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For the second day running, I am leaning on a pop culture reference to express how I feel about politics. Today's title comes from The X-Files, as it was the slogan prominently displayed on a poster of a flying saucer which hung on Agent Fox Mulder's office wall. So here's what I want to now believe, after last night's bombshell news:
President Joe Biden is hoping for a few legislative wins before the midterms. Three bills in particular seem to have a better-than-average chance of success. They're a far cry from the agenda Biden attempted to achieve last year, but having to deal with two corporatist Democratic senators derailed almost all of these lofty ambitions. So Americans will not be getting tuition-free community college, subsidized child care, free preschool, student loan forgiveness, action on climate change, and a whole host of other ideas that would have dramatically improved the lives of hundreds of millions of American citizens. Thanks, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, for nothing.
And so, once again, we find ourselves in a very familiar place. Senator Joe Manchin has just yanked the rug out from under the lion's share of what he was supposedly negotiating in good faith with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (and the entire rest of the Democratic Party). Manchin let it be known that two of the biggest things he himself had said he was going to strongly support (in the pared-down version of President Joe Biden's Build Back Better plan) were suddenly verboten and off the table. In other words, Joe Manchin successfully wasted everyone's time -- once again -- for months on end.
How Americans feel about "the economy" often depends on what the biggest problems or fears they have at any particular moment. Right now, by many indicators, the economy is doing great -- record numbers of people are working, record numbers of jobs are available, employers are hiring people in droves, unemployment is within 0.2 percent of the record low, wages are going up, most of the supply chain problems have been worked out, and COVID has faded into the background of daily life for most people. That's all good news, obviously, but that's not how most consumers see the economy these days. What is on the top of people's minds is inflation, and nothing exemplifies inflation more than the price of gas.
A window of opportunity in Congress is going to close soon. As usual in these things, Senator Joe Manchin is the key deciding factor as to whether Democrats will hit this window or miss it. In fact, there are actually two windows, a big one and one with a specific focus -- and Manchin is holding both of them up at once.
President Joe Biden capped off a pretty good week with a pretty good speech today, given right before he signed an executive order to do what he could to protect women's rights. Biden did so, of course, in response to the "extreme" Supreme Court decision which overturned Roe v. Wade.
Hey, kiddies, it's time to play "shadow boxing with Joe Manchin" once again! Yes, his teasing game has begun anew, where Democrats get their hopes up that Senator Manchin will finally agree to pass something -- anything -- from President Joe Biden's agenda, in the hopes of counteracting the predicted coming "red wave" in November's midterm elections. Once again, Manchin is playing it coy, as he is "in negotiations" with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, but has not actually committed to much of anything. The deadline this time around is the end of July, right before all of Congress disappears into the summer breeze for an entire month. Of course, they're all still on their two-week July 4th vacation this week, so nothing will really happen until next week, which leaves a rather abbreviated window.
The two biggest political topics of the past week were the continuing outrages piling up from both the Supreme Court and the House Select Committee on January 6th.
On Tuesday, a young aide who worked for Trump's chief of staff, Mark Meadows, appeared in a surprise House committee hearing. The previous week, the committee had let it be known that there would be no hearings over the two-week Independence Day break. But a day beforehand, a new hearing was announced without fanfare and without any details.
The witness who appeared, Cassidy Hutchinson, had apparently been getting threatening messages from those still surrounding Donald Trump. They read like mob bosses leaning on a witness who might spill the beans:
How low can the bar go for what is acceptable in a Republican candidate to the rest of their party? That is a question that many have been asking ever since the rise of Donald Trump. Because while he was busily tearing up all the political rules of decorum, one of the first ones he shredded and flushed down his golden toilet was the expectation that political candidates aren't suppose to tell blatant lies -- especially about themselves. Before Trump, getting caught in one big fat lie might not have been a death blow to a Republican politician's career (at least, with the right artfully-worded explanation), but getting caught in two of them was sure to be disqualifying. In our post-Trump world, however, it is apparently fine with the Republican Party if you just go out and have a ball lying your face off and just making things up out of thin air. Because, these days, why not?
Early this morning (very early, for those of us on the West Coast!), the second June hearing of the House January 6th committee was supposed to get underway. This didn't happen on time, due to a last-minute changeup in the program. One of the two in-person witnesses for the first hour, Bill Stepien, cancelled his appearance at the last minute. Stepien was Donald Trump's campaign manager for the last three or four months of the 2020 presidential campaign, and was thus in a unique position to provide an eyewitness account of what went both before and after the election.