The Song Remains The Same

Cable news anchors should take this week off.  They can just run repeats of their Monday broadcasts for the rest of the week. Because the news hasn't changed: Democrats still haven't passed a reconciliation bull to expand social amenities, the Senate is trying to come up with a climate policy President Biden can advocate for at the upcoming climate summit in Scotland, Joe Manchin has issues, and the remaining sticky wickets are the scope of parental leave benefits, Medicare and Medicaid expansions, a "billionaires tax" in place of a tax rate hike, and lowering the cost of prescription drugs. And this is really putting pressure on the gubernatorial race in Virginia.

Right now, I'm cautiously optimistic that something will get passed soon, though I think top Democrats in Congress are more optimistic than I am.  Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer says that “a final deal is within reach" in the face of disputes on two particular issues, Medicare expansion and prescription drug prices.  That's sort of like saying that a new car is almost ready to come off the assembly line but the factory workers still have trouble installing the engine and the axles.  

The story will likely remain unchanged tomorrow, and the day after that.  And on Friday, when MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell has his day off.  He won't miss much.  But perhaps the reconciliation bill and the basic infrastructure bull can both pass sooner rather than later.  But probably not soon enough of Terry McAuliffe in Virginia, who, I'm afraid, is already toast. Why did he even want to come back?

Biden At Rock Bottom

And if the bedrock erodes, he could sink lower.

This is a disastrous time for President Biden, the Democrats and the nation.  The President is still reeling from bad foreign policy decisions he made over the summer, the Democratic Congress won't give him any relief in the form of infrastructure bills he can sign into law, and COVID continues to plague the country.  Democrats don't blame Republicans entirely for COVID either; they cite the administration's CDC guidelines as being too confusing and incomprehensible, and the administration has only just begun straightening out the booster mess it created for itself by having a start date for boosters that contradicted scientific reality.

I am extremely pessimistic.  Because while he's foundering, Donald Trump is convincing more and more Republicans that the Democrats did indeed steal the presidential election . . . and conspiracy theories about things such as the election, COVID, and left-wing terror groups are multiplying faster than rabbits.  Let me put it this way: This time in 1993 and in 2009, I was relieved to be living in an America where a Democrat was President and in which Democrats controlled Congress, we had just put a bad President named George Bush behind us, and the future looked bright, with a renewed interest in public policies that would make America a country worth living in.  This time now, I'm scared stiff about the future.  I'm anticipating a takeover of state and local offices by Trump supporters in the the off-year and midterm elections to come, the rigging of the electoral process to pave the way for a Trump comeback in 2024 and a final conflict between Trump and the Democratic presidential nominee (who may or may not be Biden) that will result in 45 (Trump was the 45th President) becoming 47 and our civil and constitutional rights being eighty-sixed.  But then Bill Clinton and Barack Obama didn't have to contend with twin crises like a pandemic and a alt-right movement.  Biden should be able to deal with both, but so far he's proven himself to be a late-twentieth-century man operating in an early-twenty-first century world. 

There's still time for President Biden to recover, though.  In fact, his recovery may have already begun and we don't know it yet.  Afghanistan is slowly receding from the news while the Biden administration continues diligently to get more Americans and Afghan allies out of that country.  The dustup with France over U.S. nuclear-submarine sales to Australia has been settled - "a misunderstanding among friends," as Napoleon once described tense U.S.-French relations during the Presidency of John Adams.  The Delta COVID variant is receding as more people get vaccinated.  (The jury's out on the immigration issue, though.)  Meanwhile, the January 6 select committee is finally showing some backbone - more on that later.  The big question mark is whether the President can get congressional Democrats to pass both of his infrastructure bills before the year is out and also get voting rights legislation meant to prevent a Republican rigging of the system passed as well.  And both of those tasks rest in the hands of West Virginia senator Joe Manchin (below), who balks at more spending on social programs but is pushing a voting-rights bill that he thinks he can get passed without having to abolish the filibuster.

See why I'm pessimistic?

Hopefully, Manchin will come to his senses soon enough.  And while I'm not going to say that I have a feeling he will - there's nothing to suggest that as of yet - the nightmare scenario that brings about second Trump Presidency and puts the workings of government in the hands of a reactionary cadre of white supremacists and unindicted insurrectionists should move him at least a millimeter tor two.  I just hope it won't be too late when it does. 

On the Brink

President Biden's infrastructure bills are stalled in Congress, with moderate and progressive Democrats at odds with each other over how much to spend in new programs - "human infrastructure" - in a budget reconciliation measure.  Moderates want to go no higher than $1.5 trillion in spending over the net ten years on child care, climate change, and college tuition, while progressives want to spent no less than $3.5 trillion - after compromising down from $6 trillion.  And if House progressives don't get what they want, they're going to vote against a bipartisan bill on rebuilding roads, bridges and railways already passed by the Senate. The vote is scheduled for tomorrow and anyone who thinks it's going to pass while the $3.5 trillion bill - called a reconciliation bill because it's meant to reconcile with the budget - is opposed by moderate Democrats in both houses is either an unwarranted optimist, a moron, or both.

And the time to cut a deal is growing short.

Republicans, meanwhile, have taken advantage of Democratic infighting by refusing to cooperate on keeping the government open at the start of the 2022 fiscal year this coming Friday and also refusing to cooperate on raising the debt ceiling by not allowing itto be attached to a bill to keep the government open, meaning the United States could default for the first time ever as early as next week. 

All this while a major hurricane churns in the Atlantic Ocean and could strike the East Coast by the end of the week, causing billions of dollars in damage?

Prepare to meet thy doom.      

Biden's Bungles

President Biden's misfortune have turned into an ongoing disaster, which must be making sane Americans fearing a Trump comeback quaking in their boots. 

I mean, he did the right thing in withdrawing from Afghanistan, and the United States is now at peace for the first time since before 9/11.  Except that he didn't consult other members of NATO, the auspices under which we were in Afghanistan in the first place, before going ahead and ending the war.  Even the Germans have complained that Trump consulted with them more than Biden did.

Biden is now pivoting toward eastern Asia to counter the growing threat from China, having signed a deal with the United Kingdom and Australia to sell nuclear submarines, marine craft exclusive only to the U.S. and the U.K., to the Australian navy, to increase security in the Pacific. Except that he forgot to inform France, which had a now-canceled deal to sell diesel-electric submarines to Australia and has overseas territories in the region (can you say "New Caledonia," boys and girls?), and now the French are livid over it.  He has a lot of fence-mending to do when he addresses the United Nations General Assembly today.

Which doesn't give him any time right now to handle the sudden influx of Haitian migrants trying the enter the country from Mexico.

And as if that weren't bad enough, we now learn that a retaliatory strike responding to a terrorist attack in Afghanistan killed innocent civilians.

The poor guy can't get any relief from his allies in Congress as the Democrats attempt - I use that verb loosely - to pass a two-part infrastructure bill.  There aren't enough votes in the Senate to pass a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill and progressives in the House vow to sink a bipartisan Senate infrastructure deal if the reconciliation package doesn't pass, as they are committed to settling for nothing instead of something when they can't have everything.

And COVID is still a thing, with the vaccine requirements already under threat from state lawsuits before the requirements are even written and with China, which invented COVID, unresponsive to proposed Sino-American efforts to lead the world out of the pandemic. Not to mention the lack of a Sino-American deal to lead the world against climate change.

Biden has the wind at his back.  Unfortunately, it's his own. 

One For the Road

And the rails.  And the utilities.  And a whole lot of other things.

Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer is ready to have a procedural Senate vote to continue work on the massive bipartisan infrastructure bill amounting to $1.2 trillion so that it can be passed in tandem with the Democratic-only $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill to expand infrastructure spending to child care, Medicare, and clean-energy programs.  The vote is scheduled for Wednesday,

Can he pull it off?  Republicans are grousing about the rushing of a bill that hasn't been written yet beyond the outline, with the funding still murky.  But it's a safe bet that they'll stay on board in order to help the GOP have something to brag about in the 2022 midterms.  Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, has made a couple of concessions to get the bill through while keeping a close eye on his own priorities. And as Democrats negotiate amongst themselves on how to pay for the reconciliation package, Schumer is making sure that he keeps everyone on the same page, just as he did with the COVID relief bill.  So you might say I'm cautiously optimistic.

Schumer has been preparing for something like this for his entire Senate tenure.  If he succeeds at this infrastructure gambit, he could end up being the most effective Senate Democratic majority leader since Lyndon Johnson.

Bipartisanship?

It seems that the war against voting is over, and voting lost . . . after Joe Manchin dropped the big one.

Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia who has enormous power - something that might not have happened if North Carolina Democratic Senate candidate Cal Cunningham hadn't been caught sexting and the party had a 51-49 majority in the Senate - ruled out voting for the voting rights bill the House passed, called the For the People Act.  He argues that the bill politicizes voting just like the Republicans have been doing so in the states.  Also, he's not going to support ending the filibuster in the Senate.

So that's it, right?  Joe Biden is not only going to be a one-term President, he's going to be a half-term President once the Republicans take back Congress in 2022?

Time out, people.  Manchin never said he's against bills that protect voting rights.  He's just against this one.  I don't profess to be an expert on voting rights legislation, but I understand that the arguments against it are that it does little to end gerrymandering and even less to stop partisan officials from hijacking the vote count and throwing out results they don't like.  Rather, Manchin's hoping to gain support for the less comprehensive but still effective John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would restore the 1965 Voting Rights Act and allow the federal government to oversee changes in state voting laws.  He and his fellow senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican from Alaska, are working to get that passed.  (I'm not going any deeper into the intricacies of either bill, because that's above my pay grade.)

As for eliminating the filibuster, Manchin may be right about keeping it, because without the filibuster, a Republican majority could bass bad legislation in the Senate quite simply under a Republican President ready, willing and able to sign it.  And if the Republicans deny President Biden a comprehensive infrastructure bill or two-time him by agreeing to a deal on infrastructure and then stopping it, then and only then would Manchin be likely to enable it to pass through reconciliation.  But he'd still keep the filibuster.   

As for how President Biden's agenda moves forward, we'll see what happens.  But it looks like Manchin's fingerprints will be all over it.     

As for the President's negotiations with Senator Shelly Moore Capito (R-WV) on the infrastructure bill, well, I think he's negotiating with the wrong West Virginia senator. 

Mr. Trump Goes To Capitol Hill

I listened to Donald Trump's speech to Congress for as long as I could take, and I heard a lot of conciliatory platitudes that had little in common with his mean-spirited inaugural address but had just as much substance.  He invoked Republican President Abraham Lincoln to defend his own isolationist economic views (forgetting that Lincoln had no multilateral or even bilateral relationships to deal with), invoked Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Interstate Highway System to promote his infrastructure program (but offered no specifics about what he wanted to build, apart from his great wall along the Mexican border), and again repeated his goal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act (again, with no concrete ideas on how to do it).     

He also praised NATO after having dissed it, but thanked NATO members for paying more into the alliance, showing that he still views NATO not as a multilateral union but as a transaction. He tried to strike a positive tone for the future, looking forward to America's quarter-millenial, or 250th, anniversary in 2026 and the wonderful innovations and inventions we could see then.  He cited the great inventions that were displayed at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia (a fair from which blacks were mostly absent) and hinted that there could be a similar celebration in 2026 (forget our lousy track record this country has had of late with involvement in world's fairs, and forget also that the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations didn't work out so well).  His speech was easier to swallow than his inaugural address - but then, so is baby aspirin.  It was a kinder, gentler right-wing nationalist manifesto.  And his attempt to capitalize on the botch raid in Yemen by paying tribute to Ryan Owens, the Navy SEAL who died in that raid, was revolting.

And a President who's known for hissy tweets on issues of vital unimportance has a lot of damn gall to call for an end to obsession to trivial politics.  

And Steve Beshear delivering the Whig - oops, Democratic - opposition's response?  Well, it was a strong and solid argument for preserving the Affordable Care Act and standing up for working-class and middle-class values.  But there was just one thing wrong - Beshear is the former Democratic governor of Kentucky.  He defended his move to create a health-insurance exchange in the state, a point as moot as he is, given that his Republican successor has moved to dismantle it.  And if the Democrats need to get a former officeholder to defend the party, that should tell you how irrelevant current Democratic officeholders (not that there are that many of them) are.  

Race and Infrastructure

There are two major stories in the news that, at first glance, don't appear to have a link between them. But I think they do. And I apologize if connecting them sounds rather cynical. I could be wrong, but I don't think I am.

One story, reported just a few days ago, is that more black, Hispanic and Asian babies were born in the United States last year than white babies for the first time in this country's history. And, in all likelihood, that's going to be the trend for the rest of this young century and possibly the twenty-second century as well.

The other story, an ongoing one, involves the nation's infrastructure. President Obama - incidentally, the nation's first "minority" President - is proposing a new federal infrastructure program to build and rebuild highways, railways (especially high-speed passenger rail), airports, bridges, dams, sewer systems, and the like. The Republicans who control the House of Representatives support none of that, complaining that the proposed program spends more money at a time when the government is practically broke and, besides, amenities like high-speed rail sound very "European."

So how do these stories link to each other? Here's the thing. Rachel Maddow of MSNBC has noted that public works projects like the Hoover Dam and the Golden Gate Bridge were built as government projects. Chris Matthews has added that Lincoln gave private railroads government support to build the transcontinental railroad and Eisenhower built the interstate highways. Furthermore, Maddow has noted that such public works projects are built with future generations in mind. By building the great public works projects we need, Maddow points out, we're not only helping our economy, we're leaving something behind for the benefit of our children, our grandchildren, and our grandchildren's grandchildren.

So do you think an overwhelmingly white Republican party is interested in building anything for the benefit of future generations when future American generations will be dominated by brown people? Does anyone honestly believe that the Republicans who now control the House are interested in spending money on any public works project that will enhance the lives of Americans in the late twenty-first century when more than half of Americans will be black, Hispanic, and Asian by then? The recent lease of the Indiana Toll Road by Indiana governor Mitch Daniels to a foreign (Spanish-Australian) consortium until 2081 suggests that not only do Republicans refuse to build infrastructure for a future non-white/Hispanic majority, they don't even want that future majority to control the infrastructure we already have now.

Note this: A brown-skinned majority population does not make your country a Third World nation. Lack of public investment in an economic system where all the money flows to the top makes your country a Third World nation.

Deck The Lots

I may have said so before on this blog, and I probably did, but Americans love to take pride in their engineering feats. And in many examples, we have built and accomplished great things involving engineering, from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Apollo space program. But more and more often, as Paul Fussell once noted, these seem like aberrations from the norm. Innovations like bullet trains and the Concorde originated elsewhere (I'm citing Paul Fussell again), while Americans have become famous for building bridges and levees that collapse as well as building skyscrapers with window panels that pop out - ask the builders of the John Hancock Center in Boston how that worked out.

I bring this up because the borough of Caldwell, New Jersey committed the latest indignity in American engineering. A couple of months ago, at a two-level parking deck built in the year 2000, a chunk of concrete fell from the underside of the upper level and landed on a car parked in the lower level, prompting the town to close both levels and work on strengthening the deck that serves as the upper level. (The lower level is a standard blacktop parking lot.) The cost? $325,000, plus an extra $5000 allotted by the town for valet parking for people who use the local community center adjacent to the parking deck can still use it, as there is no other place nearby where they can park themeselves.

You know, this $330,000 could have been saved - or spent on something worthier - if the contractors who built this thing had designed and engineered it right in the first place. And this parking deck is only ten years old. Alas, this story out of New Jersey is a minor example of greater engineering disasters that have taken place in these United States.

Which begs the obvious question. Many Americans want big infrastructure projects. They want this country to build things. They want bullet trains for Amtrak. Maybe they want something like a state-of-the-art crossing to replace the Tappan Zee Bridge in New York State. But if we can't even get something as small as a municipal parking deck right, how can we competently build something bigger?

Highway 93 Revisited

One of the most exciting infrastructure projects of the past decade has just been completed over the precipitous canyon the Colorado River meanders through just below the Hoover Dam, near Las Vegas. The Mike O'Callaghan-Pat Tillman Bridge (named for a late Nevada governor and Arizona's - and America's - most famous fatality of the Afghanistan War) spans the canyon at 1900 feet long and 88 feet wide, and should open soon. Its construction began in 2005 and is slated to open in October 2010 (this month).

The bridge is to become part of U.S. Route 93 and it bypasses the original thoroughfare built on the rim of the Hoover Dam. A right-of-way across a dam may sound novel, and it is, but when the road was integrated into the dam's design, the engineers had no idea that the it would become an important corridor. The dam was completed at the same time U.S. 93, which had terminated in Nevada, was extended into Arizona. Over the years, U.S. 93 became a major thoroughfare for passenger and commercial traffic.

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 (not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing before) led to the ban of trucks on the dam to prevent a terrorist attack on that facility, which would be catastrophic, given the electricity and water supply it generates for the Southwest. Once this bridge is open, trucks no longer have to cross the Colorado River by way of Needles, California (quite an inconvenient detour, you'll agree) to get from Phoenix to Las Vegas. (The old Hoover Dam route will be accessible by car only to people on the Nevada side of the river.)

This bridge is the best argument for the planned passenger railroad tunnel between New Jersey and New York City that New Jersey governor Chris Christie is ready to scuttle, likely as early as tomorrow. The bridge was built with national security in mind; no project in the New York area would do more to help our national interest. It would increase commuter railroad ridership and get more cars off the road, thus helping to lessen our dependence on foreign oil that largely comes from places where religiously fanatical commandos want to kill us. It would also help the environment and create new jobs, improving the Tristate region's well-being. Unfortunately, New Jersey is dealing with a governor who knows the price of everything (accounting for cost overruns) and the value of nothing.