Hi there.
It’s a frustrating time to be someone who cares about things we should all be able to agree are bad: January 6 was bad, voter suppression is bad, the gender pay gap is bad, our crumbling infrastructure is bad.
Just before Memorial Day, Senate Democrats couldn’t find ten Republicans to join them in supporting a bill to establish an independent commission to investigate the January 6 attack. There doesn’t seem to be a single Senate Republican who supports the For the People voting rights legislation, which would effectively ban the state voter suppression laws that have swept the nation this year. (For that matter, conservative Democrat Joe Manchin doesn’t support the bill, either.) Nor does there seem to be any Republican support for the far more modest John Lewis Voting Rights Act, which would require the Department of Justice to pre-clear any state-level voting rights legislation. (Manchin does support that one.)
And now, as the New York Times reports, not a single Senate Republican is willing to support the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in the Equal Rights Amendment that currently allow companies to pay women less than men for the same work.
Then, of course, there’s the ongoing infrastructure talks between the White House and a Republican team led by Senator Shelley Moore Capito. Cynical observers (myself included) never expected the Capito team to operate in good faith, and indeed they did not. Over the course of the talks, President Biden agreed to cut one trillion dollars from the American Jobs Plan; Capito’s team, meanwhile, only added $100 billion in new spending to their initial proposal. That’s 10% of the compromise Biden was willing to give. But more importantly, neither side was willing to budge on where the funding would come from. Republicans want the spending to come either raised gas taxes or American Rescue Plan funding that has already been promised elsewhere. Biden, meanwhile, is rightly insistent that the only acceptable way to pay for it is by raising taxes on the rich and corporations about halfway between where they are now and where they were before the Trump tax cuts. (We’ll talk more about taxes on the rich Friday.)
That sort of bad faith negotiating is why Biden has now cut off talks with the Capito team. He’ll now turn to a group of Senators known as the G20: the ten most centrist Democrats and ten most centrist Republicans, who are working on an alternative proposal. But there’s no reason to believe that plan will fare better. At this point, the only way an infrastructure bill is likely to pass is through budget reconciliation, a process some Democrats are already laying the groundwork for. But there’s no guarantee that Joe Manchin will support that approach because, drunk with power as he seems to be, he insists that the only way the Senate can function is through bipartisanship. Hopefully, he’ll at some point realize that these fruitless attempts at bipartisanship are precisely what’s preventing the Senate from functioning.
Politico and CNN have more on the implosion of bipartisanship.
Lastly, the NYT and Associated Press report on Biden’s first overseas trip as President. He’s expected to announce new vaccine distribution plans for foreign countries, work to improve European alliances, and stand up to Vladimir Putin. Cheers to that.
Thank you for caring enough to read.
Be safe. Drink water. You are loved.
Talk to you tomorrow.