Ooof, you can’t make this stuff up.
A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss Joe Manchin’s new bargaining position on the reconciliation package and fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision on the Texas abortion law.
Watch below and email us your questions for next week’s episode.
You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.
In yesterday’s episode of the podcast Kate Riga and I were trying to make sense of Joe Manchin’s various feints and positions and un-positions over the last eight months. It’s sort of a parlor game to try to make sense of the motives of people you disagree with or frustrate you. Maybe it’s not that complicated? Maybe the reason they keep doing X is because they want to do X. The fact that you don’t like X doesn’t make it that hard to understand.
Yet there’s something a bit more to it with Manchin. His notional arguments for the ‘strategic pause’ on the President’s agenda doesn’t really add up. He says we need to worry about ‘runaway inflation’ when inflation is lower than it was in the 80s after Paul Volcker had tamed it. He says we need to keep our powder dry in case COVID gets worse and we need more massive relief packages. But actually what’s being discussed is spending over ten years. If COVID turns out to be catastrophically different in a year we could just change the plan. Even diehard inflation hawks like Larry Summers don’t think the spending over a decade is an issue on this front. And none of these things are really different than 6 or 7 weeks ago when Manchin gave all signs that he was at least broadly on board, subject to some hacks and shaves, with the $3.5 trillion package.
