Drama Queens Ham It Up Along The Beltway
– By Ed Kociela –
It’s showtime on The Beltway.
The drama queens who make up our Congress have been centerstage, emoting like the high school drama club, as they wrangle through Act One of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It’s a much-needed piece of legislation that would put the United States on the right footing for taking care of the nasty bits of governance that aggravate the masses. It’s where you go to find the money to repair bridges, repair interstates, highways and major roads, beef up public transportation, boost our broadband capacity, modernize airports, ports and waterways, rebuild the electric grid, clean up our water delivery system, and tidy up some loose ends.
It’s a non-glamorous bit of government, the nuts and bolts of keeping the U.S. rolling and fluid. It’s not sexy, not flashy, not something that should divide Congress along political lines because this is necessary stuff, important stuff that has been neglected. The last administration talked a lot about fixing the infrastructure but did nothing, really, to do so. This administration deserves kudos for advancing the bill this far.
The Senate has already jumped in with both feet, approving their version of the bill 69 to 30. Even Republican leader Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, and 18 others from his party, voted for the bill. After the vote, McConnell said, “I was proud to support today’s historic bipartisan infrastructure deal and prove that both sides of the political aisle can still come together around common-sense solutions.” This comes from a guy who has vowed to place a roadblock in front of every piece of legislation in President Joe Biden’s agenda. It comes from a guy who Donald Trump, who strongly voiced his opposition to the bill, had tucked deeply in his pocket. If the caustic curmudgeon of The Beltway can drop his partisanship on this important piece of legislation it is not surprising that others would follow.
It took quite some time for the Senate to negotiate this bill, an intense period of give and take with both sides surprisingly working toward a solution to fill the nation’s needs. The bill included some major concessions by Democrats.
But, in the House, 96 members of the Progressive Caucus are threatening to not vote on the bill until the Senate approves a partner piece of legislation earmarking $3.5 trillion for a social policy bill this fall. There is a likelihood that the bill will pass either today or Wednesday. The sticking point is that it would most likely result in tax hikes for the wealthy, the cheerleaders of the Republican Party.
So what we have now is bad theater as the parties walk away from each other in a huff and make threats they cannot uphold and that everybody knows will melt away when things like government shutdowns and angry constituents come into play. Eventually, the funding bill will pass in one way or another – predictably it will be at a lower price tag, but with enough concessions that will allow both sides to walk away with talking points rooted in animosity for the other.
And, things will go back to the juvenile normal that has become the status quo in Washington, D.C. as they disappear back into their rabbit holes after getting their 15 minutes of air time on the news stations.
The Biden agenda will be chipped a bit, but not broken and the divisiveness that has ruined the nation will gird up for even more vitriolic maneuvering. In other words, the same old cycle of chest-thumping bravado that has marked the modern era of politics more so than at any other time.
It is interesting to see that one of the major roadblocks to this package is the Progressive Caucus. The Democrats had been outnumbered long enough to understand that with the numbers on their side, they could accomplish much. I mean it is one thing to be a renegade and quite another to be a contrarian, especially when it is pretty much all for show. Unfortunately for them, they are not taking full advantage of their majority. But, that was also a problem that the Obama administration had to deal with when it held majorities in Congress. It’s what made the Affordable Care Act such a struggle as Democrats with conservative hearts turned a good bill into a tangled, ugly mess that, really, satisfied almost nobody.
These bills take on even more importance when you realize that failure to pass would result in some nasty after-effects, including a federal default that would reverberate through the financial markets. The thing is, the United States is the United States and in the end, will get away with whatever it wishes, even in the global financial network. Nobody will pull the plug on us, nobody will really challenge us, nobody will kick us to the curb because of our collective purchasing power. In other words, Amazon and Wal-Mart understand that the public is not terribly happy about purchasing items made in China, but they still shop there because they are guided more by their pocketbooks than loyalty or imagined display of patriotism. We are, after all, not very good at standing on principle. And, most of us couldn’t care less whether that new television we are eyeing was manufactured in Walla Walla or Wuhan City as long as the price is right.
This has done nothing, of course, to solidify Biden’s approval ratings, which are tanking. The thing is, even popular presidents have peaks and valleys in how the public views them. It comes with the turf. There is almost always a bounce back, especially when the president has a favorable Congress, so the song and dance goes on. Besides, these guys are already well fed and will survive quite nicely, even if they get bounced at the mid-terms, which is what, in reality, this drama is all about as the pols prepare for what should be a very unseemly election that could put a number of those Democratic seats in Congress at risk. The best we can hope for is that the public sees through all of this obstructionism and divisiveness and expresses its collective displeasure at the ballot box because, in the end, we really could use a bit of Congressional bloodletting and cut loose these bad actors from both sides who are more concerned with their 15 minutes of fame than doing the right thing by the American people.
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