Thread by @Noahpinion

This is exactly right. If I were making the BBB bill, it would just be climate stuff, universal cash benefits, and investment in housing.

The fact that it's "a grab bag of popular things...done only partway" is a bit disappointing, TBH.

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…

I know this is cliche, but the Dems really are a grab bag of disparate special interests who throw all their policy ideas into one giant bill. This approach worked well in the New Deal because the scale of the crisis gave Dems the political capital to do many different things...

The grab-bag approach also worked in the 60s and 70s because the GOP was largely on board with the need to Do A Bunch of Stuff -- Nixon wanted to pass a bunch of programs so he could be as great as LBJ, etc.

That ended in the late 70s and 80s.

Now, the GOP just comes in every time and does a big tax cut. That's it. Other than that, they rely on corrosive executive power to erode the liberal state, and on state government action. This makes them fairly effective even though Dems are generally more popular.

Without GOP support or a crisis the size of the Great Depression, it's just very hard to pass transformative policies in many areas at once. But Dems are so weakly united that leaving out any one thing results in a firestorm of criticism -- so they have to try to do everything.

If the big grab-bag passes, every Dem subgroup -- the climate activists, the supporters of universal benefits, the health care enthusiasts -- will (quite rightly) think they got a half-assed policy, and redouble their efforts to get more attention for their area next time.

And anyone who points out the impracticality of this approach to governing (e.g. me, in this thread) will inevitably be challenged by people demanding "OK, what would you leave out?!", and then castigated for leaving out something Very Very Important.

In the end, everyone will be mad, and everyone will blame the malapportionment of the Senate. Which isn't wrong, but also ignores the likelihood that if the Senate were well-apportioned, the demands from each interest group would increase til everyone was mad again.

Ultimately this is the problem with having one party that knows very clearly who it is and what it wants to do, and one party that exists as a fragile, shifting equipoise between various competing groups with different ideas of what the part is and wants.

(end)