POJO Has Lost His Mojo

The fifty Grand Old Phascists in the Senate are united. POJO’s infrastructure bill won't get a single of their votes. There are good reasons for opposing it, the Republicans don't have them of course, but there are reasonable concerns. The job market has underperformed two straight months, it was better in May than April, but still did not meet forecasters expectations. And inflation. Inflation is the third rail of U.S. economic policy. You got it, you're fucked. We have some. The Bidens say both job gains and inflation decline will occur in the fall or winter or in 2022 when kids are back in school, the epidemic is further in the rear view mirror and return to normal life, here a full return to pre-epidemic economic life, occur. But the Bidens also said the modern American post-industrial, high tech economy is too big for inflation, that we can spend and spend and spend some more and we'll have no inflation. Well, we got some. Cautious economists and politicians are wary about the last two months numbers and Biden has had to pare down his infrastructure bill to hold even his fifty votes in the Senate. 

As important as a restructuring of the economy is, it has to take back seat to the continuation of democracy in America. It has to. Who wants a booming economy with an authoritarian, non-democratic, Christian theocracy? That has replaced COVID-the economy as Job One and the House passed a voting bill that would nullify the draconian restrictions on voting enacted by dozens of states since the 2020 election. But to get that bill passed POJO still needs sixty votes, which there is no way he will get, or fifty-one votes to abolish (or modify it so that this bill can get passed) the filibuster. He has got at best forty-nine on the filibuster. Sinema from Arizona and Manchin from Deliverance are four-square opposed to doing away with (or waiving) the filibuster, even for the existential threat to democracy of neo-Jim Crow voting roadblocks. Other moderate Senate Dems have got squeaky bums at the idea of doing away with or diluting the filibuster. Senate Dem leadership's current plan is to hold vote after vote after vote to force every filibustering fool to go on public record stymieing legislation to make Sinema and Manchin realize the limits of bipartianship. That's what Harry Reid did during the Obama administration. But Harry had a bigger majority, fifty-five. The pressure shock wave caused by the constant stonewalling then was enough to get enough senators to waive the filibuster in the case of judicial nominees. 

Manchin has got substantive problems with the voting bill in its current form; "too broad," he says. And it may be, the undersigned does not know, or if he did know in more detail at one point he has done forgot, but whatever the bill contains that causes Manchin loose bowels, Biden should look to pare it down too. 

The pare level is crystal clear, at least in my mind. Return state voting rules to what they were in 2016. Yeah, that simple. We don't have a right to epidemic voting rules. It's reasonable, again to me, to say to Joe and Kristen, okay, we'll return them to 2016 levels since we don't have the epidemic that caused so many states to expand mail-in voting and other ease-of-vote laws. "You will now deliver your anti-filibuster vote please." If they refuse to even do that, well, then Dems are permanently fucked. Sinerwoman and Deliverance Joe and should be kicked out of the caucus (if that can be done), deprived of committee appointments, pushed to become Republicans. Dems should be done, done, done with them.