Josh Marshall
If you’ve been meaning to contribute to The TPM Journalism Fund during our drive this year but haven’t found quite the right moment, now is the perfect time! Seriously. It’s super easy if you’re already a member. Just click right here. If you’re not a member of you’re a lapsed member, it’s an even better time to become a member. It’s cheap, easy, gets you a lot of great stuff and supports our work. Just click here.
Matt Shuham had a chat with the OAN host who said tens of thousands of election stealing Dems should be executed. Turns out it was just a big misunderstanding.
Does Biden trust GOP Senators to follow through? “They’ve given me their word. Where I come from, that’s good enough for me.”
More here from the press conference.
And from Senate progs, nope we’re not going to get hoodwinked here.
We’ve struck a deal. A group of senators – five Democrats and five Republicans – has come together and forged an infrastructure agreement that will create millions of American jobs.
— President Biden (@POTUS) June 24, 2021
This seems to be the framework I noted below: small bipartisan deal on hard infrastructure. The rest of the Biden plan passed through reconciliation.
We seem to be moving toward a framework in which a relatively small ‘hard’ infrastructure bill is passed through the Senate with Republican support. Then most of the rest of Biden’s two part infrastructure package (The American Jobs Plan and the American Family Plan) will be passed through a reconciliation bill which will get no Republican support and pass the Senate with 50 votes. There’s a lot of downside to that – not least of which is that it allows Republicans to take credit for the most popular stuff and creating a second bill with a lot of social spending and a lot of new taxes.
I want you to take a moment to watch this video. It’s a host on OAN – Trump’s favorite startup cable news channel – calling for the execution of “tens of thousands” of “traitors” who participated in stealing the election from Donald Trump. So executions for the tens of thousands of imaginary people behind the “steal”.
On the one hand this is totally insane. But it is also textbook incitement. They should be killed and since illegitimate President Joe Biden won’t do it you should probably take matters into your own hands.
Our COVID Future
Two stories emerged out of Israel this week which give us a view into the remaining months of 2021 in the United States. There’s nothing special or significant to the stories emerging in Israel. It is simply the most aggressively vaccinated country, using the most effective class (mRNA) of vaccines. Recently Israel had its first week with no COVID fatalities at all since the beginning of the epidemic. In most respects the pandemic is or was truly over in the country. No new fatalities, only a tiny positivity rate in tests, basically all mitigation mandates lifted over the last two weeks. But then starting several days ago there was a new outbreak tied to a group of schools in the north of the country.
Now to be clear, this is an ‘outbreak’ at a much, much smaller magnitude than anything we had seen during the pandemic. It also doesn’t seem to be evading the immunity provided by the Pfizer vaccine any more than expected. But it’s still highly significant and the country is on the verge of bringing back some of the mandates like indoor masking.
Over the last 24 hours we have had 121 more TPM Readers contribute to this year’s drive for The TPM Journalism Fund. Thank you. This keeps us moving toward a successful drive. Why is this important? Click here. Ready to contribute? Click here. And again, thanks from all of us.
We’re about to record this week’s edition of the podcast and we’ll be talking about the on-going trials and tribulations of H1/S1, the For the People Act. Yesterday, to quasi-great fanfare Joe Manchin finally agreed to support what was in essence his own compromise version of the bill. Then Republicans unanimously refused to allow a debate over the bill. And that was it.
Or was it it?
New York City held its mayoral primaries yesterday. Republicans nominated 70s/80s throwback Curtis Sliwa, a choice that is likely to have zero impact on the final choice of the next mayor. The real battle took place within the Democratic primary. The winner of the primary and what it means for a run off won’t be clear until mid-July – an almost absurd result of the confluence of ranked choice voting, which is being used for the first time in the city, and generous absentee ballot rules. But the clear leader so far is Eric Adams, a retired police captain who is currently the Brooklyn Borough President. The current results are Adams 32%, Maya Wiley 22%, Kathryn Garcia 20% and Andrew Yang 12%.
Adams is black. He ran on a pro-police, pro-law enforcement platform. Polls suggest his key bases of support were black voters, voters without a college education and voters who don’t reside in Manhattan. He had strong support among the city’s unions and is in many ways a traditional machine politician.