The story here is not complicated, at least in broad strokes. Mid-summer Delta, economic knock-on effects of Delta and finally Afghanistan started sapping Biden’s popularity. Manchin saw that ebbing power and started pumping the brakes on the President’s agenda. This was of a piece with DC insider culture, which Manchin is the ultimate creature of, turning hard on the President. The big reporters changing their view of him and the lobbies sensing weakness.

All political power is unitary and it’s played out over the last two or three months in a very damaging way.

I confess that I have completely given up on making sense of what is going on on Capitol Hill right now. Is there going to be a reconciliation bill? Is the BIF going to pass? I have no idea on either. I also have no clue about the continuing appearance of a lack of urgency. A few days ago Rep. Jayapal said there’s nothing set in stone about the October 31st deadline. And just yesterday Joe Manchin said it didn’t seem at all realistic that anything would be done by then. That is, to put it mildly, deeply unfortunate because the public is drifting away from the President and his party in significant part because they cannot seem to act on the agenda they say is so important. They are also sowing a creeping disillusionment and demoralization among their own partisans. This is fundamentally the fault of Democratic voters who missed the chance to elect two to four more senators last November. But the problem is Joe Biden’s to solve.

More of the conversation from TPM Reader MM …

I agree with PT that the Dems didn’t “drive themselves into a cul-de-sac”, because they had no real choice.

But I disagree with much of the rest of his analysis. First, and most obviously, it is manifestly untrue that Manchin and Sinema haven’t learned the lessons of the past 30 years: they learned those lessons quite well. Their goals are simply at variance with, or at best skew to, many or most of goals of the rest of the Democratic caucus. Should they be Democrats? Nothing could matter less. It says ‘D’ after their names, and without them we wouldn’t even have these issues to worry about and argue over.

Matt Gaetz’s buddy is not just cooperating with the feds, he’s making allegations that “take us to some places we did not anticipate,” a prosecutor told a judge yesterday.  

The Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court today to temporarily block the enforcement of the unprecedentedly dangerous and restrictive abortion ban in Texas, filing an emergency appeal with the high court on Monday to protect the rights of women, and people who can become pregnant, in the red state.

It’s the second attempt by the DOJ to legally challenge the abortion law, which not only bans abortions post six-weeks in Texas, but also was crafted to be uniquely difficult to challenge in court. It enlists private citizens, instead of state officials, to deal with its enforcement. It’s a Wild West law that offers a $10,000 bounty to members of the public who successfully bring lawsuits against abortion providers and/or anyone who might “aid or abet” in the process of getting an abortion post-six weeks, including someone as far in the periphery of the act as a cab driver who might drive a woman to a clinic.

From TPM Reader PT …

I don’t think it’s fair to say that the Democrats “drove themselves into a cul-de-sac” on the reconciliation bill because that assumes, or implies, that the Democrats had other options. It also makes the Democrats, writ large, responsible for the fact that two (!) of their Senators haven’t managed to learn the lessons of the last 30 years.

Perhaps it’s worth replaying the tape to see how we got here.

Kari Lake, the frontrunner for the GOP gubernatorial nomination in Arizona after an endorsement by former President Trump, has called for the imprisonment of the state’s Secretary of State, Katie Hobbs, along with other election officials and various journalists over the 2020 election. Hobbs is also a leading Democratic candidate for governor. Arizona holds its next gubernatorial election in 2022 and the state will certainly be hotly contested in the 2024 presidential election.

We’re unspooling the news of Colin Powell’s death from COVID-19 complications here.

From TPM Reader MT …

I want to follow up from JB’s last line (Democrats in Congress have driven themselves into a cul-de-sac on the reconciliation bill) and just note how amazingly frustrated I am at the Democrats in Congress and those who said go for all or nothing.  I have kept my thoughts to myself with the assumption that the Democrats know what they are doing.  How stupid is that?

Unfortunately I think TPM Reader JB is right about this …

One other difference between Sen. Manchin and Sen. Tester you might have mentioned in your podcast this week is that Manchin is self-consciously wealthy.