Nice Infrastructure Bill You Have There, Joe

[Midnight]

Nice Infrastructure Bill You Have There, Joe — Too Bad It Might Have Destroyed Your Presidency

BY STEPHEN GREEN NOV 08, 2021 12:15 PM ET





While Washington Democrats are busy patting themselves on the back for spending another $1.2 trillion we don’t have on an infrastructure bill that mostly isn’t infrastructure, the question they need to ask themselves is: Did they just destroy whatever is left of the Biden Administration?



The way spending works in Washington is that a minority of very vocal congresscritters — in this case, the Congressional Progressive Caucus — can try and hold hostage a massive infrastructure bill that the majority agrees on, unless they also get an even more-massive spending bill that the majority doesn’t agree on.



This is why Americans hate politics so much.



Well, one of many reasons.



New York magazine’s execrable Jonathan Chait described the situation between the CPC and everyone else back in August like so:



Historically, most partisan bills are shaped by the preferences of the members of Congress closest to the middle, and their colleagues on the political extreme simply have to go along with it. … This time, the left has real power. Progressives can credibly threaten to sink a priority that moderates care about more than they do.



Chait even called holding the infrastructure bill hostage “AOC’s time to shine.”



The big bill was crafted in large part — and I do mean large — by Senator Bernie Sanders (D-Vermont Oblast) as a $5 trillion behemoth that would mark the single biggest expansion of the welfare and regulatory state since LBJ’s “Great” Society.


The plan was this.



The smaller bill had already passed the Senate, but CPC members would vote against it if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-The Plastic Surgery Offices of Dr. Leonard Gray) brought it up for a vote before the Senate passed the Sanders bill.

Continued at link