Biden Thread

[spmetla]

Do you guys think it'd be more productive if they stopped trying to jam everything into gigantic bills? The COVID relief act is able to be sold on the right wing side as just a cover for 'liberal agenda' items and not really COVID relief which is why the Rs that vote nah won't be hurt much by opposing it.
Minimum wage for example, why not try to change that with a single bill devoted to just the minimum wage? Make senators and representatives vote yes or no on that single item instead of giving them x number of reasons hidden in a gigantic bill to say they are opposed.

The upcoming infrastructure bill would be nice if it just focused on infrastructure but we all know it'll have various amounts of pork and other unrelated items put in it. If it focused on just infrastructure there'd be a higher chance of it passing quickly.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Do you guys think it'd be more productive if they stopped trying to jam everything into gigantic bills? The COVID relief act is able to be sold on the right wing side as just a cover for 'liberal agenda' items and not really COVID relief which is why the Rs that vote nah won't be hurt much by opposing it.
Minimum wage for example, why not try to change that with a single bill devoted to just the minimum wage? Make senators and representatives vote yes or no on that single item instead of giving them x number of reasons hidden in a gigantic bill to say they are opposed.

The upcoming infrastructure bill would be nice if it just focused on infrastructure but we all know it'll have various amounts of pork and other unrelated items put in it. If it focused on just infrastructure there'd be a higher chance of it passing quickly.

As I responded to RS, who has ever been motivated to cast a vote in an election because of a Congressional 'symbolic vote'. Would it be more productive? No, cause dividing everything into many bills means most of those issues simply get dropped.
Thousands of bills are introduced every year into Congress, thousands. These mega bills are good conglomeration of mostly agreed upon policy that can be bundled together for efficiency sake.

What hurts the mega-bills is the fillibuster. It forces everything into the narrow path of 'reconciliation' and the arcane rules of what is acceptable and it allows opposing parties to sit out the game because you can't make long-term reform through reconciliation. Without the filibuster, mega-bills can encompass any and all topics for any duration of time. Which means opposition party has to come to table to influence the bill and moderate it as much as they can.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Forcing a pointless vote for a bill that won't pass wastes valuable time and only sows division within the party.

Forcing a pointless vote for a bill that won't pass wastes valuable time and only sows division within the party.

Bull. You force the vote to point out exactly who is responsible for millions of Americans not getting something better than slave wages for their work. As far as division within the Democratic Party, you'll have to do better than hyperbole.....

Voters care about what a party delivers, not what they attempt to deliver.

You just made my point for me, dude. How about a voter looking at this:

https://twitter.com/kamalaharris/sta...757250?lang=en

The federal minimum wage: 2009: $7.25/hour 2020: $7.25/hour That’s unconscionable. The House voted to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour and it’s time the Senate does the same.

That was on 9 Feb of this year.

Now you see this:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/harris...s_3710504.html

Vice President Kamala Harris will not attempt to overrule the Senate parliamentarian if she rules that a federal minimum wage increase cannot be enacted through a process known as budget reconciliation, according to White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain.

Would you, as a conscientious black voter in 2024, vote for this woman for president? Doubt it. Just another politician saying one thing and doing another...a clear case of what a politician claims they will deliver and what they actually deliver.

Manchin holds the cards, end of story. This is political power. If he doesn't want $15 min wage in the bill, then trying to override the parliamentarian, making him look like a jackass or the bad guy does nothing but make the party look ungovernable. It makes individual senators feel insecure about the respect they command. These things matter to the human individuals who are ultimately making these choices.

Sure enough, run up the white flag at the first sign of resistance. Manchin doing what he's doing already shows the Democratic Party is ungovernable. A president that can't get one or two senators in line with PARTY goals. If this behavior is allowed to continue unchallenged, how many more times in the next two years are we going to have this very same discussion about another bill? Manchin isn't god even in his own state:

https://newrepublic.com/article/1612...ots-organizing

Getting Manchin to listen, Frankenberry believes, will also involve getting Manchin to understand that supporting the Democratic agenda will allow him to have a potentially historic impact on his state. “I’m reminded about how government has helped West Virginia,” he says. “You had FDR right? You had JFK. Then you had Byrd—everything is named after Robert C. Byrd in West Virginia, because of the amount of infrastructure that he helped bring West Virginia. This is an opportunity, in our view, for Senator Manchin to really make his mark and really help deliver for West Virginia in a way that will give our citizens a future.”


At least one national organization is already ready to pounce and replace him if he doesn’t. On Tuesday, No Excuses PAC, a group founded by former Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez staffers Saikat Chakrabarti, Zack Exley, and Corbin Trent, announced it would be beginning a search for challengers to both Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in 2024—an effort it will be publicizing and supporting through ad campaigns in West Virginia and Arizona. “No Excuses PAC was started a couple of weeks ago, when Senator Joe Manchin announced his objection to sending out checks for Covid relief,” Trent says. “And we decided that was an untenable position—we’d run on it, we’d won on it, and we’d better do it. And we wanted to run some ads and letters letting folks know where he stood there.”

“If Democrats can’t get it right, then they’re going to get replaced,” he continues. “I mean, Joe Manchin went from having pretty solid victories as a senator to barely winning, this last time, in 2018. It was two or three points. What’s happening there—just like where I’m from in Tennessee, just like you saw in Louisiana, just like you saw in Missouri a couple of cycles back with Claire McCaskill—is that the Democratic Party is losing its capacity to relate to people. They’ve got no idea what the hell is going on out here in the real world.” Trent says that No Excuses intends to engage with local organizations already working on the ground in both Arizona and West Virginia and spotlight them on their podcast.

Manchin's margin of victory was a little over 3% in 2018. He's not unassailable....

The GOP always says they have a better plan and they never do.

Nope...they don't have much in the way of planning for the future...but...they mostly deliver on their campaign promises. Tax cuts for the rich, conservative judges into federal seats, tougher immigration laws, and maybe they'll get ACA repealed in the near future.

What hurts the mega-bills is the fillibuster.

And there is ZERO chance to eliminate the filibuster. The sad result of getting your ass handed to you by Republicans this last election.

It is what it is, you should be spending your rage on local campaigns/politics rather than getting mad at a big tent party for not magically unifying on all issues to push the ideal agenda in a 50/50 Senate.

So keep my effing opinion about national politics to myself, and focus on Michigan? Now you're starting to sound like Gil.... And is the bar set so low at the "big tent party" that we'll accept anything just because this president isn't blowing up Twitter with his BS?

[Montmorency]

Flaws with forcing a vote on minimum wage separately or in combination with other policy:

1. If Manchin and Sinema don't care, they're not going to vote up no matter what.
2. Forcing a vote that fails makes the predominant media narrative "Democrats in Disarray."
3. To the extent any voters are moved by the news, Sinema's and Manchin's electoral prospects would be weakened (and by this I do not mean that they will be successfully primaried by socialists).
4. Sinema and Manchin are thus personally injured and humiliated and are disincentivized from cooperating or compromising on any subsequent major legislation.

All that for a purely performative exercise sounds like a very bad deal. It isn't a way to achieve the goal of passing the minimum wage, and is indeed counterproductive.

If we were going to try this gambit on anything, I would recommend it be for exactly the cycle in which the John Lewis voting rights bill comes to the floor. If Manchin and Sinema really refuse to abolish or limit the filibuster for the sake of that existentially-crucial legislation, history may as well cement that they were the hinge on which the party and country fell.

But Biden is starting to show his true corporate politicain

Well, he did just issue one of the most pro-union statements in the history of the presidency, and appears willing to let that be reflected in executive staffing.

Otherwise you give Republicans the ammunition to hammer you about reneging on a campaign promise, and they can even diss Bernie for not even putting it in in the first place. Seems to me to be a lose-lose course to take. Even worse, you open the door to the possibility of the GOP getting their own bill (Josh Hawley's) onto the floor:

I am very confident that Republicans won't campaign on Democrats not raising the minimum wage. More likely they would campaign on saving the country from the Democratic business-killing agenda.

Would you, as a conscientious black voter in 2024, vote for this woman for president? Doubt it. Just another politician saying one thing and doing another...a clear case of what a politician claims they will deliver and what they actually deliver.

The fundamental disagreement here is, whether voters care about this type of gestural politics and buck-passing, and whether it actually moves legislation.

Remember, the goal here is to - among other things - get minimum wage increases passed. Your proposal might be emotionally satisfying to you, but it wouldn't progress any of your concrete goals.

Manchin's worries on small businesses and the $15 minimum are not without some support. Though overall views are mixed.

AFAIK the quality contemporary research on minimum wage effects dispels the century-old conservative dogmas, but I was a little surprised to see so many small business owners supportive of increases in the linked quasi-formal survey. Then again, even most Republicans support increases, so it stands to reason.

A president that can't get one or two senators in line with PARTY goals.

I mean, that's a pretty typical story in American politics (and beyond). Not even FDR or LBJ could puppeteer their copartisans, and they had a lot more slack to work with.

“If Democrats can’t get it right, then they’re going to get replaced,” he continues. “I mean, Joe Manchin went from having pretty solid victories as a senator to barely winning, this last time, in 2018. It was two or three points. What’s happening there—just like where I’m from in Tennessee, just like you saw in Louisiana, just like you saw in Missouri a couple of cycles back with Claire McCaskill—is that the Democratic Party is losing its capacity to relate to people. They’ve got no idea what the hell is going on out here in the real world.” Trent says that No Excuses intends to engage with local organizations already working on the ground in both Arizona and West Virginia and spotlight them on their podcast.

Or local voters just disagree with Democratic values and politics.

And there is ZERO chance to eliminate the filibuster. The sad result of getting your ass handed to you by Republicans this last election.

The only prospect is to whittle it down with carveouts for narrow topics (e.g. 50-vote cloture on petitions for accession to the Union), and if the Dangerous Duo have any sense they will talk out of both sides of their mouths on this issue and claim to be upholding the filibuster while admitting no choice but to weaken it in the face of Republican partisanship.

Do you guys think it'd be more productive if they stopped trying to jam everything into gigantic bills? The COVID relief act is able to be sold on the right wing side as just a cover for 'liberal agenda' items and not really COVID relief which is why the Rs that vote nah won't be hurt much by opposing it.
Minimum wage for example, why not try to change that with a single bill devoted to just the minimum wage? Make senators and representatives vote yes or no on that single item instead of giving them x number of reasons hidden in a gigantic bill to say they are opposed.

The upcoming infrastructure bill would be nice if it just focused on infrastructure but we all know it'll have various amounts of pork and other unrelated items put in it. If it focused on just infrastructure there'd be a higher chance of it passing quickly.

Our experience of the past decades has made it quite plausible that some credible pork is the only thing that will allow passage of an infrastructure bill.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Remember, the goal here is to - among other things - get minimum wage increases passed. Your proposal might be emotionally satisfying to you, but it wouldn't progress any of your concrete goals.

Emotional satisfaction has nothing to do with it. I am retired so minimum wage has little to no direct impact on me. But I have a lot of friends in the service industry, and a raise to $15/hr does have a major impact on them. If I were a lone voice in the wilderness crying wolf, I'd fold my cards and go home. But I'm not. Any quick perusal of media digital or otherwise shows that.

Well, he did just issue one of the most pro-union statements in the history of the presidency, and appears willing to let that be reflected in executive staffing.

Wow...I'm really impressed... How much actual work did that take? He's only two months in, so there's a lot more narrative to his story yet to come. I will cut him that much slack. He has four years to write his legacy.

[Montmorency]

The emotional satisfaction would be in seeing a show put on which the villains - Manchin et al. - get publicly shamed, but it wouldn't get any money moving to your nonretired friends. Is what I'm saying.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I mean, that's a pretty typical story in American politics (and beyond). Not even FDR or LBJ could puppeteer their copartisans, and they had a lot more slack to work with.

LBJ did a pretty good job of arm-twisting to get his Civil Rights Bill passed, no?

FDR was trying to pull off a "Roosevelt Purge", as characterised by media at the time. That's not what's being advocated here...

...Manchin et al. - get publicly shamed, it wouldn't get any money moving to your nonretired friends

If money ever moves to my nonretired friends in the form of increased wages, I doubt it will be $15/hr. Of course anything above the current rate is "better", but I don't need to point out to you that in many states, even $15/hr won't be keeping up with the cost of living. Manchin is like the proverbial petulant child...if you keep cow-towing to their belligerent behavior, they keep pushing the limits of what they think they can get away with.

[a completely inoffensive name]

B
Would you, as a conscientious black voter in 2024, vote for this woman for president? Doubt it. Just another politician saying one thing and doing another...a clear case of what a politician claims they will deliver and what they actually deliver.

LOL, yes! This is how out of touch you are! Because of her, how many black voters are going to get their UI benefits through August and an extra $1,400 in their bank accounts.

Listen, I'm not trying to demean you, I don't know your background but if you are like me, we have to start getting out of the white liberal bubble if we wish to get through Trumpism alive. It is our privilege that gives us the ability to seek the most 'optimal' or 'empathetic' policies, but it is selfish to let the perfect be the enemy of the good because it is not us who will suffer from wasting time on symbolic votes for $15/hr that fail rather than a real change from $7.25 to $11.

I am being absolutely serious here. It is incredibly dangerous to see so many leftist and progressive opinions undermine the Democratic party at this juncture because we only have two years to pass policy, that's it.