Priorities

The execrable Joe Manchin

I have no illusions that President Biden or his administration is perfect. There will be missteps, unforced errors, failures of communication and messaging, and egregious policies in any administration—even one you voted for and support. But there are a few reasons I will not criticize President Biden.

The first is that American society is on a knife’s edge. We are literally in danger of losing our democracy or, more accurately, having it stolen from us, only to have it be replaced with autocracy. Only one of our two major political parties is pro-democracy and that’s the Democratic Party. The Republican Party, on the other hand, is openly and unabashedly anti-American and pro-fascist.

I’m not going to do anything to undermine the head of the only party that’s interested in protecting and strengthening democracy by, among other things, making sure everybody who is legally entitled to vote can vote, lifting millions of people out of poverty, reducing income inequality, and getting dark money out of politics.

The second reason I don’t criticize Biden can be explained by these headlines and tweets from both The New York Times and The Washington Post.

• “Role as Trump’s gatekeeper puts Meadows in legal peril — and at odds with Trump”

• “Prosecuting Donald Trump’s former chief of staff could create a precedent that hurts the Justice Department later”

• “Biden enters 2022 with many progressive goals unmet”

• “Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power”

It’s not simply that such media coverage minimizes or ignores the quite extraordinary accomplishments of the Biden administration in its first eleven months, it’s the media’s continuing to normalize Donald and his enablers while failing to call out the dangers our country and its citizens face in part because of those failures.

Meanwhile we're learning from the January 6th Committee that Meadows promised that National Guard troops would protect Donald’s supporters during the insurrection they were perpetrating.

Text messages handed over to the committee by Meadows, revealed that Donald’s energy secretary, Rick Perry, was advocating for an "AGRESSIVE (sic) STRATEGY” to have legislatures in three states deliver their electoral votes to Donald, regardless of the actual results.

Jim Jordan, apologist for child molesters, sent the following text to Meadows the day before the insurrection: “On January 6, 2021, Vice President Mike Pence, as President of the Senate, should call out all the electoral votes that he believes are unconstitutional as no electoral votes at all.”

According to another Post headline:

“Trump’s quest for more powerful shower heads is over”

Donald’s quest for the perfect showerhead may be over, but his quest to regain power by any means necessary and to avoid all accountability for his many crimes (including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans) at the expense of American democracy is also not over, but, thankfully, The Washington Post is keeping its priorities straight.

• I missed this last week, but Brian Kemp, illegitimate governor of Georgia, wrote on Twitter that, if Stacey Abrams, his opponent in Georgia’s next gubernatorial election, had been governor during the pandemic, “Georgia would have shut down, students would have been barred from their classrooms, and woke politics would be the law of the land and the lesson plan in our schools.” What he neglects to mention, of course, is that, one, Stacey Abrams would have won the election in 2016 if Brian Kemp, then Georgia’s Secretary of State, hadn’t cheated, and, two, under Abram’s leadership about 30,000 Georgians would still likely be alive.

• Donald’s frivolous lawsuit to block the House from gaining access to his tax returns was rejected by U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden who said, "A long line of Supreme Court cases requires great deference to facially valid congressional inquiries. Even the special solicitude accorded former presidents does not alter the outcome.” Of course Donald filed his appealwhich begs the question: Why is he allowed to keep kicking the can down the road? I literally don’t understand this any more.

• The Senate approved a one-time exemption to the filibuster in order to pass legislation increasing the debt limit. The vote fell along party lines. That’s great because it’s absurd that raising the debt ceiling is even an issue, but it underscores the diabolical hypocrisy of every Republican and Democrats Manchin and Sinema who pretend that the filibuster is something sacred. If you can do an end-run around the filibuster to raise the debt ceiling than you can certainly suspend it for something as important as voting rights or financing infrastructure and the Child Tax Credit. Right? Hello?

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Bonus Cap

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Under (and off) the Radar

• Last week the FDA announced that patients seeking abortion medication no longer have to pick it up in person. Pills instead can be sent by mail. The decision comes just as the Supreme Court is on the brink of overturning Roe v. Wade.

• Democrats tried, for the third time, to attach their immigration reform provision to their spending bill. Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough ruled against Democrats which begs the question, why hasn’t Majority Leader Chuck Schumer replaced her?

• Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia says he cannot vote for Democrats’ $2 trillion spending package

  • Here we have another example of a small, selfish man who, by virtue of accidentally accruing power he doesn’t deserve, has become convinced of his own greatness. Manchin spoke to Fox so, of course, no one asked about his unquestioning support of the tax break for the wealthiest among us or the upcoming $765 billion defense budget for 2022. (Yes, that’s just for one year. The Children’s Tax Credit, which seems to be the line beyond which Manchin will not go, gives families $300 per month per child, and has cut child poverty in half.

  • The Child Tax Credit, which was implemented in May and gave families $300 per month per child, cut child poverty in half.

  Manchin himself isn’t under the radar, of course. He’s turned his unique position to make sure he’s stayed in the spotlight throughout the entirety of the Build Back Better negotiations. What people may not know is just how poor West Virginia is—and how rich Senator Joe Manchin is. He is worth approximately $7.6 million and receives the largest coal, oil, and gas donations of any United State Senator. According to The Washington Post, 50,000 children in West Virginia are in danger of slipping into poverty if the Child Tax Credit is allowed to lapse.

  If you want to be an asshole about it, which clearly Manchin does, you would point out that the Child Tax Credit, if made permanent, would cost $1.6 trillion. This is true—over the 10-year budget window.

  So, apples to apples, it really costs $160 billion a year—or about 21% of the defense budget. But it would only keep kids from starving, so yeah, that’s definitely a deal breaker—at least if you’re a multi- millionaire, Maserati-driving Senator from the second poorest state in the country.