AND NOW THE NEWS...

What a helluva way to wake up this morning. Turn on Jonathan Capehart on MSNBC and the tape is rolling of Joe Manchin on Fox telling the work he’ll never vote for build Back Better and destroying six months hard work by Democrats and demonstrating what a piece of shit he is. My screenwriter’s mind then spent 30 minutes devising plots in which Joe Gets His, none of which I am going to delve into publicly since I don’t want to give anyone ideas; we’ll leave that with Dylan’s line: “If my thoughts, dreams could be seen/they’d probably put my head in a guillotine.”

There’s no other way to describe this as other than a disaster. I wish to hell there was a guilty party that could be blamed for this, but you can’t even really blame Manchin. The rickety, nailed-together-with-tacks system the Founders created 242 years ago is finally giving way under the increased load. Our system wasn’t devised to support politics as they are done today, any more than it was politics as they were done 160 years ago.

I was going to write about how this all could be foreseen happening this spring, that the day they said “We’ll get back to it in March” was politicalese for “This is dead. It’s not Build Back Better; it’s Build Back Never,” but events overtook that. Nevertheless, there are some things I’ve thinking about that are perhaps more relevant in the wake of Senator Shithead going on Fox to all but announce his membership in the other party.

The Democrats have some really big hills to take, with the enemy well dug-in and heavily armed.

Number One: If they do not find a way to make the Child Tax Credit come back to life by February, they can bend over and kiss their asses good-bye, because all those people who got help and then got the rug pulled out from under them are going to be Seriously Pissed Off. That’s going to be hard, because Manchin made clear that the only way he will support it is if it’s presented at its “full cost” over ten years; that’s the CBO score Senator Huckleberry Closetcase had asked for last week, so he could say that BBB was really $4.5 trillion, just for this part. And Manchin has also posited that a separate Child Tax Credit bill would have to have “strict means testing” and a “work requirement.” Those two things will never be accepted by the Progressives, and he will never accept the bill without them.

Number Two: If there isn’t a way to change the Senate rules to allow a “carve out” from the filibuster rules in order to get voting rights reform bills passed, the likelihood of the far right revolutionaries of the GOP successfully carrying out the overthrow of democracy that they are already setting up, with a takeover of House and Senate in November allowing them to do what they want in 2024 regardless of what the national vote is for president, is as close to “baked in” as it gets. And Manchin just explained his views on changing the filibuster right after he stabbed the BBB in the back, stating he will not agree to any reform that does not “protect the rights of the minority.”

I have no idea how either of these gets resolved, since any of my “guillotine thoughts” founder on the fact that any replacement for Manchin from West Virginia would be a Republican who makes him look like the socialist he says he isn’t. It’s a case of “can’t live with him/can’t do anything to him.”

And even if there is a way to deal with Manchin on the filibuster and voting rights, there’s “Scylla” to his “Charybdis” (two legendary large rocks on either side of the very narrow Straits of Messina, that create waves in the strait that make transit in an ancient sailing vessel nearly impossible). Senator Sinema is making it clear that she intends to keep protecting the Senate’s 60-vote requirement on most legislation and she isn’t ready to entertain changing rules to pass sweeping elections or voting legislation with a simple majority. In a statement that makes me want to laugh and throw up simultaneously, her spokesperson said this last week that Sinema “continues to support the Senate's 60-vote threshold, to protect the country from repeated radical reversals in federal policy which would cement uncertainty, deepen divisions, and further erode Americans’ confidence in our government.”

Another argument is to work to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate in November and then come back to all this when Manchin and Sinema no longer have the power they do in a 50-50 Senate. That runs head-on into the very likely fact that the current Democratic Senate numbers may be as high as they will ever be, as red and blue states sort themselves solidly one way or the other. If the Republican Senate seats up for grabs in Blue States go Blue, and the Blue seats in Red States (Raphael Warnock) go red, there are more Red States than there are Blue States, and Democrats can kiss the Senate good-bye for as long as all this lasts. So even if somehow the House majority is saved - and that’s a mighty big “If” that just got bigger

I don’t think Kyrsten Sinema gives a rat’s ass about voter suppression, or about the proper functioning of the Senate, now or in the future. I think she’s just overjoyed to be the sole occupant of her own political universe. Remember back in March, when she played “John McCain” with a showboat thumbs-down on setting the federal minimum wage at $15 an hour?

Punchbowl News’ Jake Sherman, who was on Capehart’s show this morning said he thinks from observing Manchin and talking to him nearly every day this past year, that Manchin is also very taken with his own importance and the public recognition he gets now in this situation.

So I think all this talk about getting voter reform done next month can be filed under Don’t Hold Your Breath Or You Will Turn Blue And Die before that happens.

There is very little the Democratic leadership in the Senate can do with a one-vote majority, an insane opposition party, and two of its own members clogging the process. That’s the state of things at the end of 2021, a year in which Democratic “control” of three branches of the government has turned out to be the shadow of a specter of a phantom of a mirage.

There are also worrisome signs about President Biden’s chances of rallying Democratic voters this fall if there is to be any chance of holding the House. Notably, the only thing that definitely changed the peoples’ lives for the better this first year of his presidency - the Child Tax Credit payments - has just been ripped away. With no chance of all the good things in BBB coming to fruition, and with little chance of changing the planned voter suppressions around the country, there is a real likelihood of Democratic voter disenchantment.

This is shown in some recent polling one cannot flick aside.

In Gallup’s most recent poll, Biden is down to 35 percent approval from 70 percent in January with younger voters, while a YouGov/The Economic poll released this past Thursday found his job approval with young voters has drooped to 29 percent, while 50 percent disapprove, “the worst for any age group.”

Other polls of young voters aren’t much better.

He’s at 47 approve, 52 percent disapprove in a CNN poll out Wednesday.

An NPR/Marist poll early this month had him at 38 percent approval vs 53 percent disapproval.

A similarly timed Monmouth poll put him at 33 percent approval and 49 percent disapproval.

The best he got was in a Fox Business poll from last week, in which voters 18-34 gave him 52 percent approval, 46 percent disapproval. That would seem to be an “outlier.”

As often as not over the past year, the president’s problem has been razor-thin Congressional majorities — notably a 50-50 Senate. There’s also lockstep Republican opposition, meaning Democrats look and sound more like a fractious European coalition government than a tug-of-war team all pulling in the same direction.

There is Good news.

Yes, the money from his major piece of pandemic stimulus, the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, which passed without any GOP support, is so popular Republicans all over the country are lining up to take credit for its benefits.

And the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package envisions sweeping investments in highways, bridges, rail, broadband and other areas.

And Bad New:

Unfortunately, none of that will have the kind of immediate effect the Child Tax Credit payments had: 40% of children were lifted out of poverty nation-wide over the past six months, and are now about to be dropped back into the pot.

The “own goals” the administration has scored this month don’t help. The apparent flippancy about the struggles of ordinary Americans is truly frustrating. When she was asked at a press conference why the government doesn't make rapid COVID tests free, press secretary Jen Psaki asked sarcastically, "Should we just send one to every American?" Whether such a rapid testing program would mitigate the virus's spread in the United States is beside the point. It was Psaki's tone that stung. And the answer to her tone-deaf question, in the light of the truly alarming rise in cases this past week as Omicron finally arrives, is “YES! YOU FUCKING MORON BIMBO!”

For a lot of people under 50 who are in the upper part of society by education, i.e., the people more likely to vote, there's the issue of student loans. The Trump administration suspended loan payments when the pandemic broke out, but they're set to resume next month. Biden's proposal to eliminate $10,000 in student loan debt hasn’t happened. Asked about it in that same press conference, Psaki again delivered a dose of moronic sass: "If Congress sends him a bill, he's happy to sign it. They haven't sent him a bill on that yet."

We’re supposed to rest our hopes of ANYTHING on THIS Congress?

The likelihood of voter disenchantment having a major negative effect has happened before.

Eighty years ago, the news from December 7 1941 to election day on November 4, 1942 was largely depressing. Loss and failure in the face of the enemy was widespread, and outside of one victory at Midway in June that had yet to “pay off” in concrete steps toward victory, there were few grounds for any optimism.

The result was the New Deal Democrats in the Midwest were largely defeated, replaced by Republicans who allied with the Southern Democrats to return the House of Representatives to conservative control. There was no more progressive legislation, none of what was being called inside the administration “the second New Deal” was ever presented.

Had the election happened one week later, or if the successful invasion of North Africa had happened on November 1 rather than November 8, the voter malaise would have lifted and we might not ever have this conversation, or many of the others of the past 80 years.

Much of what that “Second New Deal” wanted to create was later turned into a major piece of legislation that did more to transform America than anything else: the 1944 GI Bill of Rights.

What the Second New Deal would have done was give all that was in the GI Bill - and more! - to everybody.

Government-supported education through college. Government-guaranteed home loans. A national program of government-paid medical care.

For everybody.

Lost because voters were “disenchanted.” Because the election was held a week early, or the good news came a week late.

I wish I had a solution to all this that was better than what I have. All I can come up with is to pass on some valuable advice I received early on from my screenwriting mentor, a guy who had been successfully in the business for 40 years.

“You’re only willing to succeed to the degree you are willing to fail.”

Also, I saw a quote from Jim Acosta at CNN this past week: “I like to say our democracy is only as strong as those who are willing to fight for it.”

I’ll end on this from my friend the late Dick Best, the man who single-handedly changed the Battle of Midway from a prospective American defeat to an American victory, his answer to my question about how he managed to live through all the bad news from December 7 to June 4, and yet do what he did.

“The alternatives were too awful to contemplate.”

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