As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.
James Downie discusses the Build Back Better/ Manchin debacle; here's a long excerpt:
Let’s be clear: Manchin’s excuses for opposing this bill — which would expand child-care and Medicare benefits, fight climate change and provide other supports for low-income Americans — are nonsense. “If I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” But polls have shown that West Virginians on balance support the BBB, and it would likely help West Virginia more than most states. The idea that Manchin, who’s won statewide election six times, can’t “explain” a popular, useful bill to his constituents is laughable.
The rest of Manchin’s rationalizations aren’t any better. “The inflation that I was concerned about — it’s not transitory, it’s real. It’s harming every West Virginian,” he told Fox News’s Bret Baier. But numerous economists have said the BBB won’t affect inflation. As White House press secretary Jen Psaki noted in an acid statement, the Penn Wharton Budget Model, which Manchin is fond of citing, “issued a report less than 48 hours ago that noted the Build Back Better Act will have virtually no impact on inflation in the short term, and, in the long run, the policies it includes will ease inflationary pressures.” Notably, Manchin did not cite any expert to rebut that view in either his Fox appearance or the statement announcing his stance. [snip]
Manchin certainly bears much of the responsibility for this debacle, but not all. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) spent much of the year confusing everyone about what she would and wouldn’t support. (Sinema and her staff insisted the White House knew her priorities; somehow they were leak-happy Washington’s best-kept secrets.) House holdouts such as Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) delayed the bill to reinstate the state and local tax deductions for wealthy constituents. And other objectors such as Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.) watered down the bill’s attempt to lower prescription drug prices, originally one of its most popular provisions.
Finally, a hefty chunk of the blame must be placed at the feet of the president and congressional leadership. They chose to split the infrastructure and social spending measures into separate bills. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) chose to let other Democrats waste weeks on a spending package in the $3 trillion range, when he and Manchin had signed a letter over the summer saying Manchin wouldn’t go over $1.5 trillion. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and the White House chose to ditch the two-track strategy and fatally weaken the BBB’s chances.
No political party operates at perfect efficiency. But there’s a frustratingly common theme to Democratic failures and even some of the party’s muted successes: a refusal to play hardball.
Granted, it's difficult to play hardball when you have a 50/50 Senate and a closely divided House, where the threat to bolt the party is always an option. But the default position during this whole debacle was always to backpedal and cave to the demands of Sinemanchin at the expense of, but with the grudging acquiescence of, Congressional progressives. It's hard to believe that Maserati Manchin was ever going to vote for the social spending bill, and was rather dragging "negotiations" along until the moment felt right to go on Fox "News" and announce his back- stabbing intentions.
Steve M. has thoughts about the trajectory of the "negotiations" and how his bad faith will play in his dirt poor state and the ramifications for swing-district Dems:
I thought there might still be hope for Build Back Better, in some greatly reduced form, but Joe Manchin just stabbed the president and every swing-district Democrat in the back, as well as every person who would have benefited from the bill, because the people who own him want to keep ordinary people's grubby hands off what they consider their money and want Democrats to lose every election, and Manchin wants whatever they want. [snip]
Presumably he's been planning to do this for months if he couldn't get the White House and the rest of the Democratic Party to give up. I assume he thought he could kill the bill merely by forcing endless negotiations right up until the Democrats' self-imposed deadline, but when they made it clear that they were willing to keep negotiating into 2022, he decided it was time to shiv them. I'm sure his poll numbers will go up in his extremely red home state, particularly among people who would have benefited from this bill the most, because that's the way this country works.
The apparent demise of Build Back Better in its current form had an immediate, negative impact on economic projections:
Senator Joe Manchin's opposition to the Build Back Better Act prompted Goldman Sachs to swiftly dim its US economic outlook.
The Wall Street firm told clients Sunday it no longer assumes President Joe Biden's signature legislation will get through the narrowly divided Congress, citing the West Virginia Democrat's announcement that he's a "no" on the $1.75 trillion bill."A failure to pass BBB has negative growth implications," Goldman Sachs economists, led by Jan Hatzius, said in the research report.Citing the "apparent demise" of Build Back Better, Goldman Sachs now expects GDP to grow at an annualized pace of 2% in the first quarter, down from 3% previously.
That's enough on the back- stabber for now.
The House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis issued its staff report (which was largely ignored by the corporate media). It documents what was obvious to all sentient people about the Malignant Loser's deadly botching of the pandemic response, with some new revelations. Here's part of The Hill's summary:
The Trump administration deliberately undermined the nation's coronavirus response for political purposes, including by weakening testing guidance and championing widespread "herd immunity," according to a new report from the House panel investigating the pandemic response.
The Democratic staff report released Friday was a summation of the year's work investigating political interference in the pandemic response from Trump officials and the former president himself.
In interviews with officials and from uncovered emails and other documents, the committee found that the former administration failed to heed warnings about supply shortages, blocked public health officials from speaking publicly and neglected the pandemic response in order to focus on the 2020 presidential election and on promoting the lie that the election was "stolen" from Trump through widespread fraud.
New evidence released by the panel Friday highlighted the frustration and anger among senior public health officials with Trump's embrace of the herd immunity strategy.
You can read the subcommittee staff's report here (pdf).
Retiring NIH Director and Nobel laureate Dr. Francis Collins also had something to say in line with the subcommittee's findings:
The outgoing director of the National Institutes of Health said Sunday that he faced political pressure from then-President Donald Trump and other Republicans to endorse unproven Covid-19 remedies such as hydroxychloroquine and to fire Dr. Anthony Fauci, the head of NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
Dr. Francis Collins, whose last day as NIH director is Sunday, told CBS News that he got a "talking to" by Trump, but that he held his ground and would have resigned if Trump made him endorse remedies for Covid-19 that were not based in science."I have done everything I can to stay out of any kind of political, partisan debates because it is really not a place where medical research belongs," he said. "I was not going to compromise scientific principles to just hold onto the job." [snip]Collins also said he fought back calls from Republicans for him to fire Fauci, the nation's top infectious disease expert who now serves as President Joe Biden's chief medical adviser."Can you imagine a circumstance where the director of the NIH, somebody who believes in science, would submit to political pressures and fire the greatest expert in infectious disease that the world has known, just to satisfy political concerns?" he said.
