The Senate GOP Just Boxed Itself In

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, and I’ll tell you to quit doing that!    Democratic party

It was supposed to be such a simple plan, and pure Mitch McConnell. You put the football down, this time a big, fat bipartisan infrastructure bill on the ground, and you start to wriggle it around. After a couple of months making coo-coo noises in negotiations, You finally hold the ball up on it’s point, and yell Kick it now! by announcing a bipartisan agreement.

From there on out, it’s easy, because there are two ways for you to pull away the football. First, It’s not really a bipartisan agreement, after all, you only put in the hard infrastructure items like roads and bridges that you wanted, you also dictated how to pay for it. But the Democrats, especially Biden, desperate for bipartisanship, made the deal because they had always planned on passing a larger human infrastructure bill under reconciliation.

So, having already wasted a couple of months of time negotiating a totally bogus mini bill, you can run out the clock to the two week 4th of July break, and then filibuster the bill, forcing the Democrats to start from scratch with a reconciliation bill, with the August recess on the horizon. Or, you can go ahead and actually pass the bipartisan bill, take the glory home to your constituents, and sit back and watch the Democrats flop around like a fish on the bottom of the boat trying to pass their reconciliation bill.

Because the Democrats have a couple of problems with the reconciliation bill. Namely a pair of mental Cabbage Patch Kids named Manchin and Sinema. And while the progressives are counting on the reconciliation bill to ram through as much as possible, Sinema and Manchin are waiting in the wings to try to chip away whatever they can, leaving the Democrats with a dump bill.

But here’s where it all goes south for Lucy. McConnell got played not once, but twice. And by the best the Democrats have. One, Joe Biden, the consummate politician, not only stole the GOP’s thunder, he tied them to the bipartisanship barrel. Normally, when legislators go to the White House to talk to the President, they come out to the driveway afterwards, and brief the press. The President is too busy for that shit. But this time, it was Biden himself who led the crowd to the microphone, where he lavished praise on the GOP Senators for their bipartisanship, and announced an agreement, before heading back into the White House and leaving the GOP to clean up the mess.

As Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher said on MSNBC today, that one 3 minute photo op in the White House driveway was liquid gold for Biden and the Democrats. By having GOP Senators surrounding him when he announced the agreement, he locked the GOP in as negotiating in good faith. Biden’s infrastructure bill in insanely popular. Or they go back to the Senate, and the GOP filibusters the bill, they lose face with their own constituents, and make it almost impossible for Manchin and Sinema to reform the filibuster, since they were a part of the negotiating team.

The second is even worse, because McConnell not only got punked, he got punked by a woman. McConnell’s best scenario was to pass the bipartisan bill, and either let Pelosi block it, or pass it and watch the reconciliation bill fail. But Pelosi is well aware of the mischief Sinema and Manchin can cause. She came out and announced that she really didn’t care what the Senate did with the bipartisan bill, it would not come to a vote on the House floor until after until after the Senate had passed the reconciliation bill so that the House could approve it.

The GOP, and especially McConnell is well and truly in a box. He can’t filibuster the bipartisan bill without losing the filibuster in the process. and Manchin and Sinema are in the same box, since if they play stupid hardball on the Democrats progressive human infrastructure reconciliation bill, then they doom the bipartisan bill they fought so hard to get. This is going to get interesting real quick.