Democrats seemingly *have* learned lessons from the past. But they aren’t applying those lessons consistently. And over the next few weeks, their willingness or unwillingness to apply them will shape the country for years and years to come. mailchi.mp/crooked.com/bi…
Their approach to Biden’s economic agenda feels eerily reminiscent of the ACA process in 2009, but there are important differences which make it seem likely the story will end on a happier note. crooked.us19.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=88…
Their approach to democracy reform is more wanting, but the challenges are different, and a ton of the flack they take stems from treating them as basically the same. I’m not optimistic, but I see a method here.
If ACA and ARP represent the two poles of Democratic governing, Dems seem stuck in the middle. But they don’t have time to grind it out the way they did a decade ago. Now’s the time to implore them to be dynamic, ignore those peddling the failed logic of the past, and act.
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I’m gonna delete this thread because Alex deleted the underlying tweet. But there are two issues here.
One, which the White House is pushing back on very hard, that it agreed to scrap the Jobs Plan measures that aren’t included in the bipartisan deal. (That never made sense.)
Two, that it won’t try to recover the spending *topline* it has conceded in negotiations.
Based on what Manchin has said in recent days, that seems very likely true. And it’s a TON of spending to concede. But if it’s not actually a handshake deal with the GOP negotiators, then it’s a story about internal Dem politics, not about GOP demands per se.
Not to pick on this one piece, but it’s a good example of how Republican bad faith has become the background assumption in so much journalism, rather than a set of behaviors that can and should be questioned.
This seems correct, RE the critical race theory propaganda blitz, and should be a reminder that the whole thing is a concoction of the right, built by nutpicking and dissembling about random incidents that have no attachment to national partisan politics.
The asymmetry in how the parties prosecute culture wars reminds me of how this crazy story from almost three years ago just kinda went poof. politico.com/story/2019/08/…
The elite right had taken to blending "Nietzschean philosophy with critiques of contemporary Western society, denigrating homosexuality, Judiasm, Islam, feminism," fixating on "population genetics," and an "affinity for Slavic and northern European cultures." I.e. Nazism.
@davidshor@mattyglesias Trump is widely loathed; even where he polls evenly overall, his detractors absolutely despise him. It’s a source of immense political power, but it often goes untapped.
@davidshor@mattyglesias And even if you think the Trump name is untouchable in swing states, he and the GOP ceded a whole bunch of abstract culture-war terrain to Dems over the years (truth, patriotism, democracy) that is there for the taking.
My main thought here is the concessions to Republicans *have to be contingent on them voting for the bill*, and if they don’t, the filibuster has to go, and ideally those provisions have to go, too. Otherwise this is all just a bunch of suckers wasting each others’ time.
This is just basic negotiating, it’s what Republicans do, and not only that Manchin *knows* this is what they do.
It’s ok I didn’t want to see the records anyhow and it’s not like we have a right to them or that Trump was actually the president for four years, y’know?