I Only Hope That Lessons Were Learned By All Concerned

You know, when a long, hard, well fought victory is finally attained, euphoria and celebration are the normal emotions. But as I watched the vote tally board on the bipartisan infrastructure hit 220 yeas, I didn’t feel like I was watching a Super Bowl victory celebration. What I felt was like I was watching helicopter take off from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon, or the last US military transport go wheels up from the Kabul airport. More a feeling of relief that a senseless and avoidable tragedy was finally over.

When you think about it, it’s incredible how the same two words, used in identical circumstances, can turn out to have such totally polar opposite meanings. In the Trump administration, the words Infrastructure week became a national joke, something Trump robotically declared every week in order to distract attention from the scandal of the week. In the first year of the Biden Presidency, Infrastructure week came to represent a Greek tragedy that would go until the sands of time ran out.

For once the news show hosts and analysts had it right. They looked at this reconciliation bill debacle, playing out in full public view, by a cast of 272 bastard Freddie Krueger’s, and pointed out how terrible this made the party look, especially to their own base and supporters. But throughout the ordeal, a wide variety of bastard Freddie Krueger’s paraded before the cameras and made joking comparisons between crafting laws and making sausages. You don’t actually want to watch either one being done, but it all tastes delicious at the end.

No. Wrong. Bullshit. I have been an avid political junkie for more than a half a century, and I have seen countless reconciliation bills be passed along partisan lines, and this was not normal, nor was it acceptable from a major political party. This was a self inflicted gunshot wound with an AK-47.

Under normal conditions, watching a reconciliation bill being crafted is about as exciting as watching a ping-pong tournament at the Shady Acres Rest Home. Here’s how it normally goes when it’s competently run. The House and Senate each create a basic framework for the bill, what they want it to do, and then they forward that framework to the House and Senate committees who actually oversee the content. Because reconciliation bills are restricted to issues affecting either the budget or the deficit, those will normally be the budget and or ways and means committees, with maybe oversight thrown in.

The House and Senate committees actually hammer out legislative language for their portions of the bill, and then meet in conference to merge them into single bills. There is debate, and then the votes are held, there is no filibuster in the Senate for reconciliation. If each one passes, it goes to the opposite chamber for a vote. Because they are competing bills with competing goals, they never pass the other chamber. Then the party picks a set number of Senators and representative to go into the reconciliation committee, and behind closed doors they scream and yell at each other, gouge eyes and pull hair, and meld the two bills into one homogenous bill. That bill then gets a straight up or down vote in each chamber, no debate and no amendments. If it passes, the President signs it. Under normal circumstances, everybody tends to forget that there’s even a reconciliation bill out there, because everything but the mandatory votes take place behind closed doors.

Here’s where it all went wrong this time. The House Progressive caucus, led by Washington representative Pramila Jayapal, jumped the gun and overreached. When the original social infrastructure bill was proposed, Democrats, led by Jayapal in the House, and Bernie Sanders in the Senate, set the bill’s scope at $6 trillion. Even President Biden told them to take a reality pill, and go lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth on their head for an hour until sanity returned. They came back out and retooled down to a measly $3.5 trillion.

But here’s where the fuck up occurred. Instead of sending their framework to the committees to write the legislative language, and come up with a bill for the House to vote on, the progressive hard liners, like Jayapal and Bush and AOC and Omar started negotiating directly with the Senate Democrats in the media. Only they weren’t even negotiating, they were drawing non negotiable lines in the sand for the Democratic Senate.

Which is just bone fucking stupid. The US Senate lovingly refers to itself as The Club of 100, and the Senate has historically looked at itself as the more temperate, judicious, intellectual body of congress. And moderate and conservative Democratic Senators are not about to take a ration of shit from upstarts like Jayapal and AOC. So they started firing back. In the media as well.

Which was both avoidable and pathetic. As a political junkie, it was humiliating to watch respected shows like Meet the Press, The Reid Out, and Anderson Cooper 360 turned into political versions of Jerry Springer, or the Jenny Jones Show while they threw rhetorical chairs at each other across the stage. All because simple, time honored legislative procedure wasn’t followed. Look at Manchin’s brokered bipartisan infrastructure bill. They met in offices and conference rooms, gave agreed updates, and kept their mouths shut until the legislation was ready for a vote.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but I’ll settle on three main culprits. Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi. All three of them are long term, well seasoned political veterans, and they all know how things are supposed to operate in their fiefdoms. But whether individually or apart, they each made the conscious decision to let their howler monkeys run loose and make a mockery of the legislative process.

Shit! If you’re supervising the play yard at a Kindercare, and a couple of kids are yelling at each other, you tell them to either play nice or play somewhere else away from each other. And if you look over 5 minutes later, and see them shoving each other, they get time outs. Schumer and Pelosi had the responsibility of dragging their miscreants into a corner for a talking to, and a warning to just follow the process, and when they didn’t, Biden had the responsibility to drop the hammer on the two of them to get their houses in order, for the sake of the party.

From where I’m sitting, the big loser here is Jayapal. When I was at Zappos, out motto was under promise and over deliver. You took the order with the free 5 day shipping, and after they were gone, you upgraded it to next day air for free, and amazed the shit out of them. Jayapal over promised and under delivered. She violated the first rule of terrorism, Never taker a hostage that you aren’t willing to shoot. As I write this, congresswoman Jayapal doesn’t have a single guarantee or assurance from Manchin, Sinema, or Schumer that she didn’t have 3 months ago when the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill landed in the lap of the House. What finally changed the paradigm was that Speaker Pelosi finally dropped the hammer, and dared Jayapal to be the one who tanked her own President’s signature achievement, and cost them the House in 2022. Jayapal needs to learn that 96 is not 50% +1 of 218. If you’re going to make a power play, go ahead, but don’t do it in public, where you leave your ass out in the wind. Here endeth the lesson.

Follow me on Twitter at @RealMurfster35