On Sinema at the Sinema: October 2021 US Politics thread

i just realized that the 1.75T deal today is exactly half of the original 3.5T Sanders plan. what a coincidence, the number they decided on was exactly half.

Depends on how many Senators you think Manchin plays fall guy for. Coons, Warner, Tester, etc.. Obama's 60-40 margin didn't (make much of an effort to) stop Lieberman from kneecapping Obamacare.

― papal hotwife (milo z), Thursday, October 28, 2021 2:41 PM (eleven minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yea I think a lot of people in the media are missing this, even if you replaced those two with Bernie clones I still don't think $3.5t passes. ultimately the solution is to start electing younger people to Congress who are actually on board with unfucking a system that is hopelessly rigged in favor of rich conservatives

he didn't raise the question, just helpfully pointing out how everyone else doesn't know shit about shit

The sheer audacity to quote and respond to another post.

worst part about an internet forum, imo

ultimately the solution is to start electing younger people to Congress who are actually on board with unfucking a system that is hopelessly rigged in favor of rich conservatives

― frogbs, Thursday, October 28, 2021 12:56 PM (three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Good luck with that— a side effect of the Dems being so feckless in the face of literal climate devastation and fascist uprising is that a lot of young people with good politics have just given up hope.

If they hadn't already.

if anything the fecklessness of these old, mostly white elephants has inspired our local twentysomethings

does anyone here think biden/democrats are doing a great job "selling" what's in the bill, or that they'll do a good job over the next year?

if biden cared about this stuff he would have been on tv as often as he could, hammering home what this bill would do for the american people, and calling out sinema and manchin for blocking it.

bernie is old but he would have done that.

i agree with frogbs and the other conspiracy theorists that the moderate dems didn't really want that bill, they just wanted to look like they did. sinema and manchin, in that narrative, are just the scapegoats.

in that scenario, what is the benefit for the "moderate dems" (milo's "Coons, Warner, Tester, etc..")

their constituency are democratic voters who want paid family leave etc. this way they don't need to anger them.

if biden cared about this stuff he would have been on tv as often as he could, hammering home what this bill would do for the american people, and calling out sinema and manchin for blocking it.

― treeship

what?

I absolutely don't believe it's just Sinema and Manchin, but it's hard to discern just how many others are tanking this shit

thus inspiring the millions of West Virginian and Arizonan libs to visit Sinemanchin with pitchforks to eat their brains

if biden cared about paid family leave, lower prescription drug prices, and other provisions that have been cut in the new spending bill, he would have advocated for them more forecefully, taking the case directly to the american people. instead he negotiated them away.

xp

their constituency are democratic voters who want paid family leave etc. this way they don't need to anger them.

― treeship., Thursday, October 28, 2021 3:16 PM

so they get to be part of the 96% or so of senate/house that is behind the $3.5T plan, which pleases their democratic constituents, but they also benefit because the bill gets cut down to 1.75T, and they like that because they are fiscal conservatives at heart?

sorry if i'm misunderstanding

yes

they appease their voters and also their corporate donors.

most likely there are other senators that want to eviscerate this bill as much as possible to please their donor base but would rather not be the face of that because they still want people to vote for them. Manchin can get away with this because his voters lean more conservative, Sinema thinks she can get away with this because it makes her look like a "maverick" but she's problem miscalculating. Other senators know they cannot get away with it.

ugh, she's *probably miscalculating

he would have advocated for them more forecefully, taking the case directly to the american people

who would do what with it?

it might not have done anything. could have shamed sinema into falling in line.

can someone utterly devoid of shame be shamed into anything?

The 'taking it to the people' strategy probably would have failed - but not doing so has definitely failed so it's probably fair to say he might have given it a shot?

xp

i'm just going off of milo's "Coons, Warner, Tester, etc.." grouping of moderate dems that aren't manchin/sinema, but even just those three are very different. tester's a democrat in Montana. Coons is in safer territory, Warner somewhat less so.

mark warner has $200M, cooner has $7M, tester has $1M (source: google search, 45 seconds total, 60% reliable, 20% speculative, 50% dependable).

to what degree are they in a bloc that comes down to "faking support of a $3.5T while secretly backing the effort to whittle social spending down as much as possible to please corporate donors"? they seem like they would all have separate motives

"fiscal conservatives who don't want to get yelled at by everyone else in the party" seems pretty explanatory. Manchin is safer from that because of WV and frankly both he and Sinema seem to enjoy getting yelled at.

self-explanatory

The rail of Joe's yacht hid his rock-hard erection at poor people in kayaks roasting him.

in my lifetime, the democratic party has never taken real steps to secure a decent safety net in line with other developed countries.

it seems weird that this time they really attempted it and were only thwarted, in the final hour, by a single blue haired weirdo. just like too convenient. perhaps this is a conspiratorial instinct -- i just don't trust that the real power brokers in washington, including biden, actually wanted this bill.

Biden doesn't want to be a failure, I think he's invested in passing a signature bill. It happens to be this one so he wants it as much as anything, but it could have been any other legislation in any other moment.

are you guys at stoned as i am, i mean what

The rail of Joe's yacht hid his rock-hard erection at poor people in kayaks roasting him.

new monthly thread title!

maybe biden wanted to make it feasible for single moms to take care of their kids without sliding into poverty. who knows. never seemed like a priority for him before. and i'm angry that he and the senate democrats didn't get it done.

You two both sound like idiots right now. treeship with your "Joe should have just bully-pulpited harder, there's no way US Senators would be able to withstand the tide of grass roots support!" and milo with your...milo-ness, where everyone but you is forever operating from only the most dastardly motives.

the relevance of all of this is that it influences how one thinks of democratic leadership. are they a progressive party that just keeps getting thwarted by that darned duo sinema and manchin? or are they what they always were?

for real, explain to me what was in the full $3.5T bill, but removed from the now $1.75T bill, that aligns with what the power brokers wanted. we're talking K STREET! i realize there are a bunch of obvious things, probably. i'm thinking, family leave - that sounds like something the power broker boys don't want, because that would mean employees taking off work to have families more often! fuck that! no!

but what other things? please forgive me, because i have been trying to avoid politics for most of this year (believe it or not!), so i actually haven't been paying attention to the particulars of what is in and out at this point

the relevance of all of this is that it influences how one thinks of democratic leadership. are they a progressive party that just keeps getting thwarted by that darned duo sinema and manchin? or are they what they always were?

i think it leans toward the former - progressive party. they may very well turn into a very progressive party that is crushed under fascists. but i think it's encouraging that the vast majority of democratic senators are behind abolishing the filibuster and a 3.5T bill. if they can ever manage to get even a small majority back (rather than 50-50), i expect them to accomplish some big things. but (BUT! as always, BUT!) i can't see a likely future where that happens in the next 8 years

medicare expansion and a prescription drug pricing plan

but paid family leave is a huge deal.

where everyone but you is forever operating from only the most dastardly motives

? You mean my reference to Biden not wanting to be a failure? How is that a dastardly motive?

beyond the actual things in the bill, the bigger the price tag, the greater pressure there is to maybe make the wealthy people bankrolling these candidates pay for some of it

massive xps
bernie is old but he would have done that

fully agree! that's why we all preferred bernie to biden.

biden still wants to wheedle and horse trade with the so-called moderates who are blocking progress and he's puzzled how to respond when they don't have anything positive they want done, just invoking nebulous 'principles' against spending money to do things.

bernie would have bargained first, but faced with Manchin & Sinema's stupid intransigence, he'd have reached for other weapons to budge them. and bernie would have been blasting the stupid intransigence of the Republicans constantly from the get go.

if there's one thing Manchin has made really clear, it's that he's totally against any possible way of paying for any of this that might take a single cent from an extremely wealthy person

it's infuriating.

if they were going to use the precious first year on anything else, i wish Biden/leadership would have started with the voting rights legislation. before you do ANYTHING, let's address the whole 2022/2024 is a national crisis in plain view, foreseeable from very far away, a Novice-level challenge suitable for any rookie lookout. because now look where we are. by the time they get to passing anything (if! if!) it will likely be just ahead of the 2022 election - put aside everything else, it's not a good look to change the rules on voting just before there's a big vote. i, more than most people i think, have the view that there's no point in worrying about how conservatives will exploit things, because they always distort and spin things for their own bubble. but a big change to voting rights should have taken place immediately after the last election, not just before a new one. i don't understand why they backed off on that -- they'd rather cede the voting/election headlines to stories about Trump's "lawsuits" all year instead? why not provide a foil to those bullshit "keep your eyes on maricopa!" kind of stories by pushing the legislation to counteract that exact kind of bullshit, at the same time? instead, the democrats just kind of retreated into this idiotic "negotiation" with sinema/manchin all summer. THAT is worth criticizing them for, i think

i mean, i think something needed to be done to help working class and poor americans in a tangible way. once people see those policies paying off in their real lives, they would maybe insist on more things like that, and it could lead to a shift in the bootlicking culture of american politics.

Build Back Better is also a bit of a MacGuffin in assessing the Democratic President and Congress's performance - the PRO Act, voting rights, minimum wage, treatment of refugees, fostering a cold war with China (and Russia), defense spending, etc.. Joe B can't make Joe M vote for anything but Joe B could reschedule weed tomorrow.

The Manchin/Sinema obstinancy on BBB also serves to obscure all the other failures.

voting rights absolutely should have been the top priority, but I suspect that is even less popular with certain democrats than tossing money at a few social programs