I’m still trying make sense of the ‘deal’ negotiated yesterday on infrastructure. But there are a few key issues I can share with you that are pretty interesting. Let me start with one about the so-called ‘payfors’.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is now live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss the Republican filibuster of even starting debate on Democrats’ major voting rights bill, and game out the path forward for democracy safeguards.
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You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
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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 had a front row seat to Rudy Giuliani’s descent into Trumpy madness over the last several years, falling from his pedestal as America’s Mayor to the dripping, desperate “legal” face of Trump’s big lie.
Once the mayor of New York City, now temporarily banned from practicing law in New York state, Giuliani has had a rough one, brought on entirely by himself.
JoinWe’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.
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.