The Indignation of Civic Ignorance
Misdirected anger at things misunderstood
I Don’t Know What We’re Yelling About
West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin yesterday announced that he simply couldn’t get to a place where he could support the so-called Build Back Better legislation — the counterpart to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework passed earlier this year — effectively killing President Biden’s current legislative priority.
This isn’t all that surprising if you’ve been following the story closely. Any time there is no margin for error with such a large gap between the two sides, the odds of a compromise are pretty low. The part that no one likes to talk about is the fact that, while Joe Manchin — and to a lesser extent, Kyrsten Sinema — has been absorbing the slings and arrows for his opposition to BBB, he is merely the avatar for several Democrats in the Senate who were not exactly jazzed to vote for a bill that isn’t popular in their states. Senators like Mark Kelly (like Sinema, also of Arizona) and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire have tough reelection campaigns coming up next year and supporting BBB would have been a drag on their chances in their states.
That of course didn’t stop congressional progressives from squealing like stuck pigs:
Just a few of quick points about this: First, the idea that Ilhan Omar has a better sense of what West Virginia voters want than Joe friggin’ Manchin is, if you’ll excuse the expression, cute. Second, it’s also cute that AOC thinks that calling a roll call vote will change anything. If Joe Manchin is willing to announce his opposition on live television in front of millions of viewers, it takes a special kind of delusion to think he’d reconsider if forced to go through a perfunctory Senate vote. And perhaps most hilariously, the idea that if they hadn’t decoupled BBB from BIF they could’ve gotten both is absolute nonsense. They would’ve gotten neither. BIF was much more popular than BBB, but not popular enough to overcome the unpopularity of BBB.
Just a quick reminder for those of you who may not remember, the original progressive plan was to link the two bills together (because they knew BBB was less popular). That plan was abandoned in the Senate; but then Joe Biden, somewhat inexplicably, expressed support for it before once again giving up on it.
Both Omar and AOC represent D+25 districts — literally, you can look it up — and they seem to think the same political dynamics apply to West Virginia. It’s completely untethered from reality and it’s a drag on Democrat electoral prospects.
Which leads me to this exchange from late last week between Vice President Kamala Harris and “Charlemagne tha God,” (real name Lenard McKelvey, as I feel uncomfortable using any stage name with “tha” in it):
We can debate the effectiveness of the Vice President’s response another time, but I’ll defend her from this nonsense question (accusation?). I don’t know much about Charlemagne/McKelvey, but from what I can gather he fancies himself as sort of a left-leaning Joe Rogan; “just asking questions” of the so-called elite from a leftist-populist point of view. But his insinuation that Joe Manchin is the “real” president because he was the supposedly deciding vote against the president’s legislative agenda is borne out of a rank civic illiteracy.
It’s not a new civic illiteracy, but it’s one that’s become more pervasive over the last few years. We live in a legislative republic, but many people — including some members of Congress! — are acting as if we live in a parliamentary system. McKelvey is incensed because he apparently believes that because Joe Biden is president, he should be allowed to pass his legislative agenda at-will; and the fact that he can’t get the votes for it in the legislature simply isn’t fair. And since Joe Manchin is supposedly the one standing in the way (he isn’t really, as I noted above, but that’s the popular belief) Manchin is supposedly usurping presidential authority.
And it’s all nonsense.
I know we’re taught that America has three “co-equal” branches of government, but that’s actually Nixonian propaganda; created by Richard Nixon when he was trying to duck congressional oversight. America is actually a legislative supremacy. The legislature actually holds power over the other two branches — it’s the only branch of government that can remove members of the other two, remember.
The way the Constitution is designed, the president is basically supposed to do Congress’s bidding. Congress writes and passes laws, and the president implements them. (Provided he doesn’t veto bills and all that, but you get the idea.) The idea that the president would have input on the legislative agenda — much less set the legislative agenda — is of fairly recent vintage. And it’s causing a lot of problems in our political culture. The way that presidential elections are now basically a contest between Irish Catholics and Irish Protestants, where each side views victory of the other as an existential threat, have almost entirely inverted our political incentives.
Everyone who is angry at Joe Manchin for scuttling Joe Biden’s agenda is forgetting a couple of important things:
1. When it comes to crafting legislation, what the president wants is irrelevant. Or if not irrelevant, at least secondary.
2. Joe Manchin isn’t single-handedly scuttling the president’s agenda. The only reason Joe Manchin has any power at all is because at least 50 other Senators agree with him. If Joe Manchin was truly alone in this, no one would care what he thought.
The great irony in all of this is that Democrats shouldn’t even have nominal control of the Senate. If not for Donald Trump’s vote-deflating insanity in the Georgia Senate runoffs, Mitch McConnell would still be majority leader and the reason for Joe Biden’s floundering legislative agenda would be more obvious. But instead, Trump stumbled ass-first into giving Democrats the slimmest-possible Senate majority; and Democrats promptly started acting like they had 1930s-era filibuster proof majorities. And when you try to legislate as if you have huge majorities when you in fact have incredibly narrow majorities, you’re gonna have a bad time.
So much of the anger toward Joe Manchin and the failure of Biden’s legislative agenda is a failure to appreciate or understand the legislative process and recognize the current political landscape. It shouldn’t be controversial at all for a president’s preferred bill to fail in such a narrowly divided Congress. In fact, when Congress is so narrowly-divided, the choices are usually to either pass incredibly popular legislation, or nothing at all. Intentionally or not, Biden chose the latter.
Getting mad at Joe Manchin for it is the political equivalent of stubbing your toe on the couch and yelling at the dog. They’re mad at the wrong thing and learning the wrong lesson from it.
It’s Not March 2020 Anymore
The data about the Omicron variant of COVID-19 continues to make me cautiously optimistic:
To sum all of that up, while infections in South Africa of the Omicron variant are actually higher than the Delta wave, hospitalizations are less than half of what they were for Delta, and ICU admissions are between a fifth and a quarter of what they were for Delta.
There is no evidence as yet that Omicron is as bad as Delta, much less worse; and quite a bit of preliminary evidence that Omicron is in fact much less concerning. Which means there is currently no justification for things like this:
Or this:
We’re applying March 2020 protocols to December 2021 reality, and it’s needless. Moreover, it’s counterproductive. As anyone reading this likely knows, I’ve been a COVID hawk since the beginning. I thought the mitigation efforts first implemented in the spring of 2020 were drastic but justified. I was supportive of masking requirements in indoor spaces. And while I remain supportive of vaccine mandates and think individual businesses can have their own masking policies, the rest of this stuff is over. Barring some extreme discovery about the virulence of the Omicron variant, there is no longer any justification for any COVID-related closures.
Look at the data coming out of NYC last week:
Vaccinated people have a quite manageable risk from COVID-19. Closing schools and businesses to protect the unvaccinated from their own poor decisions is, at this point, untenable.
As I’ve been banging my spoon on my high chair for nearly nine months now, the vaccine is free and readily available. It is the single most effective tool we can use to protect ourselves and those around us. It is so effective, in fact, that it renders most other mitigation measures obsolete. But the rest of us shouldn’t be held hostage to a small-yet-obstinate minority who simply refuse to be part of the public health solution.
And I hardly think I’m alone. I mean, sure, there are people who have been against mitigation measures the whole time; and those people suck. But I suspect there are many people like me who have done our best through the entire pandemic — including getting three shots, and I hate needles — and are read to get on with it.
I hate to be one of those people like “If people wanna die of COVID at this point, screw ‘em,” but I mean, kinda, if people wanna die of COVID at this point, screw ‘em. But the facts on the ground are different than they were in the spring of 2020, and we need to start acting like it.
As the dean of the Brown School of Public Health reminds us:
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Double Vowels
Clue: This land was promised to Abraham in the book of Genesis.
Canaan
Today’s clue:
Category: Sports Nicknames
Clue: This NFL field is called The Frozen Tundra; the 1967 Green Bay-Dallas title game was played there at -13 degrees.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I find that there are few things in parenthood that are more satisfying than perfectly timing the bulb syringe to suck a giant booger out of your snorting baby’s face. It should be a carnival game.