October 28-29
By Marc Cooper
Sorry if this is getting to you a day late or so but I was awaiting Prime Minister Manchin’s approval to write this. He sent me the go ahead through a third party but is still balking on whether or not he will support the “framework” of the two infrastructure bills that President Biden announced today (Thursday).
Turns out that Manchin and his accomplice, Senator Sinema, have indeed accomplished their mutual goal of shrinking, defacing and distorting the Democrats’ Build Back Better package (BBB) – the now greatly reduced $1.75 trillion bundle that will – we suppose—be passed through the Senate “reconciliation” process that requires all but only the 50 votes that Democrats have.
Before he left for Europe today, Biden said that what happens in congress this week will determine the rest of his term including the 2022 mid term elections one year from now. He’s right. And, frankly, it does not look that great.
I think we can now safely say, very safely say, that any notion that any of us who might have said or even dared to think that the Biden administration would be transformative were wrong. The Democratic Party has shown itself lacking the courage, imagination and the independence to radically rework a system that was exposed with all of its grotesque inequities and flaws during the pandemic. This was a golden moment to set the US on a much more humane and democratic course, and it has been royally blown.
The course of events also reveals that the electorate, in spite of those scattered bright spots where people are well organized and engaged, has also proven itself to be far too passive, far too apathetic, and often too poorly informed to have exerted much pressure on the Democrats to keep their promise of massive change. For months and months we have watched the machinations of the Democrats, mightily struggling in public to reach an agreement on something that should have been agreed upon before it was put out there, and we watched some more, and some more.
But what did we DO? As I have said before, this is the very manifestation of “Room Service Politics” as Lewis Lapham wrote a couple of decades ago…a notion that the electorate sits impassively waiting to see which pol better serves them instead of understanding that in a democracy the people are the ultimate sovereign and, in the end, they have a responsibility to at least try to intervene in policy and governance.
As I write Thursday afternoon, no kidding, we are still waiting to see if Manchinema will deign to approve the package that has been forged in their conservative image. Amazing, huh? The divide among the Democrats is not moderate vs. progressive. Rather, it’s Manchin and Sinema against all the Democrats with the House progressives holding the front line.
This literally half-baked deal might be ready to serve by the time you get this…or not. But the “framework” looks like pretty much what the final deal will be give or take a few details (details which might hold this up even longer). Greg Sargent of The Washington Post has a very clear presentation that you can read here. From Sargent’s excellent piece:
Here are the highlights of what the White House says is in the framework:
Child care, health care and the care economy:
· Extending the expanded child tax credit, but only for one year, through 2022.
· Universal pre-K, authorized for six years.
· Child-care funding that will ensure that families of four earning less than $300,000 per year will pay only up to 7 percent of income on child care for kids under 6 years old.
· Funding to reduce premiums for 9 million who buy insurance on the ACA marketplaces by $600 per person per year, through 2025.
· Closing the Medicaid coverage gap in red states that haven’t expanded Medicaid, but not with the original proposal: Instead, subsidies will be offered through the Affordable Care Act exchanges.
· Expanding Medicare to cover hearing. Vision and dental may be out.
On taxes:
· A new 5 percent surtax on income above $10 million and an additional 3 percent surtax on income above $25 million.
· Corporate minimum tax of 15 percent on corporations of a billion dollars or more.
· Global minimum tax of 15 percent on foreign profits of U.S. corporations, to curb multinational corporations from shifting profits overseas.
· Funding for the Internal Revenue Service to crack down on wealthy tax cheats.
· One percent tax on stock buybacks.
Climate change:
· Tax credits for clean energy production, such as wind, solar and electric cars, and tax credits on solar panels and electric vehicles. The White House announced a $555 billion investment.
Provisions that have been cut out of the deal:
· Medicare negotiating the prices of prescription drugs.
· Paid family and medical leave.
· Billionaire’s tax
Glancing at these charts can be a bit misleading as the what’s in list is so much longer than the what’s out list (which btw is somewhat incomplete). No doubt that the items contained in the bill are important, they are significant, over time they will help some people for sure. But they are not enough to make this transformative.
The parts left out were in the areas that most directly affect the lives of most Americans and therefore it’s not too hard to understand why these were the most popular (and potentially transformative) just as the what’s in list could use a few asterisks.
We will continue to be one of only 6 nations in the world that has NO national paid family or medical leave, a mind boggling truth. The original BBB proposal called for 3 months of paid leave. Manchin and Sinema whittled that down to one month during the negotiations and then, as of today, finally killed it off.
The refusal to approve the Medicare prescription drug negotiation stands as one more example of what kind of nefarious influence Big Pharma and Big Money have within the Democratic Party. And until and unless we do something about it, and I mean we not them, we will continue to be blocked from enacting any sort of fundamental change. The dominance of the special interests has become so normalized and routine that it bears repeating this crude reality: The United States government that administers Medicare is currently and will continue to be prohibited from trying to negotiate the price of prescription drugs and will remain subject, along with tens of millions of elderly recipients, to the veritable dictatorship of Big Pharma.
And while we are on the subject of Medicare, how is that the best the Dems can do is niggardly grant hearing coverage to the BBC while still not allowing recipients any visual or dental care as Bernie Sanders was demanding. This program is now more than a half-century old in the richest country in the world and yet the elderly are told if they want the minimal dignity and safety, they must pay for dental and vision care out of their pocket no matter how poor they might be. It’s rather stupefying.
At first blush, the tax proposals in the framework look pretty good but again they are more complicated than they appear. Applying a surtax on stratospheric incomes is a welcome idea as is the corporate minimum tax on enterprises of a billion dollars or more. What is downright awful was the refusal to overturn the Trump tax cuts which, by the way, cost $1.9 trillion, almost twice the amount of the much vaunted “Biden bi-partisan infrastructure bill.” You can thank Sinema for that one as she stomped on that reversal months ago.
Further, the Democrats in taxing only the super-rich have not broadened the increased levy to include just the plain rich and filthy rich. This is not only an issue of morality and justice but also of revenue. You get more when you tax more people, period. And when you leverage your revenue on a narrow band of the ultra-rich you run the risk of running out of revenue when the economy or the markets are sluggish as the ultra-rich get less rich (ask California about this).
Also unresolved, or at last unreported in this package, is the fate of what is known as SALT. It’s the state and local tax deduction that was eliminated by Trump a few years ago. This allows filers to deduct their state and local taxes (which in place like New Jersey and California are very high) against their income tax bill. It sounds like the elimination of this deduction would severely hurt middle class Americans. Not exactly true. Now that there’s a $25,000 automatic deduction for a couple, you have to make a whole lot of money and have to have some extremely high local taxes in order to make use of this measure. Point is, numerous Democratic House members (mostly of the ”moderate” persuasion) have been diligently and very quietly fighting to restore this deduction in the BBB bill in order to please their wealthier constituents. We’ll see in the next day or two if Democrats have restored this lollipop for the rich.
One other sticking point. A big one that usually goes unremarked. It’s not clear what sort of “means testing” will be attached to the plans that are left in package. Take the Child Tax Credit, perhaps the single most worthy piece of the bill, that automatically sends $250-$300 a month to ALL families per child, phasing out only at incomes above $150,000 This extended CTC was put in place by Biden’s COVID relief bill earlier this year. The BBC extends the augmented CTC for one more year but Manchin wanted to impose a $60,000 income limit on the credit. He has apparently dropped that idea, though we cannot yet be 100% sure.
There’s a reason why Social Security is so popular. It is not seen as a “welfare” program because everybody gets it. Any program with a means test gets complicated. Both politically and operationally. They become perceived as welfare for “others” and that is why, by the way, Manchin has tried (and maybe succeeded) in his bone-headed and mean-spirited intention to attach “work requirements” to any expanded Medicaid program. If you do any reporting on these means tested social insurance programs, as I have, you often find that the program is more punitive than supportive, imposing all sorts of humiliating and sometimes impossible conditions on a very fragile and vulnerable constituency.
One more point that might get lost in all the excitement (!) over the completion of the bill. When it became clear to most of the Democrats that Manchinema (and who knows how many other Senators hiding in their skirts) were going to drastically cut the funding of this bill, they were faced with a choice of doing just a few things with a lot of money, or starting a whole lot of programs with minimal funding and a shortened time line, which they are doing, in the hope that even a Republican congress would not dare cut social programs that have become popular.
Oh, really? Did they forget that Obamacare survived a Republican congress only because one single, dying Republican senator (who would be purged today) turned thumbs down on the final dramatic vote -- a gesture the glorious Sinema aped when she stuck a dagger through the Democratic effort to raise the minimum wage.
It appears that the CTC will become permanent for lower income families unless Manchin interferes in the next few hours. But the enhanced CTC is only extended for one year and that means it will come up for renewal after the 2022 midterms where the GOP is pretty much guaranteed to take back the House. It is much much easier to let a program sunset into oblivion than it is to start up or even renew a program. So, tell me please, exactly which time-limited program Speaker Kevin McCarthy will not want to let lapse? Just asking.
All that said, the Democrats now hope to reset the clock, assuming this mess will be cleaned up and finalized in the next few days. They will enter a new phase of trying to “sell” the benefits of this program in a quest to head off that Republican victory in November 2022.
Ok. Before we go any farther, let me introduce one more point that is relevant. It was Ezra Klein (of whom I am not a great fan) who came up with the term “party-ization” a month or so ago to further define the now common political terms “polarization” and “party-ization.” Klein correctly posited that in the current political atmosphere, when you become tribalized, you also become blindly loyal to your political party and you tend to view “the other side” as the monolith of the other party. Not a world-shaking discovery but an important one. That is the reason why I use the generic term “Democrats” without much sorting of the internal factions. Trump supporters (Republicans) view all Democrats pretty much the same way and vice versa. How else could a very established moderate and cautious politician like Biden be characterized as a “socialist” and lately as a “communist?”
The Democrats now have to battle to own and impose their own narrative centered on “we get things done for working and middle class families.” And soon enough we will see Biden and other Dems out there talking up everything that is left in the BBC. There’s a couple of problems with this. They should have been doing that for the last six months instead of staging the mind-numbing dance about this many or that many trillions for a bill that only ten percent of the electorate claimed to know what was in it.
The Democrats, then, do not start this new phase off with a tabula rasa but, instead, from way down in a deep dark hole they have dug for themselves. They have done everything possible since late Spring to live up to the stereotype that Democrats are a hopelessly chaotic bag of cats that cannot effectively legislate or govern while spending trillions of dollars.
They also confront a very-well established, very effective and perhaps growing counter-narrative from a Republican Party allied with neo-fascists that does not as much as recognize that Biden was legitimately elected and that hews tightly to the Big Lie. These anti-democratic forces are now pushing their own envelope, as their latest strategic twist is to start celebrating January 6 as either a non-issue or, as an FBI inside job!
Most alarming is Fox News’ decision to produce and air sometime soon a Tucker Carlson “documentary” on January 6 that recasts the insurrection as “false flag” – a film that would make Leni Riefenstahl proud. Perhaps Glenn Greenwald will now blurb the film for butt-buddy Tucker. Take a look at the trailer, if you can.
One thing the Republicans understand that so many Democrats do not is that most Americans just don’t care about politics. They care more about their own lives and often without much thinking about the rest of society – other than as a host of real and imagined threats. This is why Republicans are campaigning on demagogic emotional vibes like the Big Lie, the imaginary threat of CRT in schools and masks (!) rather than on any real programs. The Dems will campaign on the Child Tax Credit or defense of Medicare thinking that, yes, Americans care more about their own lives and we can provide for them.
Unfortunately, the positive material effects of the BBC will take years, not weeks or months, to start having some visible and tangible and now attenuated effect on the voters. Just like it took six, seven years, for Obamacare to turn the corner into popularity. In the meantime, the subversive pitch of the Trumplicans will relentlessly batter the consciousness of millions of voters.
I seriously doubt that the Republican pitch will peel off any Democratic voters nor ever reach a majority. But ask V.I. Lenin what he thinks of “strategic minorities” and what kind of political power they can achieve and exert, and he didn’t even have an electoral college that he could manipulate. The approach of the Insurgent Right, while not cutting into Democratic ranks, is rather wildly successful in continuing to mobilize and energize an illiberal anti-democratic wave at the grass roots. Polls this week still show 35% of all voters and an eye-popping 60% of Republicans do not think Biden was legally elected. School boards across the country have become battlegrounds as enraged and often violent parent groups continue to disrupt and threaten local boards over what? A book by Toni Morrison. The phantom CRT. And any health measure. Sorry, but this is collective madness that has found a home and resonance inside one of our two major parties.
The real electoral threat to Democrats comes primarily from within their own ranks. The 2022 midterms, just as next week’s vote in Virginia, will be about turnout, turnout, turnout. It’s all about mobilizing your own party’s voters. If you are reading this, you are probably either a Democrat or you reluctantly vote Democratic as the lesser of two evils. So, I guess I can ask you. How’s your energy and excitement level? Do you feel it is competitive with the Republico-fascists? If you do, you probably need to get out a little more.
Pollsters in Virginia report that Republican energy is “magnitudes” much higher among Republican voters there less than a week from the election for senate. And the campaign of blow-dried, cleaned-up, Trumpy millionaire Glenn Youngkin edges into a dead heat on the power of pure catastrophic negative partisanship – claiming that Democrats are a threat to the children and people of Virgina. Period.
Former Governor and now Democratic nominee Terry McAuliffe has returned the favor, turning his own campaign into a one-note denunciation of Youngkin as a Trumpkin but he’s in great danger of losing. Simply because,“Terry” has always been plain vanilla, a consummate Corporate Democrat and big barnacle on the USS Clinton. Indeed, Terry was a bagman for Bill Clinton, raising a whopping $275 million for the ex-president and solidifying the links between Big Money and the Democratic Party. His problem is that he excites exactly nobody. He was elected to Governor in 2013 because of a surging youth vote but nowadays younger voters are MIA in the Virginia polls.
The pundits have all said to watch Virginia next week as a worthy harbinger of things to come in the midterms. I think that is broadly accurate. McAulliffe looms as a legitimate stand-in for Bidenesque politics and while time might be too short for Terry to survive, Biden does have a year to go before the next Judgement Day.
I’m getting a little tired of repeating it but it remains true. If they want to avoid a catastrophic midterm, the Democrats need to bring in some relief pitchers and start to hone a much sharper message that motivates rank and files Democrats as I think Biden has terribly over-estimated the political equity he will win with “infrastructure.” He and the other Dems must hone a message and a politics that inspires people, that gives young people a hope other than a looming war with China, that strengthens our commitment to liberal democracy and, God Forbid, might actually directly address the working class.
The next step must be not only finding an effective way to present the diminished BBC but also now to directly confront the anti-democratic wave washing through the country. This means quickly moving to take down the filibuster and pass some form or another of democracy protection legislation that stems the voter suppression and counters the increasing Republican push to oust local election officials and replace them with Trumpy toadies. Mostly, it means demonstrating strong, firm, and inspired leadership.
It’s a lot to hope for from this crew which seems to specialize in disappointment. It’s the only chance they have. Or maybe not. The Republicans are no geniuses and there is always the hope that too much acting out by Trump will allow the Democrats to survive. It’s one helluva a shaky strategy. +
 | | Representative Mo Brooks, left, raised only $670,000 in the last quarter, despite being endorsed by former President Donald J. Trump.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock |
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A startling amount of money is pouring into American elections, especially the race for control of Congress in 2022. Every House and Senate candidate in the country was recently required to detail their spending and fund-raising through the end of September. Here are some takeaways, tidbits and trends from those financial reports. |
Former President Donald J. Trump has been doing a lot of endorsing in Republican primaries ahead of the 2022 midterms. His backing is, by far, the most coveted in the party. But a Trump blessing has not necessarily translated to a cash boom for those Senate hopefuls he backs, the records show. |
In Alabama, Trump is supporting Representative Mo Brooks — who has literally worked the endorsement into his logo — but Brooks was nonetheless badly out-raised for the second consecutive quarter, pulling in only $670,000 compared with $1.5 million for Katie Boyd Britt, a former chief of staff to Senator Richard Shelby. |
In Alaska, Trump is supporting Kelly Tshibaka, a primary challenger to Senator Lisa Murkowski, who voted to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Murkowski doubled Tshibaka’s haul. In North Carolina, Trump’s preferred choice, Representative Ted Budd, was narrowly edged by former Gov. Pat McCrory. |
In Pennsylvania, Trump’s endorsement did seem to boost Sean Parnell, who has been a regular on Fox News and whose fund-raising doubled in the most recent quarter. But Parnell still faces a former Trump-appointed ambassador, Carla Sands, in the Senate primary and she gave her campaign $3 million from her personal fortune. |
In House races, Trump has made clear he is focused on defeating those who voted to impeach him. One such Republican has already retired. But none of the other nine House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump in January were out-raised last quarter by a primary challenger, with Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming setting the pace by raising $1.7 million. (In some races, challengers combined to out-raise the Republican incumbent.) |
One notable fund-raising haul was from Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina. She verbally lacerated Trump in January for his incitement of the Capitol riot but ultimately didn’t vote to impeach. She has since, as my colleague Catie Edmonson put it over the summer, “quietly backpedaled into the party’s fold.” Now, the $973,000 she raised is among the highest sums for a freshman. |
Among the rank and file, the strongest Democratic fund-raiser in the House was, by far, Representative Katie Porter of California, who represents a swingy region in Orange County. She raised $2.7 million and spent only $1 million — and now has $14.5 million in the bank. That could help her no matter how her district is redrawn in 2022 — or in a potential future Senate bid. One problem with the latter is that the only House member with more money currently in their treasury is Representative Adam Schiff, another ambitious Democrat from California with $15.3 million in his treasury. |
On the Republican side, Representative Dan Crenshaw of Texas has emerged as a top fund-raiser, pulling in nearly $3 million. But Crenshaw was spending far more to raise those funds: He spent roughly 88 percent of what he raised in the third quarter, records show, including more than $1 million related to direct mail. |
On the left, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York continues to be one of her party’s strongest fund-raisers, bringing in nearly $1.7 million. On the right, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the freshman congresswoman from Georgia, has continuously stirred controversy and cashed in along the way, raising $1.5 million, roughly the same sum as Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of Trump’s favorite pugilists on the Hill. |
In the political center, two moderate Democrats, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey and Tom Suozzi of New York, both topped the $1 million threshold. |
Democrats have an early money edge in key Senate races |
To keep the Senate next year, Democrats must first defend four incumbents up for re-election in the battleground states of Nevada, New Hampshire, Georgia and Arizona. The good news for the party is that all four incumbents far out-raised their Republican challengers, with Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia raising the most of anyone in the country, $9.5 million. |
The picture is murkier in three Republican-held battlegrounds: North Carolina and Pennsylvania, where the Republican incumbents are retiring, and Wisconsin, where Senator Ron Johnson has not said for certain if he is running again. Democrats face potentially messy primaries in all three races as do Republicans in the two open seats. |
But in each of the three states, the top fund-raiser last quarter between the two parties was a Democrat (not including those donating to themselves, like Sands). |
In Florida, Representative Val Demings, a Democrat, has emerged as the surprise fund-raising star of the cycle, raising nearly $8.5 million — nearly $2.5 million more than the Republican she is challenging, Senator Marco Rubio. But Demings is spending extraordinary sums to raise that money — $5.6 million in the last quarter alone, much of it devoted to Facebook ads seeking new online contributors. |
What campaigns are spending to raise money — known in the industry as the burn rate — is a key indicator, because it shows how much of what is raised will be available when voters are paying closer attention. |
Of the top dozen Senate fund-raisers last quarter, Demings had the highest burn rate at 66 percent. |
One Democratic senator on the ballot in 2022 actually spent more than she raised last quarter: Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. She raised $3 million last quarter, but she spent $3.1 million. Records show she made a $1.5 million media buy to highlight her work for veterans. |
The early ad was an unusual strategic choice. Most operatives believe TV ads that air a year from an election will be long forgotten when voting begins. But with money already flooding key states, the ad could be a chance to make an early, positive impression, especially with outside Republican groups on the airwaves. |
 | | The Fox News host Tucker Carlson, left, with Viktor Orban, prime minister of Hungary, in August.Office of the Hungarian Prime Minister |
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How the American right fell in love with Hungary. |
For one week this summer, Fox News beamed the face of Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary into the homes of Tucker Carlson’s 3.2 million viewers. In a two-tiered library adorned with dark wood and the Hungarian flag, Carlson sat across from the prime minister in Budapest with an expression of intense concentration. |
Orban is inviting, at an increasing pace, important American conservative thinkers and politicians to Budapest and encouraging them to learn about Hungary, while profiting from the attention that they bring with them. Orban wants Budapest to be the “intellectual home” of 21st-century conservatism. |
And some U.S. conservatives are taking a cue from the Hungarian prime minister on how to use the power of the state to win the culture wars. |
| NINE DAYS OF IDEAS TO REMAKE OUR FUTURE |
As world leaders gather in Glasgow for consequential climate change negotiations, join us at The New York Times Climate Hub to explore answers to one of the most urgent questions of our time: How do we adapt and thrive on a changing planet? Glasgow, Scotland, Nov. 3-11; in person and online. Get tickets at nytclimatehub.com. |
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