Come ON, Watson! Hurry! The game is afoot!   Sherlock Holmes

Go ahead, call me a dreamer. Call me a fool. But congress returns to work tomorrow, and I’m telling you, you had better strap in. But I think that there is reason to believe that this holiday break may well have been one of the most consequential in recent memory.

Because normally, when congress goes on it’s Christmas holiday, all of the pesky legislative bumf has been done. But not this time. This time, there are time and national critical items like voting rights, the Build Back Better Act, and the John Lewis Voting Rights act were left on the table. And there were far too many people interested.

Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema went home to celebrate, and instead got an earful. Their fealty to the Jim Crow era filibuster rule is keeping large swaths of their constituents from benefitting, as well as endangering the Democrats chances in 2022, and I have little doubt that they heard all about it, one way or another.

And this being politics, I have little doubt that lifetime veterans like Joe Biden and Chuck Schumer have noticed the winds blowing, and have been applying a little friendly pressure of their own. Hell, even traditionalists like Angus King and Jon Tester have publicly come out in favor of filibuster reform, and I have little doubt they’ve bent Manchin and Sinema’s ears over that subject during the break.

This is why I’m so itchy. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has already publicly announced that when the Senate convenes tomorrow, the first order of business will be voting rights. And if the GOP obstructs the vote, the the Democrats will move to change the rules of the filibuster.

This is not a threat that you issue unless you’re ready to follow through. And if you follow through, then you had damn well be ready to succeed! Manchin has long expressed a fondness for returning to a talking filibuster, but when it ended, he still wanted a 60 cloture vote. With the blowback that Manchin has received by his thumbs down for the Build Back Better bill, I’m betting that his penance is allowing a simple majority vote when the filibuster ends, along with a couple of sops on the BBB bill.

Likewise, the Build Back Better Bill is now literally too big to fail. The House Progressive Caucus, drunk on their power, put forth a Christmas list of decades long priorities. But there was one small problem. The Progressive Caucus was never a 218 seat majority.
And as such, they got spanked by the more conservative Democratic Senate members. But the Progressive caucus can’t fail, their reputation is on the line. Personally, I think that the Progressive caucus has already informally met during the break, talking over options, and may have already entered into preliminary negotiations with the more conservative
Democratic Senate members on a compromise. Ultimately, the House will settle for what the Senate passes, they can’t fail. And Biden will take anything that advances his agenda.

Strap in people. My prediction is that this is going to happen quickly. If, as I think, the Democrats used the holiday break to come together, especially on voting rights, they are going to want to show a unified front quickly. And they are also going to want to get BBB passed and out of the way. Because the primaries are just around the corner, and after that the general election cycle. Strike while the iron is hot. Don’t touch that dial.

 

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1 COMMENT

  1. No voting rights…no democracy after 2022 midterms, & a full blown fascist takeover once 2024 is stolen. Fact. There would still be signs for ‘colored’ restrooms out back if the federal government hadn’t stopped it in 1964. Fact. They won’t be stopped unless everyone gets off their collective arse & VOTES. That only works if the racist pigs don’t meet in the back room to pick who won. Fact. Either we save our democracy & stop the fossil fuel industry or we will be spectators of our own extinction. Planet don’t lie…people do. Fact.

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