I have always had a problem with the United States Senate. They’re a bunch of arrogant assholes. They openly refer to themselves as The Club of 100, and tend to treat the Senate as if it was Mar-A-Lago without Trump. But as a gentleman’s club, they also have rules. And one of those is that you never criticize another member directly. Remember the movie The Fight Club? It was doctrine that The #1 rule of fight club is that you never talk about fight club! And the #2 rule of fight club is that you never talk about fight club! The Senate is like that. A closed society.
But not anymore. Not today. Today Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders stepped in front of the podium, and all hell broke loose. Sanders wasn’t just kicking ass and taking names, he was doing the unthinkable, at least in the Senate, and naming names. He specifically called out West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, and by association Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, for their disingenuous negotiating tactics on President Biden’s $3.5 trillion human infrastructure bill.
I have always had a love/hate relationship with Bernie Sanders. I love him as the image of everybody’s crusty Grandpa, who is ever surprising. And God knows I respect his political skills and intelligence. And most of the time I agree with him. But Bernie also has an obstinate, my way or the highway streak to him that can be counter productive. But not this time.
Sanders was devastatingly effective mainly because he didn’t get down into the mud with personal insults, which isn’t his style anyway, but because he was surgically precise with his criticisms. And his criticism was leveled at the purely obstructionist way in which Sinema and Manchin have been negotiating this bill. Because they haven’t actually been negotiating the bill.
President Biden has literally spent tens of hours talking to each of the Senators, trying to draw out their objections, and get them to give him some kind of counter offer to start negotiations. And both Sinema and Manchin have steadfastly refused to engage on substance and content, instead falling back on phony platitudes.
Sanders specifically called out Manchin over his comment this morning that he didn’t want to turn the United States into An entitlement society. Sanders angrily demanded that Manchin publicly state which programs were egregiously entitlement programs, and what level of entitlement he would find acceptable. And while not directly referring to Sinema, he made it clear by railing about two Democratic Senators stonewalling 48 Democratic Senators, the President of the United States, and the will of the American people, where the bill is wildly popular.
The paradigm has changed going forward. For far too long, the two attention whores, Manchin and Sinema, have been able to get by, by spouting brainless platitudes of objection with no underlying logic or substance. In one smooth, elegant move, Sanders Cried havoc, and let slip the dogs of war! In this case, that means the national news media. Thanks to Sanders, there is no longer any safe haven for Manchin and Sinema. They can try to spout lame bullshit, but thanks to Sanders the media will start demanding specific reasons for their objections. And since they were never interested in anything more than increasing their national face time, this is not a position they want to be in.
God I wish that Bernie had done this three weeks ago! So much wasted time because of two overbearing egos. But here’s how I see this playing out. Publicly, I see Manchin and Sinema wearing Nike’s to the Senate, outrunning reporters, and when cornered, mumbling vague platitudes. But behind the scenes, I can see these two finally having to come to the table and negotiate for what they actually want. I am suddenly much more confident that the reconciliation bill will be passed, and voted on in the House with the bipartisan infrastructure bill by Halloween.
And one more thing. Not that Bernie has blown away all of the bullshit, and forced Manchin and Sinema to negotiate in good faith, it has an ancillary benefit. Going into the next debt ceiling negotiations in November, it will make it harder for them to continue to profess their loyalty to the filibuster without solid reasoning. And they don’t have any. Circles within circles.
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Sanders is doing this with the full backing and blessing of President Joe, who ALSO happened to have been a Senator for a few years, we may remember. Just all part of the negotiations to get it done…and it WILL get done.
“But behind the scenes, I can see these two finally having to come to the table and negotiate for what they actually want.”
What they want is to vote no, no matter what. That’s what I think they have been bribed to do. They are not Democrats.
Manchin is somewhat understandable given his state’s definite (and unfathomable) sharp turn to “Deep Red” over the past 20 years (it was once a general rule of presidential politics that a Democrat couldn’t get the party’s nomination without winning West Virginia and a Democrat couldn’t win the White House without winning West Virginia*) but Sinema is a genuine head-scratcher. She started her political career as an independent affiliated with the Green Party and opposed Joe Lieberman’s 2004 Democratic presidential bid, denouncing him (ironically) as a “shame to Democrats” and seeming “to want to get Republicans voting for him.”
Biden is getting tired of the crap coming out of the senate also – he’s likely to say “stuff the filibuster where the sun don’t shine”, while Manchin and Sinema are still doing their minuet about that and what they want changed.
Bernie wants to sit in a room and discuss bipartisan compromise, and the centrist is drawing red lines and talking in weird flowery vague rhetoric.
Remember when You Can’t Do That on Television did the opposite sketches skits?
I live in Arizona, and we are deeply embarrassed, and pissed. Some are calling Simena a traitor. She won’t be reelected.
Go Bernie go!