Jesus Christ, can the Congressional Dems caucuses please go five minutes without shooting themselves in the foot?
Just pass the damn bills. There's no good reason to connect one to the other. Passing the infrastructure bill isn't going to do anything to the reconciliation bill, but it's very important for the party. Killing the infrastructure bill as a hostage-taking tactic to get the reconciliation bill passed is just absurdly self-destructive.
And there's no good reason not to pass the reconciliation bill. Manchin is being an idiot. There's absolutely no reason to "pause" anything. The nation isn't going to fall apart because there were too many policy changes in one year.
We desperately need one or two more senators. It's nice that we have Manchin holding a seat in WV of all places but having him as the swing vote is really hurting our agenda. I mean it's way better than having some right-wing Republican in the seat, but it would be really nice if we could make his vote irrelevant for the more ambitious aspects of our agenda.
With that said, remember that we're extremely lucky to be in this position at all. If we didn't have Manchin -- or didn't have Sinema -- or didn't win both Georgia seats -- it would be Mitch McConnell just blocking everything.
Not passing anything sounds bad to progressives but probably doesn't impact much if anything electorally. Passing nothing also makes it hard for Rs to run against spending and gives them no target like Obamacare was. Running against Trump and his cronies is more effective than running on something, sad but completely true.
