The Biden administration reportedly sent 200 ventilators and 100 nasal oxygen kits to the state of Florida this week as the state sees an unprecedented spike in COVID-19 cases. As we’ve reported, the number of people hospitalized with the virus increased by 1,173 just in the last two days — putting the total number of confirmed hospitalizations in the Sunshine state at 14,787.
But Gov. Ron DeSantis claims he didn’t ask the feds for the life-saving equipment.
So a few thoughts on Manchin.
We’ve said repeatedly there’s going to be a lot of drama and haggling before this gets settled. Well, see: I was right. Does this change the global picture? I don’t think so.
Many people believed that Joe Biden would never be able to get 10 Republicans to agree to a bipartisan mini-bill deal without also agreeing to jettison most of the rest of his fiscal/infrastructure/climate agenda. They figured that these efforts would eventually fail. Once it had failed, Biden would then go to the bipartisanists and say, “Look, we tried. It didn’t work. Now we pour everything into the reconciliation bill.”
That wasn’t a bad plan. It was just another way to get to passing the agenda. In any case, that’s what many people believed. I was one of them. I was wrong.
This is what I mean by Biden having his cake and eating it too.
Now, to be fair, I didn’t think it was impossible, just unlikely. But they both get you to the same end goal.
Most of us have understandably and rightly been focused on the new House select committee as the investigation that will get to the heart of the January 6th insurrection and the coup plot that preceded and created it. We’re right to. Indeed, before the new committee was impanelled I’d gotten used to hearing about this and that one-off hearing, most focused on security lapses on January 6th itself, and had been semi-tuning them out. But as I’ve learned from my colleagues in recent days, there’s more going on in the Senate than I realized.