There are two interesting special election primaries happening today in Ohio for two vacant seats in the U.S. House of Representatives. The winners of the races today will likely coast through the special election itself, since both are in reliably partisan districts (one Democratic and one Republican). They are even more interesting because they are both fierce factional races which will provide a few tea leaves for those looking to see what the future of the two parties might be. Which factions will prevail? Whether it means anything in the grand scheme of things or not, it's at least something for pundits to discuss during the long "silly season" of August.

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There is an abject lesson in the failure to successfully get federal help to renters and landlords in a timely fashion. And I'm not talking about how Congress and President Joe Biden couldn't manage to extend the eviction moratorium deadline, either. That was a preventable tragedy, but what's even more instructive is the fact that of the billions earmarked for rental assistance, only a tiny fraction of the money actually made it to the people it was intended to help. Compared to how the direct COVID-19 pandemic aid payments were distributed, it's pretty easy to see there's a right way and a wrong way to deliver federal aid. With Bernie Sanders now putting the finishing touches on a vast expansion of federal programs to make people's lives better, one certainly hopes this lesson has been learned so that future programs won't get so bogged down in red tape or bureaucracy that they wind up being both ineffective and frustrating.

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President Joe Biden is now getting very close to securing the second leg of his three-legged economic legislative stool. To put it another way: this week we all finally got to experience the almost-mythological "Infrastructure Week" which we had been promised for lo, these many years. Bipartisanship struggled back to life, fulfilling not just a campaign promise from Biden but also his deep-seated desire to return Washington to some sort of pre-Trump normality.

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Is Donald Trump's stranglehold over the Republican Party fading? One can only hope....

It is indisputable that Trump's voice is fading. Banished from polite online society, Trump is now reduced to sending out an email blast every once in a while and doing interviews on far-right media outlets. This does get his message out to his base, but with a lot smaller a megaphone than he once wielded to his tens of millions of social media followers.

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It's like the Republicans all suddenly got put on double-secret probation or something. It seems to have finally dawned on them that the Delta variant of the COVID-19 virus is actually real, and it is now killing off an inordinate number of their own base voters. So some of them had, as President Joe Biden said this week, their "altar call" moment.

Of course, hearing "Delta," what popped into our minds for this tectonic shift was Animal House's John Belushi asking his fellow Delts: "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell, no!" Of course, his speech ended when his frat brother stood up and proclaimed: "I think this situation absolutely requires a really futile and stupid gesture be done on somebody's part." To which Belushi responded: "And we're just the guys to do it!"

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It became a running joke in the previous administration (the phrase a mockery since none of it ever came to fruition), but we may now have finally arrived at a real, honest-to-goodness "Infrastructure Week." Or, to put it another way, it's finally time for everyone to stop kidding around. By week's end, we may know what sort of legacy President Joe Biden is going to leave. He could be counted by history as one of the more transformational presidents of the modern era, or it all may fall apart at the last minute. Either way, this week will likely be the pivotal one.

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There were two interesting developments in the congressional sausage-making process this week, both of which Democrats should immediately adopt as their main messages for the next week or so.

The first was that Senators Bernie Sanders and Mark Warner announced they had come to a compromise on the reconciliation bill which will fund the lion's share of President Joe Biden's economic agenda. They settled on a total figure of $3.5 trillion in new spending, which is far less than Bernie's original goal of $6 trillion (just for this bill alone), but also far more than the opening bid of the fiscally-conservative Democrats, which was in the $1.5 to $2 trillion range. It also will mean that Biden got the exact total he asked for in his "three-legged stool" of economic legislation. His first big legislative achievement (the American Rescue Plan) spent $1.9 trillion, and the bipartisan infrastructure deal represents $0.6 trillion more, which will mean a grand total of $6 trillion for all three -- which is exactly what Biden asked for in the first place.

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced this week he will be moving legislation to the floor of the Senate to legalize marijuana at the federal level. This is an important milestone (even if the measure fails), since such legislation has never had leadership support in the Senate before. The House has passed similar bills already, knowing full well they were all going to die in the Senate. But with Schumer on board, the chances that the federal War On Weed could end have improved considerably.

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Although few are pointing it out today, Senator Bernie Sanders is truly the man of the hour in the Democratic Party right now. Much faster than anyone expected (myself included), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced last night that a deal had been struck within the Democratic caucus over the reconciliation bill that Bernie Sanders is in charge of writing (as chair of the Senate's budget committee). This deal was principally negotiated between Sanders and Senator Mark Warner, who represented the penny-pinching faction within the Democratic Party. But even with this necessary trimming, what was just announced is simply breathtaking in its scope and reach.

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Can Democrats still be bold? We are perhaps on the brink of finding that out. Joe Biden campaigned as a total moderate, but has been sort of thrust into a historical moment when boldness might actually be possible -- and be rewarded. By the time he got into office, Biden had realized this and was already talking about being a "transformational" president rather than just a moderate caretaker.

The COVID-19 pandemic was what set the stage for all this bold action, and Biden has done an admirable job of delivering on his promises on this front. But the rest of his economic agenda is now on the verge of becoming reality as well, and if the lion's share of it passes, Biden will indeed bask in comparisons to F.D.R. and L.B.J.

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