On the infrastructure front, TPM Reader MC thinks Manchin’s talk is mostly just talk, made to put himself at the center of the conversation and maximize his leverage when final negotiations get underway on an actual bill. I will add that this is broadly consistent with what I’ve heard from people close to the decision-making processes. And it’s always seemed to me like the most likely scenario. Still, hope is not a plan.

Your recent post is great, but to my mind misses something about Manchin’s possible decision process.

It’s been known for a long time that drafting the infrastructure legislation would take awhile. Back in early April, Pelosi said publicly that she hoped the text would be ready by July 4, with a vote in August. The timeline hasn’t been extended by Manchin’s hemming and hawing.

Continue reading “Don’t Worry About It?” →

Sometimes a writer will take a bundle of ideas that have been floating around in a lot of other peoples’ heads and commit them to paper with clarity and concision. If you are one of the other people in whose mind the ideas have been floating, seeing this happen can be both illuminating and annoying. But if someone else wrote them down before you did it likely wasn’t just a matter of speed. It was because you hadn’t done the work of taking the inchoate impressions and feelings that occupy all of our minds and whittling them down to concrete assertions and arguments that others can readily understand. We don’t really know what we think until we are able to commit it to the written word.

Continue reading “Making Sense of the Big DC Summer #2” →