mandate to let radicals transform the country. And they certainly have no mandate to permanently damage the rule of law.

Our advice: Don't quit your day job, Mitch! Or, on second thought, go right ahead and quit. Why not try stand-up for a second career? Go for it, Mitch!

Although it happened so long ago it's tough to think of it as being "this week," President Joe Biden's big win in Congress easily made him the Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week.

In fact, his increased involvement towards the end of the negotiations has some Democrats calling on Biden to immediately start showing the same sense of hands-on urgency on Biden's Build Back Better bill. This is really the only way it's going to get over the finish line, so it would make sense for Biden to continue the leadership he showed in order to get the infrastructure bill done.

The bill itself is impressive enough, although (due to the insistence that it be bipartisan) it's nowhere near as impressive as it could have been. But the list of what the infrastructure bill contains is a long one, and a very popular one as well. Not that many people are political dead-set against fixing roads and bridges, after all. The Republicans bizarre insistence on using a very strict definition of what an "infrastructure" bill was allowed to contain now means Biden's got a pretty easy sales job ahead. Because the Republicans who negotiated the bipartisan bill only would agree to things which even Republicans couldn't be politically attacked over, now that it has passed it is impossible for other Republicans (the ones who didn't vote for it) to point to any one piece of it to demonize the whole bill.

President Biden has already begun his sales job to the public. It will continue over the next few months, and it will involve not just the president but cabinet members and other Biden administration experts.

Democrats in states and districts where Republican senators and representatives voted against the bill need to immediately start making some political hay over the issue. Here is Representative Val Demings doing just that, as she gears up for a run against Senator Marco Rubio: "We cannot forget that our state's senior senator, Marco Rubio, fought this effort.... He voted against economic opportunity and relief."

That is the case Democrats need to take to the Republicans, on pretty much any bill they can get through: "This is what Democrats do for you, while Republicans fight against it all."

But that's all in the future. For now, there's simply no other valid candidate for Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week than President Joe Biden.

Way to go, Joe!

[Congratulate President Joe Biden on his White House contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.]

Since we don't have anyone specific for this, we're just going to award it by default almost. We don't have anyone specific mostly because not a whole lot happened this week. Not a whole lot happened, because both houses of Congress gave themselves an entire week of vacation for Veterans' Day.

Congress has an enormous list of critical things which must get done before the end of the calendar year. And they just wasted an entire week of it.

This is on top of the insanely-generous holidays they'll be taking for Thanksgiving and Christmas, mind you. The House of Representatives has only scheduled 13 work days from now until the end of the year. There are over 30 work days remaining (defining "work days" as "days which an average white-collar worker would not get off from his or her company"). But the House won't even meet on half of the available days. And the Senate is not much better.

So this week's Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week award goes to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, for allowing Congress an entire week off for a holiday most workers don't even get one day off for.

Just please (even though we know it is almost inevitable) don't start complaining that "there's just no time to get everything done" -- when you return from your nine straight days off, that is. For Veterans' Day.

[Contact Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi on her House contact page, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer on his Senate contact page, to let them know what you think of their actions.]

Volume 641 (11/12/21)

OK, a rather mixed bag of talking points this week. A few deal with Republican idiocy... well, really, most of them do, in one form or another, we suppose.

We spent an inordinate amount of time this week writing about the whole subject of Democrats attempts at messaging (three whole articles, if anyone wants to check them out). Because such messaging is going to be key to whether Democrats have any prayer in next year's midterms. Joe Biden keeps saying he learned the lesson of Barack Obama's failure to sell Obamacare to the public, and we're about to see the true test of that.

For now, though, here are a few smaller soundbite-sized talking points for Democrats to start using.

   Stop the madness!

This is serious stuff, people.

"It absolutely astounds me that the Republican Party -- from its congressional leadership on down -- is exhibiting something the GOP used to be stridently against: moral relativism. The idea that a thing is only bad if the other side does it, not your own. A sitting Republican House member this week sent out a video with a depiction of him killing Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and violently swinging two swords at President Biden. After the vote on the infrastructure bill, another GOP House member tweeted out a list -- with phone numbers -- of all the Republicans who voted for what she called: 'Joe Biden's Communist takeover of America via so-called infrastructure.' The House members on the list soon started receiving angry calls and death threats. In both cases, Republican leadership was completely silent in response. Where are the condemnations of calls for violence as an acceptable political tactic? Where are all the Republicans who once considered the moral high road their own party's purview? Where are the denunciations of such tactics as fascist and completely unacceptable? The Republican leadership's moral outrage is conspicuous in its absence. Lo, how far a once-great party has fallen!"

   Seriously? You're against all of that?

This should be a pretty easy case for Democrats to make, really.

"Who in their right mind could be against what the infrastructure bill does? I mean, really! The Republican Party can't support spending money to fix roads and bridges? This bill has 110 billion dollars to do so. It has 66 billion for rail upgrades, to avoid supply chain problems in the future. Another 65 billion to improve the electrical grid -- maybe even down in Texas, where they seem to need it the most? Rural areas will get 65 billion to improve their broadband access -- don't a whole lot of Republican voters live in rural areas? And finally, 55 billion to repair water systems, including replacing lead pipes. Again: how can anyone be against this stuff?"

   Hammer the holdouts on it

Don't let them get away with showing up at the groundbreaking ceremonies anyway....

"You know, next year, we'll probably see several Republicans trying to take public credit for something they voted against. I bet we'll see a few of them show up at groundbreaking ceremonies, in fact. So please never forget that most of them voted against it. Because it didn't happen when their guy was in the White House, Republicans in Congress petulantly voted down improving America's roads and bridges and broadband access. You know who gets stuff like this done? Democrats. Donald Trump kept holding fantastical Infrastructure Weeks throughout his whole four years, and nothing ever happened because he couldn't make such a deal if his life depended on it. Joe Biden got it done in less than 10 months. Top be fair, some Republicans did join with the Democrats, but most of them couldn't manage to vote for something to help their own constituents. But don't worry -- we're not going to let them forget it! And neither should you, at the ballot box."

   That's all you got? Seriously?

So far, the GOP hasn't been all that successful with something they're usually pretty good at -- demonization.

"I hear the Republicans rending their garments over the fact that President Joe Biden got a bipartisan legislative victory through Congress, but they really have yet to come up with any one thing contained in the bill to rant and rave about. Maybe that's because all this stuff is wildly popular even with Republican voters? So far, they've fallen back on a tantrum they've been throwing for at least 90 years now -- slap the label "socialism" on it and hope voters will hate it. No, really -- that's all they've got. They tried this on F.D.R.'s Social Security idea. They dusted it off to fight Medicare and Medicaid. And now somehow building decent roads is some sort of socialist plot to take over America? Seriously, that is exactly what they're saying about it. I bet General Dwight D. Eisenhower might have something to say about that, were he still with us. After all, it was President Eisenhower who proposed the Interstate Highway System in the first place -- and now he's a raging socialist for doing so? One deranged House member even tweeted out that it was nothing short of, quote, Joe Biden's Communist takeover of America via so-called infrastructure, unquote. That's really the best you can do? New highway interchanges and bridges means Karl Marx will have won over capitalism? Wow... and, really, that's the best they've been able to come up with in the demonization department. Good luck selling that folderol to the voters...."

   Strange how it always seems to be Republicans...

Hoo boy. Hit this one as hard as you'd like, they deserve it.

"I hear endless complaints about 'voting integrity' and 'voter fraud' from Republicans these days. But you know what? Whenever an actual (and very rare) incidence of true voter fraud pops up, it always seems to be Republicans who are the perpetrators. Case in point -- Republican Glenn Youngkin won the recent election for governor of Virginia, in what everyone expected was going to be a close election. But it seems that his own 17-year-old son tried to fraudulently cast a ballot -- twice! -- assumably for his dad. Since he's not 18, him attempting to vote is actually a crime. But I won't be holding my breath waiting for the new governor to stand up for law and order and election integrity by prosecuting the only known case in his own election. I mean, seriously, for all the noise they make over the issue, why does it always seem to be Republicans trying to commit actual voter fraud?"

   Flipping Ted the Big Bird

This one's pathetically easy.

"It seems Senator Ted Cruz got his panties in a bunch this week after Big Bird from Sesame Street got vaccinated and encouraged all children ages 5 through 11 to do the same. Now, please remember that it wasn't that long ago that Cruz and his ilk were downright incensed that anyone would ever try to change any beloved children's icon, back when he was falsely accusing all sorts of people of 'cancelling Dr. Seuss.' This was always horsefeathers to begin with -- the publisher had made the decision independently, there simply was no lefty villain responsible. But now Ted seems to want to cancel Big Bird. For urging children to get what could be a life-saving shot. Even though Big Bird and Sesame Street have been encouraging children to not be scared and get vaccinated since 1972. Well, you know what? I've got a pretty 'big bird' to flip to Ted Cruz, in response."

   Reporting from Fantasyland, we take you to Kellyanne...

You just can't fix stupid, it seems.

"Kellyanne Conway, fabulist extraordinaire, popped back into the news this week, for saying something not just monumentally but hilariously stupid. Here she is, in her own words: 'I worked in that White House for four years. We never even heard of a such of a thing. There was no supply chain crisis.' Now, I have no real idea what the color of the sky is on whatever planet Kellyanne lives on, but back here on Earth I can still remember getting up at five A.M. to go down and stand in line for toilet paper. It was like something out of the bad old days of the Soviet Union -- grocery store shelves were completely empty of not just paper products but all kinds of supplies, nurses and doctors couldn't get masks and other protective equipment, and the car lines for food banks across the country stretched for miles. That is what I personally remember from the year 2020. I have no idea what fantasy Kellyanne thinks she remembers now, but that was the ugly reality under Donald Trump's presidency."

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant