John Light
One of the many soft deadlines Democrats are facing as they trudge forward with their reconciliation package is the looming UN Climate Change summit in Glasgow. Last year’s Conference of Parties was postponed because of the pandemic, and, with the world now two years deeper into its worsening crisis, this year’s gathering is being heralded as the most important since the Paris Agreement was hammered out in 2015.
All that build-up comes as the U.S. Senate struggles to deliver the policies that would fulfill the President’s climate agenda.
Read MoreCongress is in recess and the firehose of public positioning we’ve experienced over the last several weeks will slow to a trickle during these next few days. But important work is still being done on the reconciliation package … or, so we hope.
Kate Riga will have an evening briefing, giving you the latest at the end of each day — at least until senators return to DC. Check out the first installment here.
Mitch McConnell’s dangerous game with the debt ceiling seems to be playing out more or less as intended.
Susan Collins refused to endorse Trump in 2016, and she voted to remove him during his 2020 impeachment trial.
But in 2022, she will be supporting the self-declared proto-Trump Paul LePage. (“I was Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” the former two-term governor of Maine once opined.)
At TPM, we’ve been harping on the fact that the whole bipartisan back-and-forth that unfolded over the last two months — and that might conclude early tomorrow morning — doesn’t really matter that much. It’s the reconciliation package that matters. If it passes in a form similar to what Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer outlined this morning, it would be the most significant progressive legislation in at least a decade.
It might also be the last significant progressive legislation for at least a decade.