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:

I want to believe Joe Manchin. I do. I want to believe that this time he will actually follow through on his promises and not back out or blow everything up at the last minute.

This will require a large leap of faith, since he has done just that on numerous occasions in the past year. Yes, it's been a year -- Politico helpfully pointed out today that the letter Manchin and Schumer signed which laid out what Manchin was prepared to support and what he wasn't was dated July 28, 2021. This whole dance began in earnest one year ago today, in other words.

In the intervening time, Manchin has seemed very close to a deal multiple times. Then he'd get into a snit and announce he was pulling all support for all aspects of the deal. He'd gain another round of television interviews, and he'd get courted by the White House and Schumer all over again, and the game of tease would just go on and on.

So now this time we have to believe that he's actually being truthful and will follow through. Like I said, it requires a rather large leap of faith.

I want to believe that the surprise nature of the announcement was actually Chuck Schumer outmaneuvering Mitch McConnell (for once).

McConnell had threatened to pull Republican support for what is now called the "Chips and Science Act" if Democrats didn't give up their efforts to pass something (anything!) through budget reconciliation rules. This hostage-taking didn't work, though. The Chips and Science Act passed the Senate yesterday with plenty of Republicans voting for it. Mere hours later, the Manchin/Schumer deal was announced.

That seems more than just coincidence. It actually seems tactically planned. McConnell was not happy about this turn of events, and tried to get House Republicans to kill the bill -- to no avail. Plenty of House Republicans also voted for the bill today, and it is now on its way to President Joe Biden's desk for his signature -- a clear political win for him. The hostage escaped unharmed, in other words.

I want to believe this was planned, just for the joy of watching Mitch McConnell get beaten at his own game, for once.

I want to believe that Kyrsten Sinema won't torpedo the bill because she feels left out of all the attention being lavished on Manchin. I want to believe that one of her fatcat donors won't call her up and say: "You want the gravy train to continue, right? So you've got to kill this bill."

Sinema has been bought and paid for by corporate America, plain and simple. She has used her power to kill previous suggestions of a deal. After campaigning on raising taxes on the wealthy and huge corporations, one day she suddenly announced she would kill any deal that raised taxes above the Trump tax cut level -- even on the richest of the rich. Because they were now her big donors and she had to keep them happy.

There are indeed two tax hikes in the deal Manchin and Schumer announced. The first would put a minimum tax of 15 percent on corporations, no matter how many write-offs they amassed. The second would curtail the enormous tax break for "the carried interest loophole," which is a fancy way of saying "people who make zillions buying and selling stocks get to pay half the tax rate that average workers do."

Sinema has never agreed to either of those things, and she has been awfully quiet today. So it's still a mystery whether she'll get on board or not. But I want to believe she will.

I want to believe that all 50 Democratic senators will be healthy enough to vote at the same time.

Dick Durbin tested positive for COVID-19 today. Joe Manchin tested positive a few days earlier. Pat Leahy is still recovering from two operations on his hip. The Senate, unlike the House, never adopted COVID rules for remote sessions or remote voting. The old rules still apply -- senators have to be physically present on the chamber's floor in order to cast a vote.

With only 50 senators, this obviously means that everyone has to be healthy at exactly the same time. The bill is reportedly scheduled to hit the floor next week, and then the Senate has their big August vacation planned just afterwards. That's a pretty tight window.

I want to believe all 50 Democrats can all manage to be healthy enough to vote at some point during the next week, but all it would take (really) is one more COVID-positive announcement from a Democratic senator to derail that.

I want to believe that groups of Democrats in the House won't refuse to vote for the Senate version because it doesn't have their pet project in it.

The one most often mentioned is a group of moderate Democrats pushing to remove the Trump tax cut $10,000 ceiling on state and local taxes (called "SALT" for brevity's sake). This limits the deductions taxpayers can claim on their income taxes in places with high property values and high state and local taxes -- which are mostly blue states (this was a targeted tax hike Republicans passed, mostly out of spite). Earlier, in the discussions on the Build Back Better bill, a group of House Democrats swore they'd never vote for a bill that didn't get rid of the SALT cap. Will they still stick to their position? Or will they bend to political reality and go ahead and vote for it anyway?

I want to believe they won't torpedo a big win for Joe Biden right before a midterm campaign season. They surely wouldn't be that intransigent, would they?

All in all, hoping for this bill to actually make it to Joe Biden's desk to be signed is (at the present) an act of faith. The only saving grace to all of this is it looks like it will happen quickly, at least. So by the end of next week (with delays, the vote might get pushed to the weekend), we will all know whether this faith was misplaced or rewarded.

I want to believe that this deal is going to pass.

I want to believe Joe Manchin. I really do.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant

For those who don't instantly recognize the pop culture reference inherent in that title, I would direct you to a poorly-videotaped homemade copy (starts at 1:15 in) of Rob Lowe appearing on Saturday Night Live and doing the best "Shaggy" impression ever seen, standing (of course) next to Scooby Doo. Those darn kids are always meddling....

However, what the title actually refers to is no laughing matter. Because powerful groups within the Democratic Party have indeed been meddling in Republican primaries. They have been spending money -- money ostensibly and supposedly for supporting Democrats trying to get elected to Congress or statewide offices -- on ads which are designed to boost a particular Republican's chances of winning his or her GOP primary race.

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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.

But while the failure of the broader agenda contained within Biden's proposed "Build Back Better Act" has been a massive disappointment to many, Biden did manage to chalk up a few legislative achievements -- although you wouldn't know it, because Democrats haven't bothered to toot their own horn very effectively. Only about one-quarter of the public is even aware that Biden got a massive infrastructure bill through Congress last year. This is a failure of communication, from Biden on down to each congressional Democrat. Democrats need to inform voters not just what they want to do in the future, but what they've already done.

Perhaps that's all water under the bridge at this point, but it doesn't mean the Democrats can't pass a few big bills right before the midterm election season, and perhaps when threatened with losing control of Congress they will actually go out and brag about such things in public. As things stand, there are now three big bills which might soon manage to arrive on Joe Biden's desk for his signature.

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Today Representative Elaine Luria tweeted out what could be called a deleted scene from the video testimony presented at the most-recent House Select Committee hearing. This new video shows more of Donald Trump's edits to the speech that his aides prepared for him to give on January 7th, the day after the failed insurrection attempt. From the Washington Post report today:

Rep. Elaine Luria (D-Va.) posted a video Monday on Twitter showing previously unpublicized testimony from several people close to Trump, centered on a speech he was supposed to give Jan. 7, 2021.

"It took more than 24 hours for President Trump to address the nation again after his Rose Garden video on January 6th in which he affectionately told his followers to go home in peace," Luria tweeted. "There were more things he was unwilling to say."

This adds to our understanding of what Trump found objectionable in the speech (in addition to the outtakes of his attempts to record this speech, which were presented at the last hearing). It includes a portion of a draft document titled: "Remarks on National Healing" that was personally edited by Trump (and his Sharpie). This was attested to by his own daughter Ivanka, in the video clip Luria posted.

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Initially, tonight's hearing by the House Select Committee to Investigate January 6th was supposed to be the final hearing. That was before all the rest of the hearings caused so many other witnesses and tangential stories to come out of the woodwork. Nevertheless, it was indeed (as I wrote yesterday) the "season finale" of the summer miniseries of televised hearings. The committee is now promising to reconvene and hold more public hearings in September, to cover all the new information. The committee will stay busy during the August congressional break, digging into all the new evidence and witnesses who have come forward, and then they'll report back afterwards to the public. So there's all that to look forward to....

Tonight was billed as the "187-minute hearing," but (cue rimshot) it only lasted about 165 minutes. The "187" figure, of course, was the time between Donald Trump leaving the stage at his rally at the Ellipse and when he (finally) put out his "go home" tweet, over three hours later.

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I write this just before the start of the season finale of "House Select Committee Investigates January 6th" -- which I should mention is not actually the title of a television miniseries, as these hearings are not being presented for entertainment purposes. They are being presented for informational purposes, because every American deserves to know what happened before, during, and after that dark day in American history. They are hours-long extended public service announcements, in other words. Very sober proceedings exposing very serious crimes and misdemeanors -- including, tonight, dereliction of duty by the country's commander-in-chief.

All of that is doubtlessly true, and yet... they still are television shows. I've been aware of this from the beginning, when I began referring to the hearings as "episodes." Tonight will be "Episode 8," although in truth it will actually be the ninth public hearing from the select committee (the "pilot show" aired last summer, featuring four police officers who fought for their country and the U.S. Constitution that day).

And I have to say, here at the end of the summer season, the committee has handled the "television show" aspect of the hearings almost flawlessly. Each episode was riveting and informative, without getting too much into the weeds of minutiae. All of the witnesses were chosen brilliantly, since they all have had very compelling stories to tell, and their stories have all added vital pieces to the puzzle of understanding just what took place... and how, and why. The hearings haven't dragged on too long (two to three hours each), and the chair usually calls a "bathroom break" halfway through. All the serious broadcast networks (all except Fox, in other words) have carried all these hearings live. Tonight will be the second primetime hearing, a bookend to the first hearing.

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A bipartisan group of senators has unveiled two bills today which would improve and protect the process of presidential elections. One of these bills would update the 1887 Electoral Count Act (a law which was very vaguely written and legally confusing in parts), while the other bill addresses more peripheral subjects such as doubling the penalties for violence against poll workers. Both bills have the support of nine Republicans, so both have a very good chance of eventually being enacted.

The 1887 Electoral Count Act was the last time Congress came in to clean up the mess from a highly contested presidential election, but the law had some major loopholes and was nowhere near specific enough to address all the possible problems with the process. The rewrite will go a long way towards fixing the flaws that were highlighted in the January 6th insurrection attempt, but it may not address all the problems we may face in 2024 and beyond. January 6th is being seen more and more as merely a trial run for what some Republicans (who have sworn more fealty to Donald Trump than to the U.S. Constitution) are planning next. The House Select Committee hearings have exposed how weak the current system is, and how many places it can be attacked for partisan gain. The two bills announced today are at least a big step in the right direction towards fixing this situation.

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There is no right to privacy specifically enumerated in the United States Constitution or any of its amendments. According to the current Supreme Court, this means that it does not legitimately exist as a foundational right of American citizens. Democrats, for over half a century, have been complacent in relying on previous Supreme Court rulings which did spell out what the implied right to privacy encompassed: the right to marry someone of a different race, the right to purchase and use contraceptives, the right to an abortion, and the right of gay couples to marry (among others). All of those spring from the same right to privacy, but one of them obviously does not exist anymore at the national level.

For all that time -- all those decades -- Congress has never passed any law which enshrined those rights, or the basic right of privacy itself. They all figured the court had ruled, therefore passing a law was unnecessary. They were wrong, obviously.

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Since the Supreme Court declared a free-for-all on laws which restrict abortion, Republicans have been in a race to see which state can produce the most extreme forced-birth laws possible. Idaho Republicans seem to have won the award for "most extreme idea yet," as their party convention just rejected an amendment to their party platform which would have allowed for an exception to the state's ban on abortions if the mother was in "lethal danger." The vote wasn't even close: 412-164. So that's where the GOP race to the extremes will inevitably end up, one assumes. If they had their way, Idaho Republicans would condemn all women with ectopic pregnancies to needless death, plain and simple. The fact that if the mother dies the baby will also die doesn't seem to concern them in the least.

The Idaho GOP is out in front of the rest of the Republican Party, but not by much. Before the Dobbs decision was handed down, the big push by anti-abortion politicians was to limit the weeks covered. Abortions would be allowable up to 15 weeks, or 13, or even just six. After that point, abortions would not be allowed. But now that they've achieved their goal at the Supreme Court, the forced-birth contingent is freed from any semblance of rationality. Right now the arguments being fought politically mostly center on the other two exceptions commonly included in laws (up to this point, at any rate) -- allowing abortions in cases of rape and/or incest. The 10-year-old rape victim in Ohio will just be the first such tragic case in the national news, as more and more of these dire situations will be faced by more and more women. It's a lot easier to pontificate about the number of weeks in a political setting than it is to try to explain forcing a fourth-grader to carry her rapist's baby to term.

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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.

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