[ Posted Tuesday, March 9th, 2021 – 16:50 UTC ]
President Joe Biden is going to take a victory lap Thursday, with a primetime Oval Office address to the American people. He deserves to. As he said to Barack Obama when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act passed, this is a big [expletive gerund deleted] deal. By some measures, it is the biggest such big deal in history. And even though it is already wildly popular with the public, Biden learned the lesson of Obama's first big emergency stimulus bill and will be touting the American Rescue Plan Act's accomplishments to the skies, while encouraging others to do the same. This is doubtlessly going to pay off politically for him. Which he and his fellow Democrats also deserve.
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[ Posted Monday, March 8th, 2021 – 16:51 UTC ]
It's now official. Senator Joe Manchin is the second-most-powerful person in Washington. Obviously, President Joe Biden is still number one, but Biden's entire agenda now hinges on the whims of Manchin... and everyone knows it. And Manchin is enjoying his newfound stature so much that it seems pretty certain he's going to enjoy flexing his political power over and over again for the next two years.
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[ Posted Friday, March 5th, 2021 – 17:53 UTC ]
President Joe Biden is about to have a very good month. The Senate is on the brink of passing (after all the Republican time-wasting obstacles are cleared) a mammoth $1.9 trillion pandemic recovery bill. The White House has taken to calling it the "Rescue Plan." It is wildly popular with the public. Next week, the House will pass the same version and Biden will likely sign it immediately thereafter. It will be the first big legislative victory for the president and the Democratic Congress.
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[ Posted Thursday, March 4th, 2021 – 18:05 UTC ]
There's an old and now-dated joke that is the genesis of that headline. The setup to the joke is the question: "What are the three greatest lies in America?" The punchline is: "(1.) The check is in the mail, (2.) I will respect you in the morning, and (3.) I'm from the government and I'm here to help you."
I am reminded of this now because of a confluence of disparate issues, from Democrats bolstering the rights of transgendered people to the reaction to the news that the publisher of the Dr. Seuss canon will not be publishing six of his books anymore because of racially insensitive depictions. And a lot of other unrelated things, as well, such as Donald Trump railing about seemingly mundane issues like toilets and lightbulbs and dishwashers. Many of these things are now being lumped together politically as a conservative crusade against "cancel culture."
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[ Posted Friday, February 26th, 2021 – 18:31 UTC ]
In the past week, two of the biggest political stories have been which way the Senate parliamentarian was going to rule on an arcane rule in the chamber, and how one of President Joe Biden's nominees might be in trouble because in the past she had (gasp!) tweeted such mean things as: "vampires have more heart than Ted Cruz" (a statement that is not provably true only because vampires are mythical creatures while the heartlessness of Ted Cruz is, sadly, all too real).
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[ Posted Wednesday, February 24th, 2021 – 17:57 UTC ]
While everyone agrees on the obvious truism that President Joe Biden is now the most powerful Democrat in Washington, the person next in line in this new partisan power structure isn't as obvious. Because it is not actually Kamala Harris, Chuck Schumer, or Nancy Pelosi, despite them being (respectively) vice president, Senate majority leader, and speaker of the House. No, instead the biggest power player in Washington after Biden is now Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia. He has now set himself up to be "the next Joe Lieberman." Under President Barack Obama, Lieberman acted as a virtual caucus of one, determining what was allowably "centrist" enough for him to support and vote for. Manchin has now thrust himself into exactly the same position, and by doing so will hold the keys to Biden's ultimate legislative success or failure for at least the next two years.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 23rd, 2021 – 17:31 UTC ]
Joe Biden's first major legislative initiative is going to be a winning one for Democrats, and (hopefully) a big anchor around the neck of all the Republicans in Congress who vote against it (which, as of this writing, looks like it's going to be "all of them"). It's rare that a bill this popular doesn't have bipartisan support, because most politicians on either side of the aisle know full well that voting for something wildly popular -- even if your party didn't propose it -- is usually good politics. It's something to brag about in the next election campaign, in normal times.
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[ Posted Friday, February 19th, 2021 – 18:44 UTC ]
After one short month in office, President Joe Biden has already achieved his biggest goal. The country is united again. We all universally agree on one thing, with true bipartisan spirit. What is this unifying belief which all Americans now share? That Ted Cruz is an awful excuse for a human being.
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[ Posted Thursday, February 18th, 2021 – 17:28 UTC ]
President Joe Biden has had his ups and downs in his first month in office. His biggest down to date has been his propensity to telegraph much too early that he knows his bargaining position isn't going to carry the day -- before the bargaining is even really close to being over. He's done this on the push for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, and now he's doing it on the immigration bill just proposed, by hinting that it might have to pass in several pieces instead of a comprehensive bill. Signaling what he'll ultimately accept too early undercuts Democrats fighting for the strongest bill possible, so this could be the start of a worrisome trend. However, Biden did hold rock-steady on the size of his COVID-19 relief bill, even in the face of faux bipartisanship, where Republicans offered an opening bid of less than one-third of what Biden wanted (proving it was really nothing more than the old "stall and obstruct" Republican tactics, in "bipartisan" clothing). So we'll have to wait to see which tendency becomes more prevalent in Biden, over the next few months.
But on the up side, Biden has already accomplished one brilliant political bit of jiu-jitsu. He has totally redefined "bipartisanship" in a way that bodes well for many progressive agenda items in the near future. This move was absolutely brilliant, even though few have realized it yet.
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[ Posted Tuesday, February 16th, 2021 – 16:58 UTC ]
I had a choice of topics for today's column, one of which was weighing in on the debate over the possibility of earmarks returning to Congress. I say this to make a point -- American politics may not be back to normal by a long shot (since the Republican Party obviously hasn't quite returned from their Looney Tunes vacation yet), but in his four weeks in office, President Joe Biden has moved us all a significant way down the road to normalcy once again.
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