RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://freebeacon.com/columns/fall-guys/

President Joe Biden practically begged a group of moderate Democrats visiting him in the Oval Office Wednesday to say how much money they are willing to spend on the massive “Build Back Better” reconciliation bill making its way through Congress. According to Politico‘s Playbook, he didn’t get an answer.

The 11 moderates, including Senator Joe Manchin and congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, insisted that Democrats agree first on how much revenue they will raise in taxes before settling on a price tag on a bill that would transform energy, health care, higher education, pre-K, and paid leave. A disappointed Biden assigned the moderates homework: Come up with something that will stop Progressive House members from killing the separate, $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package that already has passed the Senate and is scheduled for a September 27 House vote.

Best of luck. In another meeting Wednesday, Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, pulled a Wendy Sherman and broke into tears while pleading that the reconciliation bill include an immigration amnesty (the Senate parliamentarian has said it can’t). Jayapal urged Biden to delay Monday’s vote or be prepared for Progressives to nix the infrastructure deal. Biden didn’t give in, but he did leave open the possibility that the vote won’t take place on September 27 as planned.

Yet any postponement would create new problems for the White House. House moderates have pledged to sink the reconciliation bill if they don’t get to vote for infrastructure first. And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford to lose only three votes. And the Senate is tied, with Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema still cagey about what they want to do. And oh, by the way, Congress needs to fund the government before September 30 and raise the debt ceiling before mid-October. Is your head hurting yet?

Democrats have run smack into political reality, and it isn’t pretty. They spent months convincing themselves that a presidential election decided by 42,000 votes in three states, a tied Senate, and a 220-212 House (with 3 vacancies) is the same as FDR’s and LBJ’s supermajorities. Now they are just figuring out that the coalition that put them into office doesn’t agree on much of anything besides the idea that Donald Trump shouldn’t be in the White House.

Now the autumn of 2021 is turning into a reckoning for a Democratic Party that wanted to leverage a squeaker election into fundamental change. Like their predecessors in 1993 and in 2009, frontline House Democrats have to decide whether supporting a liberal agenda is worse for their careers than denying a president of their own party a legislative win. Either way, they lose.

Chance, guile, and missteps put the Democrats in this position. They hardly could believe their luck when Trump’s sour grapes cost the GOP two winnable seats in Georgia and handed Vice President Harris the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. What they forgot was that full control of government is a mixed blessing: Your partisans expect the sun, moon, and stars, while independents have no one else to blame when things go wrong. A Republican Senate might have given Biden a foil, and a reason to govern as the centrist he pretended to be during the campaign. Instead, he has no wiggle room. Thanks, Trump.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nancy-pelosi-goes-for-broke-house-spending-bill-democrats-senators-joe-manchin-kyrsten-sinema-11632690894?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Can Nancy Pelosi bull-rush her few House moderates and Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema ? That seems to be her strategy this week as she prepares to jam a $3.5 trillion (really $5 trillion) tax and spending bill through Congress.

Mr. Manchin recently wrote in our pages that he favors a “strategic pause” on the spending bill to assess its economic impact and take more time to debate specific policies. Sounds sensible. But Speaker Pelosi doesn’t do pauses, especially in what she views as her legacy project to turn the U.S. into a European entitlement state.

She keeps moving on the spending bill she calls “transformative” to appease her left flank. The Budget Committee marked it up this weekend. She’s hoping this movement will be enough to pass the Senate infrastructure bill through the House this week. Her expectation is that passing that bill will be enough to buy off the swing-district Democrats to sign up for her entitlement project. These Democrats haven’t shown any backbone to date, so it’s a reasonable bet.

The bigger imponderable is whether she and President Biden can bludgeon hesitant Senators into submission. Mrs. Pelosi promised her caucus any bill will be pre-negotiated with the Senate before a vote. But she may have to break that pledge, and many House Democrats have already taken votes in committee that could end their political careers in 2022.

For Mrs. Pelosi, legislative success on her terms is all that matters. The party’s fate in 2022 is incidental, since she’s likely to retire and once entitlements are in place she figures Republicans will lack the fortitude to repeal them. The Speaker will keep marching even if it breaks her own majority.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/congressional-democrats-moderates-are-being-played/

They’re starting to realize it, too.

F or the last two months, a ragtag group of parvenue political extremists has somehow managed to convince the leadership of the Democratic Party that what the swiftly ailing Biden presidency really needs at this moment is an acrimonious standoff over spending. More impressive yet, these radicals have managed to make it seem as if the blame for the standoff lies not at their own gormandizing feet, but with those whom they have routinely harassed. If, as they must, the Democrats wish to avoid a further collapse in their fortunes, they must snap out of this reverie and call their browbeaters’ bluff.

The progressives’ ploy rests upon their claim that the Democratic Party has just two political options before it: To go big, or to go home. More specifically, it rests upon their declaration that Bernie Sanders’s gargantuan, nation-changing reconciliation bill is nonnegotiable, and that, as a result, everything else that Congress does must be contingent upon its passage. Summing up this position last night, Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) confirmed that she and her like-minded colleagues intend to kill even the colossal infrastructure legislation that has passed the Senate if they don’t get what they want. “Try us,” Jayapal told reporters who questioned how serious she could possibly be.

Underpinning Jayapal’s strategy is the asseveration that the Democrats will lose badly in next year’s midterm elections if they do not pass something enormous. But this, of course, is nonsense. Certainly, there are some political risks associated with President Biden’s achieving nothing at all this year. But there is an extraordinary amount of space between doing nothing at all and engaging in the largest spending binge since the New Deal on a panicked, party-line vote. It is, of course, to be expected that the progressives in the party will try to spend as much money as possible; that is what progressives do. But, by pretending that the whole party is doomed if they don’t get their own way, they are doing the rest of their colleagues no favors at all. There is political hardball, and then there is assisted suicide, and the Jayapal plan is beginning to resemble the latter.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/21/opinion/Ritchie-Torres-AOC.html

Ritchie Torres, a congressman from America’s poorest district — New York’s 15th, in the Bronx — quietly bristles at the A.O.C. comparison.

“There’s a sense in which the media narrative diminishes me,” he tells me over plates of pasta at a restaurant in the Bronx’s Little Italy when I raise the subject of his notorious fellow Democrat from an adjoining district, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “I resist the temptation to fit into a preconceived narrative. My career in politics long predates the Squad.”

No need to explain who and what is meant by the Squad — the House members seen by some as the bright dawning of a new Democratic Party and by others as the Four Horsewomen of the Wokepocalypse. Not long after our lunch, A.O.C. once again became Topic A of national conversation for posturing politically while posing pictorially at the Met Gala.

The bigger mystery is why Torres (who was emphatically not at the gala) hasn’t yet become a household name in the United States. On the identity-and-background scorecard, he checks every progressive box. Afro-Latino, the son of a single mom who raised three children working as a mechanic’s assistant on a minimum-wage salary of $4.25 an hour, a product of public housing and public schools, a half brother of two former prison inmates, an N.Y.U. dropout, the Bronx’s first openly gay elected official when he won a seat on the City Council in 2013 at the age of 25 and the victor over a gay-bashing Christian minister when he won his House seat last year.

He’s dazzlingly smart. He sees himself “on a mission to radically reduce racially concentrated poverty in the Bronx and elsewhere in America.”

In other words, Torres is everything a modern-day progressive is supposed to look and be like, except in one respect: Unlike so much of the modern left (including A.O.C., who grew up as an architect’s daughter in the middle-class Westchester town of Yorktown Heights), he really is a child of the working class. He understands what working-class people want, as opposed to what so many of its self-appointed champions claim they want.