Infrastructure: What Went On
The media, even the Times, covered this story very conventionally, without making any attempt to explain what had happened as a political event. Why did AOC and her colleagues vote against it? Why did 13 House Republicans, not to mention Mitch McConnell and other Republican Senators, vote for it?
Every one of those questions is answered by the following description, from a typical conservative (not Trumpian) writing in The Hill. “Back in the Spring, McConnell read the tea leaves and let the infrastructure bill pass the Senate. Infrastructure remains a popular government program — and I mean bricks and mortar construction, not the various Orwellian extensions Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) uses.”
By this, the author means all the variants of “infrastructure”that address “human capital, ”and that were in the original bill as it came from the House: child care, parental leave, education. All the programs, in fact, that were stripped from that Bill, which passed the House only on a partisan vote, and was torpedoed in the Senate by Joe Manchin, Big Energy’s bagman there, whose vote was necessary to get to the magic number of 50 + 1. Why only “bricks and mortar?”
To put it simply, as Bryce Covert did in yesterday’s Times,
“ Robust economic research has found that giving children more resources when they’re young results in fewer infant deaths, improved health, longer lives, less interaction with the criminal justice system and higher earnings. Those outcomes are vitally important in each individual child’s life, but they’re also important for everyone — the whole economy reaps the benefit of less spending on medical care and higher tax payments from healthier, more productive people.
Other industrialized nations provide a far more robust safety net than the one we have and even the one Mr. Biden proposed. Yet Republicans and at least one Democrat insist that such social welfare spending endangers the nation’s fiscal and moral health. How did we get to a point that doing less for Americans is a virtue, and comprehensive social welfare a privilege?”
That can be put as a statement rather than a question. It’s a bit misleading, since a majority of persons would probably support the original Bill; indeed, the conventional explanation of Virginia and New Jersey is that they went so heavily Republican, or nearly so, because the Infrastructure Bill had not yet been passed, and Biden and the Democrats looked like failures.
But in any event persons don’t decide such matters, money talks. And given the very unrepresentative nature of both the Senate and the House–especially the former — elect leaders and representatives who either ignorantly believe in what Paul Krugman calls “zombie Economics,” or find it rewarding to act as though they believe in it.
From this standpoint, we can see that the six progressive Democrats and the 13 Republicans were both responding to the final bill: I would have voted against it myself: Joe Manchin despises the very thought of human need, including the needs of West Virginians. And the 13 were happy–though now they’re being viciously attacked–to vote for a bill that would benefit their constituents and had been stripped of all that obnoxious social welfare stuff.
But still, were AOC and colleagues taking a chance on losing “Infrastructure” altogether?
No, they weren’t. What actually happened, as we can piece it together, was an informal version of what in the Senate has been for centuries a formality: the pairing of votes. You need to go to a Neo-Fascist conference in Belarus, I have to go to the wedding of a third cousin on my step-father’s side. So we split our votes, happily go off to where we really wanted to be–which is, that is to say, elsewhere — and leave everything the same as it would have been if we both voted: in many cases, as neither of us really would have wanted to.
So as far as the Six were concerned, they knew perfectly well that because of Republican defections, Nancy Pelosi had enough votes to pass the Bill, Their opposition was therefore without cost. They still have to explain it–as I did above–to their constituents, but can stand on their votes as a matter of principal. Doing the right thing but also having it both ways.
The sad fact is we elected a President and, both houses, by the barest of margins. But bare margins aren’t enough to accrue real power and produce real change–unless, like Hitler in 1932–3 you’re willing to use force.
As to that, and to conclude, here are a few recent news items:
“At a conservative rally in western Idaho last month, a young man stepped up to a microphone to ask when he could start killing Democrats.
“When do we get to use the guns?” he said as the audience applauded. “How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” The local state representative, a Republican, later called it a “fair” question.”
At least 10 Republicans who attended the January 6th insurrection have been elected to public office.
Congressman Paul Goesar of Arizona posted a Twitter showing him gleefully killing AOC and President Biden. How many Republicans will vote to censure him?
“Trump-endorsed gubernatorial candidate appears with Nazi sympathizer and QAnon-linked activists at campaign events.”
Bisexual Superman creators get LAPD protection after threats
“The creators involved with writing the new Superman comic that has the Man of Steel revealing himself to be bisexual.”
“A new poll found that more Republicans now think that Donald Trump will likely be reinstated as president before the end of 2021.
The survey by The Economist/YouGov was conducted between November 6 and 9 and surveyed 1,500 Americans. One of the questions that respondents answered was: “How likely or unlikely do you think it is that Donald Trump will be reinstated as President before the end of 2021?”
28% of registered Republicans voted for “likely.”
Signs of the Times.
