Reconciliation is a truly warm and forgiving word. It means coming back together after a period of being apart or at odds. Couples reconcile after time spent apart (for whatever reason). Friends achieve reconciliation by burying hatchets and shrugging off long-carried grudges. It means coming back together, no matter what the circumstances.

The fact that it means something more technical in the parliamentarian terminology of the U.S. Senate is mere coincidence. A budget reconciliation bill is one that amends the original budget for that year with new realities. The two bills are reconciled to each other, merged into becoming the actual budget for that year.

But if the current budget reconciliation bill under negotiation is ever written and passed into law, it will come about because of the reconciliation of two factions of the Democratic Party with each other. The first faction consists of Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and a very small handful of House Democrats. They are often misleadingly called "centrists" or (even worse) "moderates," but they are in fact corporatists, plain and simple. They used to be called a few other misleading labels back in the Clinton era (as we discussed earlier this week, and as Paul Krugman also later pointed out), but at heart they are just pro-big-business -- especially big business that they personally profit from (either directly or indirectly in the form of mountains of campaign cash). The second faction in the Democratic Party is, essentially, the entire rest of the party. This consists of all the progressives and moderates and centrists (the real ones, not the bought-and-paid-for corporate shills). Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer are all in this group, as are Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The second group consists of 95-plus percent of the party. This is not an equal reconciliation; it will be the reconciliation of a tiny handful of corporatists with all the other Democrats. But, due to the almost-non-existent majority in the Senate, this reconciliation must happen if Joe Biden is going to get anything at all done as president.

Which leaves us where we've been all week: waiting for something to happen -- perpetually checking our watches during a performance of Waiting For Godot, wondering when the whole thing is going to be over. Political journalists have been essentially writing the same story all week: "Negotiations Continue, No Breakthrough Yet."

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[Before I begin today, a program note is in order. I am currently so frustrated with watching the "What are Manchin and Sinema thinking?" show that I really needed a break. So today, I am eschewing politics altogether to opine upon a subject I admittedly know next to nothing about. In the first place, I do not regularly talk to schoolchildren (although I do talk to some parents, so I get secondhand information, at the very least). I don't even know what to call the subject today -- sociology, maybe? (The fact that I'm not even sure of the right term to use should be a good indication of my ignorance.) Branding and marketing? Some combination of these, most likely. In any case, consider yourselves duly warned.]

I recently read an article which defined and explained a not-so-impressive neologism for the current generation of American children:

In 2005, social researcher Mark McCrindle coined the term "Generation Alpha" to identify the group born after Generation Z. He defines the generation as those born from 2010 to 2024, while Gen Z spans 1995 to 2009 and Gen Y spans 1980 to 1994 (though many push the millennial birth years back a bit later).

This is taking silliness to an entirely new level. This entire sequence of "let's just give generations letters" began a long time ago, mostly pushed by Baby Boomers who (perhaps) didn't want any other generation to have a label cooler than theirs. After all, for a good decade or so, the Baby Boomers themselves were referred to (disparagingly) as "the Me Generation." Everything always had to be about them, in other words, so the following generations would just have to make do with "X," "Y," and "Z."

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All week long, we've been playing a big waiting game on what is going to happen to President Joe Biden's domestic economic agenda in Congress. His promised "Build Back Better" plan initially had three parts. First, there was the immediate relief needed for the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Next, physical infrastructure projects. And finally, human infrastructure investments. The pandemic relief passed soon after Biden took office (back when most Americans hadn't even had the opportunity to get their first vaccine shot). The other two remain undone. The negotiations to get both of them on Biden's desk for his signature are what we've all been seeing play out -- not just this week, but for the past three or four months. We're (hopefully, at least) now in the endgame of the waiting game, to mix a few metaphors with abandon.

Biden had his own metaphor he would use to describe his tripartite legislative strategy. He called it a "three-legged stool." This is a useful image, since if you take any one of those three legs away, the stool does not stand. It collapses. That is precisely how Biden has seen this effort from the beginning.

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Sadly, the public debate over the budget reconciliation bill in Congress has so far usually been reduced to a single number. I say "sadly" because what this means is that while the media (and, also sadly, too many Democratic politicians) obsess over that one number, it means they seldom (if ever) talk about what is actually contained within the bill itself. Perhaps Democrats can pivot to having this discussion if the bill ever actually passes. But for now, I'd like to put that big, scary $3.5 trillion number into some necessary context.

The first thing Democrats should do when asked the question (over and over again) by journalists is to insist on always pointing out "...over ten years." This is actually happening with more and more frequency, and should be encouraged. Talk about "$350 billion per year" rather than the ten-year figure. Because that is a much more relevant number to any discussion about annual budgets.

I have also heard some Democrats make the following contrast: "We're talking about investing in $350 billion per year on human infrastructure. The annual military budget is over $700 billion per year. All we're saying is it would be worth spending less than half of what we spend each year on the military on things like free preschool education, tuition-free community college, expanding Medicare to include dental and vision and hearing aid coverage, caring for the elderly, and finally doing something about climate change. I think it's worth it to make those investments -- again, which would only cost half as much as we spend each year on the Pentagon." This sounds much more reasonable to most people.

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The mainstream media, as usual, is mostly presenting the power struggle taking place right now within the Democratic Party in a rather slanted way. The fight, we are told, is a fairly equal one between "moderates" or (as is becoming more in vogue recently) "centrists" and the progressives. The progressives are usually painted as the radicals, while the "centrists" are seen as those cautioning moderation and compromise. Virtually none of this is true, however. What is really going on is the old-guard "New Democrats" are being forced to confront the reality that it is no longer the 1990s, and their particular brand of "Wall Street-friendly" Democratic politics is not only seriously on the wane but has now been almost totally eclipsed. Senator Bernie Sanders was at the vanguard of effecting this drastic shift, but it is almost complete. And the old guard is none too happy about it, as they cling to the remaining leverage they still have.

Almost all the conversations about what the progressives are trying to accomplish start out by framing progressives as "far left" or "lefties," or other similar terms. They are painted as the fringe, either explicitly or implicitly. But the reality is that the things progressives are fighting for (in the "Build Back Better" legislation at the heart of this fight) are actually quite popular with the general public (to say nothing of Democratic voters, where these proposals are actually wildly popular). Three progressives wrote a recent opinion piece for CNN where they made this point plain:

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It's one of those rare weeks in Washington, where Congress is actually forced into doing its job -- legislating, holding hearings... you know, the things the taxpayers actually pay them to do. As usual, they are facing multiple deadlines. They deserve zero pity, though, since they just returned from their annual month-long summer vacation. If they had stayed and worked instead of gone and played, then they wouldn't be facing all these time crunches simultaneously. Which is why we say: zero pity.

Right now, there are two enormous legislative efforts underway. One is to raise the debt ceiling as well as keep the government functioning past the first of October (when a new fiscal year begins). It's a double-whammy, both a fiscal cliff and a government shutdown rolled into one. The second is to finalize the huge budget reconciliation bill, which has a laughably impossible deadline of next Monday attached to it. As a quick glance at a calendar shows, that doesn't leave a whole lot of time for an enormous amount of work. Right now the media is mostly spotlighting the fight to raise the debt ceiling, but next week the reconciliation bill will also deserve some attention in one way or another.

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Here we are again. The Washington Kabuki theater is raging while all the media cheerfully go along for the ride. Will the United States reach its debt ceiling without Congress acting, and will the country then default on its debts for the first time in over 200 years? What will that do to the world's economy? What will it do to the American economy? Red flags are waved, warning beacons go off, fire alarms sound, signal flares are launched. It's all merry fun until a way is figured out (at the last minute!) to save us all from the "fiscal cliff" of defaulting on our obligations. It's all as regular as clockwork, now. But it just doesn't have to be this way.

Democrats are already being forced to pass a hike in the debt ceiling completely on their own. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is being a total schmuck about the whole thing, insisting that Republicans want absolutely no part in saving America from financial disaster. Democrats are in control, therefore Republicans are free to vote for the destruction of our entire country's economy. For McConnell, this is really just run-of-the-mill schmuckery, though. It really just feeds into his schmucky brand, to be honest. So he's comfortable enough with it all.

But if Democrats are going to be left to their own devices, why not defuse the issue forever? Instead of passing an increase in the budget ceiling, instead just abolish the concept once and for all. Never again will Republicans get to hold the entire country's economy hostage. Which any sane person would have to admit they will indeed do, if they are not pre-emptively stopped by eliminating the possibility entirely.

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America may have just turned the corner in the fight against the Delta mutation of the COVID-19 viral pandemic. This is good news, obviously, if the trend continues. It could mean a return to at least the normalcy of the beginning of the summer, which would be a welcome relief to all. And it could signal that the next variant which hits us (whatever Greek letter it happens to have) will be less destructive. And that's really good news for all.

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In less than a week, congressional Democrats will face a deadline of their own making. Next Monday is the day Speaker Nancy Pelosi promised she would bring to the House floor the bipartisan infrastructure bill that the Senate has already passed. Because it has cleared the Senate, the next step for the bill (if the House passes it) is President Joe Biden's desk, for his signature. But unfortunately, it is increasingly looking like the companion budget reconciliation bill will not be ready for a vote -- perhaps not in either chamber. Since these two pieces of legislation are linked, this may mean neither one of them passes (at least, not next Monday). This would endanger the two bills which not only form the base of Biden's agenda, but also the basis for Democrats to run their campaigns on next year. Either both bills pass, Biden will be seen as a transformative president (on the order of L.B.J. or even F.D.R.), and the Democrats can run on a spectacular record of getting good things done in Washington -- or none of that will take place at all, which would pretty much doom the Democrats chances in the 2022 midterms. In other words, it's an important week -- one that may actually stretch into being an important month.

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Last night the Senate parliamentarian released the first in a series of opinions about the Democratic efforts to draft an enormous budget reconciliation bill. She said that, in her opinion, legalizing millions of undocumented immigrants should be seen as a policy proposal, not a budget proposal. If Democrats follow her advice, they'll have to remove the path to citizenship from the reconciliation bill. This would be a major blow to immigration reform, although not entirely unexpected.

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