A Bridge Too Far

Immediately after the Key Bridge collapse, I wrote the following:

Congress needs to pass $$ for the Key Bridge rebuild ASAP. The longer it waits, the more likely some insane r-w conspiracy develops about how “bridges are DEI” and suddenly the funds are being tied to burning Pride books or something. 

Sigh. 

This week, Pennsylvania GOP Representative Dan Meuser slammed President Biden for calling on Congress to fully fund the response to the Baltimore collapse. Meuser insisted it’s “outrageous” that Biden wants to fund repairs in their “entirety,” and even demanded that some of this money must be taken from “ridiculous EV expenditures.”

[....]

Some GOP lawmakers are already treating future funding of the Baltimore response as a future concession on their part. Representative Jeff Duncan says Congress should not spend “one more dime” of additional infrastructure money before a border wall is built, as if the need for disaster relief can be used to extort Democrats into funding MAGA priorities in return.

[....]

It gets still worse. Some right-wing media personalities are floating whackjob theories blaming the collision on diversity, equity, and inclusion programs, on our supposedly open borders, and other MAGA preoccupations. Some “online influencers” and GOP politicians indulged in trivializing nitwit speculation and targeted Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott and U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg with other assorted hateful smears.

Some predictions are too obvious to get credit for nailing.

(H/T) 

Nine Angry Dems

Nine moderate Democrats are trying to tank Joe Biden's strategy for passing his signature social policy package by demanding it be decoupled from the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Their reasons are not exactly compelling, and they have a lot less leverage than normal in circumstances like this because they don't have a cost-free "...or we walk" option (doing that would imperil the infrastructure bill they very much do support).

Notably, while this letter is identified with the party "moderates", it doesn't include some of the more high-profile members of the "moderate" wing of the party -- folks like Elissa Slotkin, Abigail Spanberger, or Lauren Underwood. Indeed, nine names is a rather infirm showing. So who are the Dems that did sign on? Are they "usual suspect" sorts, or surprises? Here's the list:

• Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey
• Carolyn Bourdeaux of Georgia
• Filemon Vela of Texas
• Jared Golden of Maine
• Henry Cuellar of Texas
• Vicente Gonzalez of Texas
• Ed Case of Hawaii
• Jim Costa of California
• Kurt Schrader of Oregon

Rep. Gottheimer is at the helm of the "Problem Starters Solvers Caucus," and this sort of letter has his fingerprints all over it -- the only signatories who aren't part of the cause are Reps. Vela and Case (though again it's perhaps more notably how few PSC members signed (not even a third, by my count). Case has always been far too moderate for the deep blue hue of Hawaii; I don't know too much about Vela (or Rep. Gonzalez). Bourdeaux is a freshman congresswoman and a rare R-to-D House flip in 2020; she represents a swingy district but I still expect better. Reps. Golden and Schrader broke from the Democratic Caucus to vote against the American Rescue Plan Act because it was too generous to too many Americans -- they've already proven themselves capable of being chaos muppets. Rep. Cuellar is one of the worst Democrats in the House -- I sincerely hope he meets the same second-times-the-charm fate as Dan Lipinski and gets ousted by Jessica Cisneros in their rematch. Jim Costa likewise seems to be completely taking his seat for granted in California -- but hey, maybe he won't have a seat anymore after redistricting!

So basically, of all the people on this letter, the only one who maybe I care about listening to is Bourdeaux -- possibly Vela too, but I doubt it. In all, though, this is a stupid push on behalf of bad politics, and the Democratic leadership should tactfully but firmly tell them to suck on a root.

The Humiliating Best-Case Trump Administration Scenario

I want to talk about what I take to be the best-case Trump administration scenario. Now let's be clear, along a lot of axes that scenario is still a pretty grim one. On many issues -- civil rights and liberties, voting rights, the environment, reproductive rights, to name a few -- it's hard to imagine a Trump administration being anything less than cataclysmic. I don't talk about those here, not because they don't matter, but because they aren't meaningfully different in the "best-case" scenario versus the median-case.

So what is our "best-case"? Well, Trump's victory speech focused on infrastructure, and I've joked with my friends that if Donald Trump wants to distract himself for four years by building trains I would be over-the-moon. And this is hardly implausible -- Trump has very little in the way of firm ideology (he's the consummate populist panderer), but he does like building things. He's already calling for a huge stimulus package, of the sort that Democrats have been begging for for years now but Republicans always derided as socialist. Well, "always" meaning "when Democrats propose it." If there's one thing we know about Republicans, it's that they're entirely fine with massive federal government spending so long as it isn't a Democratic idea. So it strikes me as eminently plausible that this could get through Congress.

Likewise on health care. The big news and the end of this week was that President-elect Trump may consider keeping major portions of the Affordable Care Act: specifically, the ban on preexisting condition discrimination and the allowance that young people can stay on their parents' insurance up until age 26. I've also heard that he might continue to support the Medicaid expansion, and I'm dubious Republicans state politicians will continue to resist taking that money now that it isn't an explicit middle finger to Obama. The ban on preexisting condition clauses, for its part, would make it virtually impossible to get rid of the mandate. I fully expect to see some law out of the Republican Congress that purports to "repeal Obamacare." But rather than "repeal and replace," it may well be in essence "repeal and keep." The "repeal" part would basically be an ego salve; or perhaps more accurately, an effort to appropriate Obama's legacy to themselves by taking what's properly termed a "fix" and pretending like it's a brand-new Republican idea.

So let's see: Infrastructure spending. Stimulus. A health care plan modeled on the ACA. All of these are Democratic ideas, that Republicans will now consider only because it won't be a party of Black people and women that's proposing them. This is actually not even that surprising when you look back at American history -- remember how the healthcare mandate was bog-standard Republican orthodoxy right up until it became Obama's policy, at which point it transformed into the greatest threat to human liberty in the past century? Much like Rock & Roll, they'll savage them right up until they can steal and take credit for them. Again, it's the best case scenario because it preserves or implements some genuinely good policies. But it'll be humiliating to see Republicans act as if they came up with these wonderful ideas all by themselves.

And of course, the real moral of the story would simply be "we can get Congress to invest in America again, but only if we wash it down with a gallon jug of White nationalism and misogyny while we're at it." This would not augur well for the future of American progressive politics.