Biden infrastructure/tax increase megathread

[KaiserDave]

Winning!

[KaiserDave]

Disappointing but unsurprising. I like his plan anyway.

[KaiserDave]

Underrated aspect that should be getting more attention.

https://twitter.com/johnkartch/status/1377245266697457673

Oh yeah
Ohhhhhhhhhh yeaaaahhhhhhh

[KaiserDave]

https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/1377748114916917252
 

Pelosi just said yesterday that she hopes to do it, so unless Biden's threatening to veto (which is, y'know, lol), this doesn't actually stop Congress from just adding the proposal in on their own.

That requires it to get through senate reconciliation untouched. And I'd be pretty surprised if Manchin or whatever didn't kill it there.

Manchin won’t kill it lol

Why on earth wouldn't Manchin touch SALT? The GOP could bring up a floor amendment to just SALT and he could vote yes. He forced changes to the stimulus bill, after all.

“Changes”

Manchin isn’t going to force the removal of something the Democratic congressional leadership cares about, he’s basically our Susan Collins.

Yeah but now he has the same position as Biden.

[KaiserDave]

Highly misleading title, also I laugh at anyone who actually thinks Manchin will vote against this when all is said and done

[KaiserDave]

https://twitter.com/bresreports/status/1379198557048168451?s=21

[KaiserDave]

Wikimedia Commons (cropped by myself)

[KaiserDave]

I recall the usual cast were mocking and deriding Bernie’s 6 trillion dollar proposal. Will they now admit their haste and misjudgment after seeing how that was a wise negotiating tactic?

[KaiserDave]

Crooked crooked Kyrsten

[KaiserDave]

Shrug


Waiting for reconciliation

[KaiserDave]

Was this 550 billion or 1.3 trillion

[KaiserDave]

No quarter for Gottheimer's goons. Of course Gottheimer is a goon too.

No quarter!

[KaiserDave]

Gottheimer is one of the worst people in Congress, but I don’t buy this argument that Biden is in kahoots with him-at all.

[KaiserDave]

The problem with the idea of Biden acting like LBJ against Sinema is that it'd cause a sexual harassment scandal (and arguably rightfully so)

Not necessarily. The actual issue I see here that Biden & Schumer don't have much leverage to use against Sinema. They need her in the caucus and otherwise would lose the senate majority instantly. And she's not up for reelection until 2024. If Johnson was prez today, he'd likely offer Sinema and Manchin some extra funding for infrastructure in their states or so. The difference is that Johnson had larger majorities in congress and several GOPers were open for business with his admin on issues the Southern Dems opposed his agenda. Divisions in congress are not comparable to the 1960s, not even to the Reagan era.

I'm almost certain he was referring to some of the more crude things LBJ would do. (I don't think it's anything he would've done in the presence of women.)

Maybe this is discussed above, but here is a good summary of the state of play on reconciliation and infrastructure. The two bills have been effectively decoupled it seems to me. Pelosi was forced to fold. The Dem moderates held firm.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/house-moderates-provide-even-more-leverage-joe-manchin-reconciliation-n1277592

Here’s hoping that the progressives at least force there to be a second bill even if it isn’t the one we currently have.

I don't see this as Pelosi having caved. The Congressional Progressive Caucus controls 95 seats in the House, 43% of the Democratic Caucus. The ultimate math for the bipartisan bill is whether the number of progressives that are willing to hold firm and take or kill the hostage (the bill) versus how many Republicans will end up voting for the bill. We're sort of going through a series of checkpoints where the two sides within the Democratic Party can try to extract concessions or potentially destroy the whole process.

Nothing has fundamentally changed. Manchin and Sinema are still needed in the Senate for final passage of the reconciliation bill. The Problem Causers Caucus isn't going to do anything worse than those two. There are a lot of players in this right now, but there will ultimately have to be some sort of agreement between progressives in the House and Manchin and Sinema in the Senate. If September 27th comes and there is no reconciliation bill, progressives can and should defeat the bipartisan bill. I imagine you're looking at a maximum of 30 Republicans that could potentially vote for the bipartisan bill. That wouldn't require many all that much of the CPC to kill it, even with some Republican votes supporting it. I wouldn't be surprised if they had a tacit agreement with Pelosi, especially as her views are in alignment with the CPC.

Even after this, people are still finding ways to doubt Speaker Pelosi's abilities.

If nothing has changed, if Pelosi didn't cave, why these efforts to bind the bills together in first place?

I really don’t think there was a concerted attempt to bind them together

[KaiserDave]

Truly disgusting

[KaiserDave]

Joe has a chance here to deal a stunning defeat to the worst characters of corporate America. This reconciliation bill is crucial. Don't surrender Joe!

[KaiserDave]

I'm happy Biden is being more aggressive, we can only wait and see.

However, once this is done with, ideally Biden would backstab the Gottheimer gang and cut them all off in 2022 and endorse primary challengers, but that won't happen.

[KaiserDave]

Biden is at war with the worst of corporate American and their army of lobbyists and legislators, we must hope for his success.

[KaiserDave]

Why is everyone assuming that there is a mass capitulation going on? If Jamaal Bowman is agreeing to the BIF, there's clearly stuff going on behind the scenes. Don't count your bills before they pass.

[KaiserDave]

Why is everyone assuming that there is a mass capitulation going on? If Jamaal Bowman is agreeing to the BIF, there's clearly stuff going on behind the scenes. Don't count your bills before they pass.

That's my thought. We don't know enough about what's going on here.

None of us know what will happen. Indeed.

[KaiserDave]

Like seriously. If Pelosi has agreed to this, it means she's just given up on the entire Biden agenda and thinks all that's left for this Congress to do is raise the debt ceiling, avoid the shutdown, and just wait for the inevitable GOP wave of 2022. It means the entire Biden presidency has basically been for naught.

Just pathetic.

Get a glass of water, you’ll be tired after Olympic jumping from conclusion to conclusion.

[KaiserDave]

You know I'd love to be proven wrong, but smug dismissal and tautological invocations of Pelosi's supposed infallibility aren't exactly convincing counterarguments.

I am not pretending I know what will happen, and it’s hardly smug to say to stop making really outlandish claims.

[KaiserDave]

You know I'd love to be proven wrong, but smug dismissal and tautological invocations of Pelosi's supposed infallibility aren't exactly convincing counterarguments.

I am not pretending I know what will happen, and it’s hardly smug to say to stop making really outlandish claims.

There's nothing outlandish there. If the House votes tomorrow without a reconciliation deal, it's over. Plain as day.

I hope that's not the case, maybe the negotiations on reconciliation are further along and something will come up today to clear everything up. But it's getting harder and harder to believe.

Yeah that's outlandish.  It's not "over."

[KaiserDave]

You know I'd love to be proven wrong, but smug dismissal and tautological invocations of Pelosi's supposed infallibility aren't exactly convincing counterarguments.

I am not pretending I know what will happen, and it’s hardly smug to say to stop making really outlandish claims.

There's nothing outlandish there. If the House votes tomorrow without a reconciliation deal, it's over. Plain as day.

I hope that's not the case, maybe the negotiations on reconciliation are further along and something will come up today to clear everything up. But it's getting harder and harder to believe.

Yeah that's outlandish.  It's not "over."

You think the centrist Dems will agree to anything after they get the only thing they ever cared about? Now that's outlandish.

I'm don't claim to know what is going on behind the scenes, and I will draw my conclusions once events out of my control have transpired.

[KaiserDave]

You know I'd love to be proven wrong, but smug dismissal and tautological invocations of Pelosi's supposed infallibility aren't exactly convincing counterarguments.

I am not pretending I know what will happen, and it’s hardly smug to say to stop making really outlandish claims.

There's nothing outlandish there. If the House votes tomorrow without a reconciliation deal, it's over. Plain as day.

I hope that's not the case, maybe the negotiations on reconciliation are further along and something will come up today to clear everything up. But it's getting harder and harder to believe.

Yeah that's outlandish.  It's not "over."

You think the centrist Dems will agree to anything after they get the only thing they ever cared about? Now that's outlandish.

I'm don't claim to know what is going on behind the scenes, and I will draw my conclusions once events out of my control have transpired.

So you've got absolutely nothing, except insisting we shouldn't draw the obvious conclusions based on the players' incentives as they have been plainly laid out for all to see since like May. Gotcha.

I've got nothing and anybody who claims to got everything...doesn't. I don't think we can make plain conclusions.