I’m seeing lots of mainstream press commentary that Bernie Sanders had to scale back his ambitions a lot, essentially take a loss agreeing to a $3.5 trillion reconciliation framework. He wanted $6 trillion but had to settle for $3.5T. This seems to me a wildly blinkered view, verging on oblivious or tendentious.
You don’t negotiate by starting with what you’ll settle for or even what you want. You start with a high bid as Sanders clearly did here. That’s not a loss. That’s negotiating. The other point to keep in mind is that when you add up $3.5 trillion plus the bipartisan mini-bill plus the spending on the China/innovation legislation you come to a total number pretty close to Biden’s high end original set of proposals.
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things.
Go Big Now
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) announced last night that the Democratic senators involved in hammering out a reconciliation bill for infrastructure (and a lot of other stuff) landed on a $3.5 trillion proposal.
Schumer stated that “every major program” that Biden originally proposed in his infrastructure plan is funded “in a robust way.”
Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), a key centrist in the negotiations, said the bill would be “fully paid for.”
Senate Budget Committee chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) declared that the budget was “the most significant piece of legislation passed since the Great Depression.”
The next step is getting all 50 Senate Democrats on board.
Beyond the topline number, most of the details of the proposal are still unknown.
Biden will discuss the proposal with the senators today during a caucus lunch.
Meanwhile, GOP senators are still playing the phony outrage game over Democrats doing both a bipartisan infrastructure bill and a reconciliation bill on their own–a move Republicans were well aware would happen in advance despite their current bellyaching.
Key analysis: “How Republicans hope to scam Democrats into committing political suicide” – The Washington Post
Tennessee Republicans Go Full Anti-Vaxxer
It turns out the state’s GOP lawmakers aren’t just trying to block the Tennessee Department of Health’s teen outreach efforts for the COVID-19 vaccine; they’ve successfully pressured the agency into stopping teen outreach for all vaccines, the Tennessean reports.
Follow The Money Trail To The GOP’s CRT Boogeyman
The Thomas W. Smith Foundation has poured more than $12.7 million into 21 right-wing groups that’ve led the charge in conservatives’ obsessive culture war against critical race theory, an investigation by Popular Information found.
Behind Closed Doors
Trump had a huge meltdown over a media leak reporting that he had hidden away in a White House bunker during a George Floyd protest nearby last summer–and suggested that whoever had leaked that story ought to be executed, according to a new book by Wall Street Journal reporter Michael Bender.
“Whoever did that, they should be charged with treason!” the then-president yelled during a meeting with aides, according to an excerpt of the book obtained by CNN. ‘They should be executed!'”
The (Literal) Cost Of Shooting Down Florida GOP’s Absurd Laws
Florida taxpayers are shelling out a whopping $675 per hour for lawyers hired by Gov. Ron DeSantis and state Republicans to defend their blatantly unconstitutional laws that inevitably get struck down in court, like their pro-Trump ban on social media platforms suspending politicians.
A Lot Going On Here
“QAnon-Loving Pastor Running for Congress Accused of Satanism by, uh, QAnon” – Vice
Roy Moore Fails Once More
Two-time Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore’s $9.5 million defamation suit against comedian Sacha Cohen Baron got tossed out by a federal judge.
Moore, whose 2017 campaign for U.S. Senate was upended by allegations of sexual misconduct with underage girls, was previously removed from the state Supreme Court … twice.
In case you don’t remember, Cohen tricked Moore into participating in a TV bit where the comedian repeatedly waved a beeping pedophile detector over the disgraced Republican:
Murder On Air At Fox Studios
Texas state Rep. James Talarico (D), who was invited on Fox News to discuss his colleagues’ fleeing from the state to block the GOP’s voter suppression bill, roasted the network for its complicity in Trumpland’s crusade to undermine the 2020 election.
“You have made a lot of money personally and you have enriched a lot of corporations with advertising by getting on here and spewing lies and conspiracy theories.. so what I’m asking you to do is to tell your voters that Donald Trump lost the election” pic.twitter.com/4MOVwmWYlJ
It turns out that in addition to spending thousands of dollars on charter buses to the Trump rally that preceded the Jan. 6 insurrection, being present at said insurrection, and spearheading a “forensic investigation” of the 2020 election in his state, Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) promoted the deranged QAnon conspiracy theory more than 50 times on Twitter before he entered office.
One of the truly spectacular tweets MediaMatters dug up features Trump fan art depicting the ex-president as a sparkly anime hunk:
An alleged Capitol insurrectionist recorded himself repeatedly boasting that he and the rest of the pro-Trump mob were breaking into … the White House.
“Storm the White House! That’s what we do!” said Douglas Jensen as he prepared to storm the U.S. Capitol. pic.twitter.com/UwXDA58vjN
There were a few short, golden hours after the news broke that the White House and a bipartisan team of senators had come to an infrastructure framework agreement where the Republicans involved eagerly supported it.
This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis.
Over four days in June 2021, thousands of protesters attended the Treaty People Gathering in opposition to Line 3, a crude oil pipeline slated to be built across traditional homelands of the Ojibwe peoples in northern Minnesota.
Republicans have a good model with winning out-year governors races in state like Virginia and New Jersey that hold their elections off the even numbered two year cycle. Bank on the energy of hungry Republicans partisans looking to win and election while presenting themselves to the electorate at large as a salt-of-the-earth problem-solver just looking to lend a hand. (Dems of course have their own version of this playbook.) But the situation in Virginia today shows how the Trump era may pose some problems for that model.
Glenn Youngkin is a former private equity CEO who played hard for Donald Trump’s endorsement to be the Republican nominee for Governor in Virginia. It worked. He got Trump’s endorsement and the nomination. But he’s generally eschewed the Republican label in the general election campaign and certainly not leaned into Trump and all that goes with him.
Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who served as the medical director for vaccine-preventable diseases and immunization programs at the Tennessee Department of Health, was ousted on Monday after state Republican lawmakers attacked her for a recent memo on giving teens the COVID-19 vaccine.
