Robert Baird at The New Yorker takes a deep dive into the negotiations on President Biden’s agenda and the Congressional Progressive Caucus:
The C.P.C.’s show of strength came as a surprise. Not since the Democratic Study Group, an organization of liberal House members who helped steer civil-rights legislation through the blockade of Southern Democrats in the nineteen-sixties, had a group of left-leaning members of Congress acted with such concentrated force. The C.P.C. was founded three decades ago, but, as recently as 2015, The American Prospect described the caucus as “a fragile informal coalition that has lacked the same kind of leadership, money, publications, communications strategy, or clout” as its predecessor. Jayapal told me that when she first joined, “People got together, and they got mad at what was happening, but there wasn’t infrastructure built for the caucus to be strong.”
Brian Klaas in interviewed by Molly Jong-Fast on how Democrats can fight Republican extremism:
“Democrats have been given power. They need to wield [it],” he says. “The idea of protecting some comparatively insignificant norm while letting the rest of democracy burn is totally antithetical to everything we understand about how to protect democratic institutions.” That, and the rest of us need to “beat the authoritarian party at the ballot box while you still have democracy.”
The alternative? More extreme people in office. In fact, it’s what Klaas’ book is about: examining why so many leaders are awful humans, with the rest of us at their mercy. It’s how we got people like Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Lauren Boebert making political decisions in the first place.
“The way you set up the system of power determines who ends up putting their hat in the ring for it,” he says. “When you have Trump as the figurehead for the party, the people who are thinking about [running for office] that are on the fence… they’re thinking they’re going to lose the primary. So they bow out. Whereas the Lauren Boeberts and the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world, they’re full speed ahead.”
Ed Kilgore takes on the 90s take on Democratic strategy:
Sometimes when I hear a bit of popular music from the 1990s — whether it’s the boy-band stylings of NSYNC or the guitar-rock version of Radiohead — it seems familiar and momentarily with-it until I realize, Oh my God, this was a quarter-century ago!
Similarly, when I read Mark Penn and Andrew Stein’s op-ed in the New York Times offering a take on the current plight of the Democratic Party, I certainly recognized a familiar tune from the ’90s. This was the heyday of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization I loyally served in various capacities for about a decade, eventually becoming vice-president for policy. I feel that like most of my colleagues from that era, I have evolved a lot since then, as has the Democratic Party and the United States of America. But the Penn-Stein analysis shows no evolution at all: It’s a view of the current political landscape from the perspective of 1995 at the latest, and thus offers very bad advice to today’s Democrats.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post editorial board writes in support of vaccine mandates:
Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve heard outrage expressed that somehow public health measures are a restraint on people’s liberty. Beyond doubt, the restrictions have been onerous for many. But they must be weighed against the benefit. Face masks, social distancing, better ventilation, hand hygiene and vaccines have saved lives. The vaccines available today, free and widely available in the United States, are an unprecedented boon. No generation before had such highly effective vaccines invented, manufactured and distributed in such a short period of time. Listen to the voices of those unvaccinated people sickened in the hospital or on their deathbeds saying they wish they had taken the vaccine. Vaccines are a near-certain pass to avert misery, a protection against hospitalization and death. Isn’t that freedom?
On a final note, don’t miss Paul Krugman in The New York Times on infrastructure week:
But if infrastructure spending is a political winner, why didn’t it happen under Donald Trump? The Trump administration first declared Infrastructure Week in June 2017, but no legislative proposal ever materialized, and by the time Trump was voted out of office the phrase had become a national punchline. Why?
It wasn’t just incompetence, although that was part of it. The bigger story is that the modern Republican Party is constitutionally incapable — or maybe, given recent behavior, that should be unconstitutionally incapable — of investing in America’s future. And, sad to say, pro-corporate Democrats, whom we really should stop calling “centrists,” have some of the same problems.
Trump talked big about infrastructure during the 2016 election campaign. But the “plan” released by his advisers — it was actually just a vague sketch — was a mess. It wasn’t even really a proposal for public investment; to a large extent it was an exercise in crony capitalism, a scheme for taxpayer-subsidized private investment that would, like the “opportunity zones” that were part of the 2017 tax cut, mainly have ended up showering benefits on wealthy developers. It was also completely unworkable.
