Beware the Ides of March -- U.S. Politics March 2021

rmde

Aggressively living out the centrist rally Twitter joke now. Better things aren’t possible and you’re an asshole for suggesting that they could be

Hmmm. I directly quote you telling me to fuck off and this magically transmutes into my calling you an asshole? rmde again

Frustrating as Manchin's last-minute trimming was, if you had told me last March that the a 50/50 Senate would send a a nearly $2 trillion relief bill that would cut child poverty in half to President Biden's desk I would have thought you were almost delusionally optimistic https://t.co/dynWm2V2G7

— Scott Lemieux (@LemieuxLGM) March 6, 2021

xp Don't believe I addressed you today?

I bet the people who are about to get $1200 more a month for the next six months are just frothing with rage at those awful, worthless Democrats.

― but also fuck you (unperson), Saturday, March 6, 2021 2:43 PM

That's a good example of it getting worse. They were going to get $1600 more a month for the next seven months under Biden's proposal. The non-taxable $10k in benefits offsets ~$1k for most people so the bill wound up a couple of thousand worse for most people using UI - all because Joe Manchin loves drama. Is that an incorrect read on the outcome?

― Joe Bombin (milo z), Saturday, March 6, 2021 2:56 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

It's really weird that you're raging out because I'm expressing disappointment that Joe Biden didn't get what he initially asked for primarily because of Joe Manchin.

if i were the president of the united states and knew that joe manchin was who he is, you know what I'd do? make my proposal higher than I'd know Manchin would agree to, so that he would negotiate it back down to where I thought I could make the deal in the first place.

seriously - if you have centrist assholes like manchin and sinema, and you know you have zero GOP votes, than you're effectively just negotiating with the centrists. if it was widely foreseeable that manchin and sinema would probably choose to flex their newfound Centrist asshole political power - and it was - then you shouldn't be surprised to see that the final bill moved a bit toward them. how else were they going to get 50 votes?

Better things aren’t possible and you’re an asshole for suggesting that they could be

C'mon, nobody has said that. Better things are possible, and actually achievable, and this bill demonstrates that. It is way better than anything that would have come out of a second Trump term or a Republican-majority GOP, either or both of which were entirely possible outcomes of the election. As the Lemieux tweet says, this is a much better position than progressives had reason to expect just a few months ago.

You don't get everything you want, because almost nobody ever does, and especially not progressives in a system that is in all sorts of ways heavily tilted against progressive power and priorities. But also knowing how to recognize a win as a win and not as a calamitous capitulation is important to not driving yourself completely insane because the world isn't the way you want it to be.

milo’s not the one who seems driven insane today idk

"better things aren't possible" is often a legitimate default refrain against settling, thankful for what you get

Its also a tiresome default deployed when someone thinks they deserve a fucking biscuit every time they can imagine a nicer outcome than has arisen.

You dont get any fuckin biscuits for being able to imagine better things than the US setup milo, and you def dont get any biscuits for the cunts tone youve adopted to anyone interest in discussing the whys and wheres of "possible/likely" in us politics for the last year and more, ten hours a day

Save the tone of injured protest ffs

if i were the president of the united states and knew that joe manchin was who he is, you know what I'd do? make my proposal higher than I'd know Manchin would agree to, so that he would negotiate it back down to where I thought I could make the deal in the first place.

seriously - if you have centrist assholes like manchin and sinema, and you know you have zero GOP votes, than you're effectively just negotiating with the centrists. if it was widely foreseeable that manchin and sinema would probably choose to flex their newfound Centrist asshole political power - and it was - then you shouldn't be surprised to see that the final bill moved a bit toward them. how else were they going to get 50 votes?

Manchin started trying to tank it yesterday and held the whole affair up for almost an entire day because he's a messy bitch who lives for drama. It's very difficult to chalk that up to a planned negotiating position on Biden's part, I would think. He certainly seemed surprised by Manchin's last minute actions.

I don't know why any of this is supposed to make it impossible to compare the bill as proposed and as it existed even early this week (remember how deeper means testing was off the table and all the leftists were dummies for getting preemptively mad about it?) and the final outcome. All I said was it could have been better.

It's one thing if Joe Biden bargained with an opposition party to pass a bill that was less than hoped for but better than nothing - but that isn't the situation. The Democrats made their own bill worse all on their own. That simple fact is inherently disappointing.

Well, again, not to bring up the Way Things Have Always Been, but I don't know why you think intra-party negotiations are easier than inter-party negotiations. They never, ever have been.

I just don't know, in an era without pork, what executive tools Biden could've used to bend a Manchin or Sinema. They're assholes from red(dish) states.

Wedgies?

have you seen Manchin's ass

I suppose I can guess.

Wedgies?

― Canon in Deez (silby), Saturday, 6 March 2021 22:36 (one minute ago) bookmarkflaglink

Well its setting the sights higher than bootstraps tbf

xxxxp Even if that was true (it's really not - you're not going to see a government shutdown with a unified Democratic government for instance), so what? The initial offer was better - in pretty much every way - than the final result, all without a single Republican being able to obstruct. It wasn't all a some play acted negotiation, as Manchin started to fuck with them for fun yesterday.

The final product is more disappointing than what it could have been and the way it went down is disappointing for what it tells about the future of progressive legislative priorities.

Imagine what these bills would look like if the Republicans actually tried to negotiate in good faith, extremely compromised!

And that's the pie in the sky scenario

it seems weird to place all the blame on biden for not being a corleone, while ignoring the widely foreseen grandstanding of manchin and the centrists, which was inevitable, and the reality of composition of the senate, which the democrats only control by a thread.

otm

The results, caveats assumed, are much better than what I expected from a Joseph Fucking Biden.

The Democrats made their own bill worse all on their own. That simple fact is inherently disappointing.

the 2020 election results were inherently disappointing. that's what made today.

It can be both better than expected and dramatically worse than we have the right to expect.

and i predict that the rest of 2021-22, legislatively speaking, will be disappointing as well. they call me nostrildamus

Well yeah.

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/91/8d/75/918d75f16c1378e807563bc4b37011f0.gif

xp
definitely. i mean, in some alternate universe the mess of the trump era culminating in the pandemic failure leads to a progressive utopia, with some person under the age of 75 years old rising on the (beloved by all, opposed by zero GOP in this universe) Green New Deal and basic income, and the conservative supreme court justices are so awed by the righteousness of it all that they die of heart attacks, all of them, and the court is suddenly 9-0 and guns are banned. goddamn that would be awesome. forgot what i was talking about

it seems weird to place all the blame on biden

Who's placing all the blame on Biden?! I've done nothing but lay the blame on Manchin and other centrists/obstructionists. Biden certainly didn't seem to be asking Manchin to attempt to gut the UI and he didn't ask that the most famous image from his signature $1.9 trillion stimulus be a Democrat putting some zing on her vote to shit on the poor.

I don't think Biden cares deeply about progressive priorities or the $15 minimum wage and isn't showing any strategy to but his actual proposal was good. The failure to assert himself (until the last minute when Manchin started to really fuck things up) is not good and does not bode well for those priorities.

Any strategy to check Manchin*

Assume he is napping a lot

it's naptime for america

'Democrats' being such a roomy denomination is presumably a problem here (and elsewhere).

Also true of 'Republicans', apparently:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/06/donald-trump-republican-national-committee-fundraising-name

xp you're right milo, i shouldn't have phrased that way, i know no one's putting 100% blame on biden. there's plenty of blame and disappointment to go around, it is dismal.

yet it isn't because we have a decent bill

The Democrats roomy denomination is their own choice, though - the party machine wanted Sinema, they helped beat back a progressive challenge to Manchin, they do everything they can to bolster center-right candidates and remain hostile to the left wing of the party. It serves their purposes to be a big tent that just so happens to only knock down progressive priorities. Democrats don't get a pass on that front.

Thread:

1) Despite having only a 50-vote Senate majority, Democrats are about to pass a nearly $2 trillion bill that puts more than $7,600 into the bank account of the typical family of 4, establishes America's first proper child allowance (on a temporary basis for now)...

— Eric Levitz (@EricLevitz) March 6, 2021

it's wild no matter when I check out this thread milo has just posted, relentless...like the t-1000 terminator of saying democrats suck

Remember when we said we wouldn't need monthly threads anymore, it was going to be so quiet

dramatically worse than we have the right to expect

What do you base that "right" on? American history? Take a second look at the last 250+ years.

We deserve everything

otm

I agree with milo’s description of manchin as a messy bitch who lives for drama, but it could be worse. He could be Lieberman or a Democratic ted Cruz or something. He does seem to actually want to accomplish things.

Sinema is far far more worrying to me for everything else on the agenda. Given the kind of politics she was involved in 10 years ago and what she’s doing now, she seems ... unpredictable?

The other thing I find worrying is that both Delaware senators, biden allies, voted against $15.

senators from Citibank

it's wild no matter when I check out this thread milo has just posted, relentless...like the t-1000 terminator of saying democrats suck

we all mourn Morbs in our own ways

https://www.politico.com/amp/news/2021/03/03/biden-minimum-wage-negotiations-republicans-473583

The consent factory is about to start working double shifts about how $15 was impossible and never the real goal.

Can we take the Sabbath off for silent contemplation of God’s glory please, and resume Monday with fresh vigor and determination?

The outrage is not that Manchin, Sinema and the Centrist Democrats watered this bill down. That’s to be expected. They are doing what their voters sent them to the Senate to do- be a Democrat, yes, but be a pain in the ass and gum up the works whenever possible so things don’t go too far progressive. The real outrage is that there was never any question that there might be even a single Republican vote for this bill. The outrage is that every single Republican senator was willing to line up and vote no on a bill that is going to help people during a crisis. Where are the Centrist Republicans, who are willing to buck their party and vote their conscience and vote with the best interests of the people in mind? Oh, there are none? They are all more interested in scoring political points and taking advantage of schisms in the other party, knowing that the Democrats will take the hit for any watering down of this bill? Knowing that it will be Manchin’s name in the news during negotiations and not theirs? Fuck them. We have one whole party in our 2 party system that is complete and utter shit. That’s the outrage here. I’m not happy about this bill getting watered down, and I think Manchin et al can fuck right off, but the real problem is the party that has been completely radicalized and has no interest in helping people unless it’s incidental to them scoring political points, i.e. not the Democrats, but the other fucks that have no qualms about lining up to say “fuck you” to the American people en masse while people are suffering.