We are in the midst of a bit of Washington Kabuki theater, which is underway with a very specific audience in mind: Senator Joe Manchin. The entire exercise is designed to prove to him that Republicans are fundamentally incapable of compromise and are not negotiating in good faith with President Joe Biden and the Democrats on anything, including things that used to be fairly universally-supported, such as infrastructure. So I do hope Senator Manchin is paying attention.

Joe Biden probably sincerely does want to work with Republicans, because he knows that picking up a handful of Republican votes in Congress would insulate him from all the cries of "partisan legislation" from the right. He also is old enough to remember when Democrats and Republicans weren't split on purely ideological lines, when conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans still existed in both the Senate and the House. So it's kind of nostalgic for him to even try to get bipartisan support. But Biden also remembers the endless stalling Republicans did under Barack Obama, and how they wound up with precisely zero GOP votes at the end of the process. So he's determined not to fall into that trap again.

He will accomplish this with deadlines. He has set Memorial Day as the deadline for his American Jobs Plan, and if he determines there has been no significant progress on a compromise by then, then Biden will push Chuck Schumer to just lump the whole thing with his American Families Plan and pass it with only Democratic votes (using budget reconciliation). The question of when we get to this point, though, has always been whether Manchin will go along with it or not.

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In more ways than one, Liz Cheney is her father's daughter. Coming from a liberal, however, that's not exactly a compliment. Both Cheneys are unapologetic warmongers, and both are extremely cunning denizens of Washington. Both stand for principles I personally abhor, and I doubt there's a single political issue or stance on which I would ever agree with either one of them. Having said all of that, though, Cheney is to be praised for going down swinging. She refuses to back down, she refuses to stay quiet, and she will tell anyone who will listen that what Donald Trump and his spineless enablers are doing is nothing short of an attack on both American democracy itself and the United States Constitution.

That is to be praised, at least these days. In times past, Cheney wouldn't even have to make such a stand, because in times past America had never seen a president attack democracy and an election he lost, and then actually egg on an insurrection against Congress finalizing the Electoral College vote. None of that would have even been conceivable before Trump, so there would have been no reason to oppose such a farfetched and unimaginable thing.

These days, however, Cheney is one of the precious few Republicans left who are strong enough to stand up and say: "I will not believe a lie -- the election was not stolen." And in the spirit of reinforcing positive behavior (even in your political opponents), I have to applaud her for doing so.

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This could be the week when we all learn whether bipartisanship is an achievable goal or whether it is merely a windmill not even worth tilting at any more. President Joe Biden is sitting down not only with all four congressional leaders (Nancy Pelosi, Kevin McCarthy, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell), but also with a delegation from the Senate Republicans who say they are making an honest attempt to come to a compromise on an infrastructure bill. Democrats have already signalled that this won't be an endless waiting game -- if nothing appears by Memorial Day, they are going to use budget reconciliation to pass their bills in the Senate with a simple majority vote, which will leave Republicans without any say over the final bill at all (which is exactly what happened on Biden's first major legislative achievement, the American Rescue Plan). So they've got roughly three weeks before their bipartisan dream bill turns back into a pumpkin.

Most media stories which have covered the give and take of negotiations have zeroed in on the overall size of the bills the two sides are proposing. There is quite a bit of difference between Biden's $2.3 trillion opening bid and the $568 billion the Republicans put on the table. But these sorts of issues are usually the easiest to compromise upon, because it is just an exercise in seeing who will give up more before a final number somewhere in the middle is agreed to. Joe Biden knows all about such haggling, from being in the Senate for so long.

That's not really the problem, though. What could be the irreconcilable difference between the two plans is how it will be paid for. And there hasn't been one inch of compromise offered up by either side yet. So that is really what is worth watching this week (and beyond).

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Sometimes the headlines just write themselves, folks. House Republicans are about to joyfully embrace the "cancel culture" they routinely decry, by forcing Representative Liz Cheney out of her leadership position. Cheney keeps saying things they don't like (such as the incontrovertible fact that the 2020 election was safe and secure and that Donald Trump lost, for instance), so they are going to try to squelch the power of her voice by kicking her out. The Republican journey from selling themselves as the "party of personal responsibility" to the party of endless victimhood is now complete.

Since the Republicans are now rebranding themselves as the Big Lie Party, they are of course using another lie (big or small, take your pick) to oust Cheney. According to them, Cheney keeps "living in the past" or "bringing up the past" instead of properly concentrating on the future (the 2022 midterm election) and selling the party brand to the voters. The problem with this construct is that the entire fight is about the past, not the present or the future. It is Trump who refuses to let go of redefining the party around his Big Lie. It is Trump who refuses to even engage Joe Biden and his policies. It is Trump who keeps bringing it up -- Cheney is merely reacting to him when he does. This is not about the future, it is about the party's willingness to redefine its core ideology to "the election was stolen, Trump really won." That's really it. That's all they've got left, other than "rich people should pay no taxes at all." That is all that is left in the Republican ideology cupboard.

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In 2018, Democrats dominated the midterm elections. This was not historically unusual, although the size of the victory was at the high end of the scale. Since there is now a Democrat in the White House, the 2022 election has to be seen as tilted towards the Republicans. But there is one very potent issue that Democrats should truly begin exploiting -- in the same manner they exploited healthcare in 2018. Back then, Democrats ran on a very obvious choice: vote for us, we will try to make health insurance cheaper and easier to get, while Republicans' only answer is to repeal Obamacare (which, by then, had become quite popular). It worked. In 2022, the Democrats' message should be: vote for us, we will make [or, if it passes, "we made"] four additional years of education free, while Republicans told you it was evil and socialism and maybe even communism -- while they fought hard against two free years of preschool for America's children.

This is a truly perfect message, because it aims right at the heart of the key demographic battleground: suburban women. Who here thinks suburban women are going to militantly fight against free preschool and two years of free community college? Because that is exactly what the new Republican position is. Don't believe this? Here they are in their own words:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell: "[the Biden administration] wants to jack up taxes in order to nudge families toward the kinds of jobs Democrats want them to have, in the kinds of industries Democrats want to exist, with the kinds of cars Democrats want them to drive, using the kinds of child-care arrangements that Democrats want them to pursue." Those dastardly Democrats! Forcing people not to pay for child care! Oh, the horror!

Senator Tim Scott (in his response to Biden's speech to Congress): "[Democrats want] to put Washington even more in the middle of your life, from the cradle to college." To Republicans, providing free schooling is somehow the jackboot of tyranny, obviously.

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The way things are going, they might as well just go ahead and rename the Republican Party the "Party of Trump." It'd certainly be more honest, that's for sure. Not only has Donald Trump successfully co-opted the party from within, he is now also in charge of who is allowed to stay. If you're in Trump's good graces, then you are a true Republican (and a patriot to boot). If you are not, then you are shunned and booed and excluded. There is no "big tent" to the party anymore -- it's a small tent (and getting smaller) and the tent is wholly owned by Trump, Inc.

Plenty of people -- President Joe Biden among them -- expected some sort of magical return to normalcy after Trump's forced exit (both from public office and from social media). They figured most Republican politicians would sort of come out of their daze, shake themselves vigorously, and return to garden-variety conservatism. The party would reunite in opposition to a Democratic president, and by the next election cycle almost all of the Trumpian fervor (or fever) would have melted away.

They were wrong. This has not happened. In fact, the opposite has happened. The remaining "never-Trumpers" and those who were aghast at Trump inspiring and egging on a direct attack on American democracy and our elections have now been both ostracized and silenced. Or "cancelled," perhaps. They're about to be put out to pasture, in one way or another. And it doesn't matter how prominent they are, their former political heft now means very little.

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Representative Liz Cheney did not come from the planet Krypton, but not unlike Superman (at least, the Superman from the 1950s television version) Cheney is in the midst of a "battle for truth, justice, and the American way." This may sound rather odd to hear, coming from me (as well as both dated and cliché). But while I disagree with Cheney on just about every ideological item on either one of our lists, I have to applaud what she is doing now -- standing up to the idiocy which has taken hold of her own political party, reminding them that they used to stand for things like personal responsibility and the U.S. Constitution, and calling a Big Lie an actual Big Lie. In today's Republican Party, that is both admirable and (sadly) almost extinct.

Liz Cheney knows the emperor is wearing no clothes. And she is loudly telling the rest of her party this fact. So, in response, the party is going to unceremoniously chuck her out of their caucus's third-highest leadership position in the House Of Representatives. For refusing to publicly and knowingly lie to the voters.

To put it another way, the Republican Party has just lost any remaining shreds of honesty or morality it may still have had retained over the past five years. Its members are shown to be white supremacists or investigated for child sex trafficking -- and the party leaders look the other way: "Nothing to see here... move along...." But when one of them refuses to swear loyalty and utter fealty to their Dear Leader, then she must be expelled. Ironically, she'll be booted out for actually acting like a political leader -- you know, by leading instead of blindly following (and encouraging) the senseless mob.

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[CORRECTION: I wrote this entire article using the wrong metric. I didn't fact-check it closely enough, even before I sat down to write it. President Joe Biden called today for 70 percent of adults to be vaccinated by July 4th, and not (as the article states) 70 percent of all Americans. To correct this would have meant rewriting almost the entire article, so I am not even going to attempt this. Most of the points made here are still valid, especially the one about listening closely to what is being measured in any statistic you hear cited. Basically, I should have followed my own advice. I apologize for the error. Mea culpa.]

President Joe Biden announced a new goal for his administration today: getting 70 percent of Americans vaccinated at least once before the Fourth of July. That's a pretty high number, even though we've got two whole months to go. But it is an interesting one to pick, since it is the low end of the estimate for what the country will need to achieve "herd immunity" (others put the number higher, as high as 80 or even 85 percent). So it is without doubt a worthy and admirable goal to shoot for.

But I've noticed something about the way these numbers are reported in the media and even from the scientists and medical experts -- different people are using different yardsticks, which can lead to some confusion in the public. So you've really got to be sure you're comparing apples to apples when you hear one number or another reported on the news. There are many ways to measure the success of the vaccination program. But for various reasons, some report things differently. So whenever you hear a number quoted on the news or by a medical expert, pay close attention to what the quoted percentage is actually referring to ("all Americans," or "those eligible," or "adults").

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Back in 2015 and 2016, the mainstream media gave Donald Trump's presidential campaign a huge boost. Trump was like catnip to them, endlessly entertaining, and as a result, they made his campaign a gift of hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in free airtime. They'd cover his rallies in full, just to see what outrageous things he said. When the Republican primary season happened, all their questions to the other candidates were basically some form of: "What do you think about what Trump said about X?" Trump was a creature of television and pop culture, and as such understood the value of generating high ratings. And the media gleefully went along for the ride. And as a result, Trump dominated the primary and then dominated the general election.

Much later on, the media went through a bit of soul-searching: "How could we have allowed this to happen? How complicit were we in the con job?" But by then, of course, it was too late.

Fast-forward to now. Now, the mainstream media is giving not Donald Trump the same amount of breathless coverage, but instead Trumpism -- the toxic cult that the Republican Party has now become and fervently believes in (with the notable exception of a precious few). And at the heart of this is the blind belief in The Big Lie -- that with not a shred of an iota of a speck of proof to back the claim up, the 2020 election was somehow a gigantic fraud perpetrated on the American people and the realty was that Trump won in a landslide. Other than a few core principles the Republicans will never give up, this is truly not only what they now believe, but it has fast become a litmus (or loyalty) test to even gain entrance or acceptance to the GOP ranks.

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President Joe Biden is either a radical, far-left socialist who hates many things about America and lied to everyone in his campaign about "unity" (because deep down he really just wants to divide us to foster his own political ambitions)... or he is not. If he isn't, then he just might be a moderate Democratic centrist who has been thrust into three simultaneous crises and who has reacted by abandoning his former timidity and instead decided that the time is now to prove to the American public that the federal government can indeed be a force for good in their lives, in the biggest way possible. Joe is going big, even though his natural instinct would be to sit down with Republicans and hash out a compromise that fell far short of what the Democratic side of the aisle thought was necessary.

That is the state of our political divide. Either you believe the first sentence in that former paragraph, or you believe the rest of it. The problem for the Republican Party is that a majority of the American people believe (to some degree or another) the more-reasonable interpretation of Joe Biden. This is why his job approval poll numbers are still higher than Donald Trump ever managed even once. Joe Biden looks and sounds like a moderate. But he seems determined to rise to the occasion, and he has shown a surprising amount of steeliness (and impatience) when confronted by GOP stalling tactics. This is likely due to the lesson he learned full well while serving as Barack Obama's vice president, when Obama was stymied multiple times by GOP bait-and-switch tactics. Obama, most notably on Obamacare, gave in on all sorts of issues in the hopes of forming a compromise plan that Republicans would vote for. This effort took up an enormous amount of time, and in the end, the Republicans refused to vote for it anyway. Biden learned the lesson: "put them on a timetable, and if they can't deliver enough GOP votes to matter in the Senate when that time is up, then feel free to ignore them and use budget reconciliation rules to get it done -- because all people will remember later is whether you got it done or not, and not how you got it done." That's an excellent lesson to have learned, when dealing with today's Republican Party, which is even worse than they were back in the Tea Party era under Obama.

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