Because automatic GOP opposition and the filibuster are treated as unalterable background conditions of our politics, big reforms pass the House and are treated as DOA and therefore non-stories.
Result: Voters don't know what GOP and filibuster killed:
How can Biden lead at the democracy summit without telling the truth about the authoritarian threat at home -- that it comes from the right and GOP? Will he really paper over his own party's utter failure to safeguard against that threat? My latest: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
Biden advisers are struggling with how to address our own democracy problems at the summit. SecState Blinken says he will use it to rally our "better angels" at home.
But this casts the problem as a failure of persuasion, when it's a failure of inaction:
Just awful: Steve Bannon is now ripping into David Perdue, who is *Trump's* candidate for Georgia governor, as too much of a squish to wage the war on democracy Bannon wants. This shows that the right is headed toward full-blown insurgency. My new piece: washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
I had a fascinating conversation with Nicole Hemmer, a historian of conservative media, about Bannon.
Bannon is similar to Oliver North. Both parlayed their willingness to operate outside the law into a media following built around explicit insurgency:
David Perdue supported the lawsuit seeking to invalidate millions of Biden votes. He called for the firing of the Sec of State who rebuffed Trump's pressure to steal the election.
Yet Bannon still sees him as a squish. Only full blown insurgency will do:
It's unthinkable that Ds would let the filibuster scuttle reforms to avert a future coup, when we *already saw* Trump attempt exactly this scheme, and antidemocratic currents in the GOP are getting worse:
Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene aren't fringe. They're leading indicators of an increasingly violent, paranoid style of right wing politics. They claim to speak for the base. Given that GOP leaders won't censure them, are they wrong?
There's real overlap between the ravings of Marjorie Taylor Greene and Steve Bannon, and some of the stuff from the "intellectual" Claremont Institute.
The thread: A leftist enemy so fiendishly monolithic and totalitarian that anything goes in response:
Three days after Trump tested positive for covid, Melania, Don Jr and others in his inner circle sat in the debate hall without masks, in direct violation of protocols. They rebuffed demands to mask up.