The Senate Republicans who are trying to appear as if they are negotiating an infrastructure plan in good faith with President Joe Biden are, in reality, trying to con both the media and the public into thinking their plan can be directly compared to the White House's offer. I say this not because of all the bickering over what really and truly constitutes "infrastructure," but instead over the numbers themselves. Because comparing Biden's plan to the GOP's plan is like comparing apples to peanuts.

The Republicans have been at least partially successful at this con job, mostly because journalists in general and even political journalists who report on budgetary matters (who really should know better -- they should be on the alert for just such an attempt at pulling the wool over their eyes, in other words) are just not all that good at math. Sad but true.

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[Program Note: The first part of this article, which gave a historical overview of the First Amendment, ran yesterday. The following is the conclusion.]

We now have to jump forward to what the state of Florida is attempting to do, with their new law. Florida is run by Republicans and its governor is widely reported to be considering an eventual presidential run. He's always been a big supporter of Donald Trump and so the state Republicans have taken up the insistence on the right that somehow social media platforms banning conservatives is some sort of tyrannical outrage that must be stopped by governmental intervention. In this one area -- social media and Big Tech in general -- Republicans are for all the regulations they can impose, which obviously runs counter to their longstanding drive to remove as many regulations on as many corporations as possible. So far, though, Republicans don't seem to have any ideological opposition to more and more regulations in this one area, and it's doubtful they ever will.

Here is a quick rundown of what the new law is supposed to do:

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[Program Note: This column ran so long I thought it was best to break it into two parts. In today's, I present a short history of the First Amendment and what it meant to the people who wrote it and ratified it. Tomorrow, I will examine Florida's new law and why it runs so laughably counter to both the spirit and the letter of the First Amendment and is so obviously unconstitutional. My apologies for the delayed conclusion.]

State-level Republicans are up to a whole new set of antics these days, in their continuing refusal to ever learn the true meaning of the First Amendment. The governor of Florida just signed a law whose purpose is to somehow protect the "free speech" rights of state-level politicians and conservative commenters -- by which they mean the non-existent "right" of government and politicians to dictate to social media companies how their own platforms must be used. As usual with such Republican flimflammery, the law is the exact opposite of what it purports to be -- it is a governmental attempt to "abridge the freedom of speech." Which is exactly what the First Amendment was written to prevent in the first place.

Let's begin this discussion by reviewing the text, and a little of the history of how it came into being:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Conservatives these days have mostly been pointing to the "freedom of speech" clause, but the next two are equally important in this debate as well: the freedom of the press and the freedom of assembly.

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It's infrastructure week again, down at the Republicans' Last Chance Saloon. One week from today is Memorial Day, which is the deadline President Joe Biden set to see some sort of substantial progress on a bipartisan infrastructure bill in Congress. If such progress is not achieved by the time of the summer-opening picnics, then Democrats will begin moving on their own to use the Senate's budget reconciliation provision to pass both of the big Biden proposals (the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan). The clock is ticking, in other words, with one week to go.

Of course, Biden's deadline was self-imposed and rather vague. He didn't say a drafted bill or even a good-faith agreement was actually necessary, just that substantial progress be made towards those goals. So he can define defeat or victory pretty much how he chooses. Compared to the COVID relief package, there has already been a lot more substantial progress in bipartisan talks. But no agreement is in sight, and the two sides are pretty far apart with only one week remaining.

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Republicans, these days, just seem rather lost. They used to be so good at coming up with semi-cohesive talking points to use against Democrats, and they have always admirably been able to all sing from this same songbook every Sunday morning (for the political chatfest shows on television). But these days, all the issues they choose to highlight are all so incredibly short-term that the problem usually disappears before their politicization of the issue really even has a chance to take hold.

Case in point: Republicans' heavy lean on school reopenings. They've been so convinced this is going to be a big winning issue for them, they rode it all the way to getting a recall election called for California's governor (Gavin Newsom). But by the time Californians vote on it (later October or early November of this year), everyone will already be back in school again.

Pretty much all the Republicans' complaints about COVID restrictions fall into the same category. All the pushback (most notably from churches who had in-person services locked down for a time) on social distancing, all the weeping and wailing over the non-existent "vaccine passports," even all the outrage over mask-wearing and Dr. Anthony Fauci -- how much of this is really going to be a current issue in November of 2022, do they think? My guess would realistically be: "None of it -- everyone will have gratefully moved on by that point, and just prefer not to remember the entire pandemic and all the hardships it caused."

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Bipartisanship has been achieved! You would think that this news would make Republicans happy, since they've been whining so incessantly about President Joe Biden somehow not being sufficiently interested in bipartisanship in Congress, but you would (of course) be wrong about that. Instead of celebrating the milestone, Senate Republicans from their leadership on down are now desperately trying to create more partisanship, to kill the bill. There's an object lesson here, for people like Joe Manchin, but it remains to be seen whether this lesson will be taken to heart or not.

The House of Representatives voted yesterday to approve a commission to investigate the attempted insurrection on the sixth of January. This commission is set up almost identically to the 9/11 commission, and was a compromise negotiated by a House Republican assigned to the task by Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy. Again, you'd think McCarthy would have been happy, since the negotiator got Democrats to back down on almost all their demands. As a result, the commission itself simply cannot be called "partisan" in any way -- it will have an equal number of commissioners appointed by Democrats and Republicans. The Republicans on the commission, should they so choose, will be able to block subpoenas from being issued. All of the GOP complaints about the initial Democratic proposal were adopted, with the sole exception of the insane demand that a "1/6 commission" investigate all sorts of things completely unrelated to January the sixth. That one was left by the wayside, since it was such a ridiculous thing to ask for in the first place.

An astonishing 35 House Republicans voted for the bill. Think about that for a moment -- in this day and age, one-sixth of the Republicans voted with the Democrats. That's about as bipartisan as it gets on a contentious issue, at least these days. And these 35 members did so even though McCarthy and other prominent Republicans argued strenuously against voting for it. Donald Trump also firmly opposes the bill, which is understandable since his culpability will be a big subject of the investigation. But astonishingly, Trump's iron grip on Republicans slipped in a big way on this bill.

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The circus has come to town! Step right up folks, because Arizona is currently hosting an absolute three-ring extravaganza. The Republicans who control the state senate decided the best way to get on Donald Trump's good side would be to chase down the rabbit hole of: "Maybe if we look at the ballots again, we'll find all that non-existent fraud Trump keeps telling us is there!" So even though the ballots in Maricopa County (the lion's share of the statewide vote totals) have already been audited twice, the state senate voted to conduct their own personal "audit" of the ballots. That word is in quotes to signify that this isn't a real and authentic audit, it is instead nothing short of a circus.

This isn't even my own personal hyperbole. Here is what the Maricopa Country Board of Supervisors just wrote, in a letter to the Republican leader of the state senate: "Your 'audit,' which you once said was intended to increase voters' confidence in our electoral process, has devolved into a circus." And that's not even the snarkiest thing they had to say. Four out of the five supervisors who signed this scathing letter are Republicans, mind you, so this cannot be cast as any sort of partisan name-calling.

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Georgia Lieutenant Governor Geoff Duncan just announced he will not be running for re-election next year, and instead will be devoting his time and energy to a new movement to reform the Republican Party. He calls this effort "GOP 2.0." His chances of success appear to be somewhere between "slim" and "non-existent." But you have to at least applaud the guy for trying.

He is essentially trying to build on the platform that Liz Cheney just created, that of Republicans who still value things like the truth and reality and who have realized that the party's unwavering fealty to Donald Trump is quite likely to end in disaster (one way or another). However, Liz Cheney is a nationally-known figure (even more so since she was unceremoniously ostracized by her peers in the House), while Duncan is only the number two guy in a single U.S. state. I certainly didn't immediately recognize his name when I heard about the GOP 2.0 idea, and I follow politics fairly closely. Also, unlike Cheney, he isn't a member of a well-known GOP political dynasty. All of this points to his effort making a very tiny splash, in the grand scheme of things.

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The more I see of President Joe Biden, the more I am reminded of Ronald Reagan. Not in substance, mind you (their policies could hardly be more opposed), but rather in style. Joe Biden is just likeable, no matter what you think of his agenda. He's beyond avuncular, he's downright grandfatherly. Just like Reagan was. Where Reagan had: "There you go again," Biden has instead: "C'mon, man." Both express exactly the same (and extremely rare) political quality -- the ability to defuse a story completely, right before reframing it in a way that most average non-political Americans would agree with (or at least relate to), even if it drives the pundits bonkers. You could call this inherent skill the ability to project being a "commonsense politician," I suppose.

Biden, of course, is nowhere near as charismatic as Reagan. Reagan was quicker with a joke than Biden, and quicker to give amusing faux backhanded compliments to his political opponents. But when confronted by a tough question, Reagan could slide away from it so easily (and sound so reasonable doing so) that he became known as the "Teflon president" -- nothing ever stuck to him. Biden, so far at least, seems to be exhibiting the same ability (albeit in a different way -- the two men's styles are merely similar in this respect, not identical in any way). Nothing bad -- no matter how bad -- ever stuck to Reagan. And even though it has only been four months, nothing so far has stuck to Biden, either.

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The Republican Party has officially divorced itself from reality. They have, quite simply, moved their headquarters to Cloud Cuckoo Land. Any among their ranks who do not swear fealty to the fantastic lies they now believe must be either shunned or expelled. That is the state of one of the two major American political parties, in the twenty-first century.

Normally, such a development would be a reason for glee among the other political party, but this is not merely a matter of Republicans believing that the world is flat, the moon is made of green cheese, or tax cuts always pay for themselves -- no, this is no mere pedestrian fantasyland they have now taken up residence within. This is far more dangerous.

Republicans now must bow down to Trump's Big Lie, that the 2020 presidential election was somehow "stolen" from him (with zero evidence to back this up, of course). Because of this forced fealty, Republicans have turned the Big Lie into a perpetual motion machine, feeding on itself. Since the election was stolen, that means lots of fraud must have taken place, and that means passing laws in as many states as they can to change the game for the next election cycle. But while most of the attention has been centered on all the voter-suppression aspects of these new laws, a much more insidious thing is also taking place -- Republicans are changing the rules of how votes are counted and certified. They saw what happened to Trump's attempt to steal an election last time, when Republican officials actually took their election oversight jobs seriously and resisted; and they aim to replace that system with one where Republican politicians are in charge of determining which elections they deem valid and which they don't. Elections with more votes for Democrats are obviously suspect and need overturning, to put it more plainly.

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