Not reconciled: An update

Yesterday morning the White House posted a summary of its so-called Framework of a Spendapalooza bill to be jammed through Congress by Democrats via the reconciliation process. The White House posted the summary just before President Biden went up to Capitol Hill to meet with the House Democratic caucus.

Biden followed up with one of those 20-minute White House speeches in which he stares vacantly into the teleprompter while he struggles to read the text served up to him. The White House has posted the text of his remarks here. I have posted the video below.

The falsity of the remarks lies somewhere between painful and outrageous. Listening to Biden recite the text is tortuous. If ordered by a court as punishment for a crime, it might violate the Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

Not a single congressional Republican supports the Spendapalooza in any form, yet this is Biden’s line:

I want to thank my colleagues in the Congress for their leadership. We’ve spent hours and hours and hours over months and months working on this.

No one got everything they wanted, including me, but that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on.

I’ve long said compromise and consensus are the only way to get big things done in a democracy, important things for the country.

“That’s consensus” requires translation. It means Democrats agree. Otherwise, not so much. And this is at the top of the speech. It rolls downhill slowly from there. Every element of the big bang deserves close scrutiny — the kind of scrutiny Carrie Lukas gives to the proposed daycare/preschool gravy train in the Federalist column “Inside Democrats’ Plan To Indoctrinate Your Toddlers In Preschool.”

I bet you didn’t know you were going to be paying for electric vehicles coming and going. You could feel the excitement coming through in his confusion:

We’ll build out the first-ever national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations all across the country. So, when you buy an electric vehicle, and you get credit for buying it — when you buy an electric vehicle, you can go all the way across America on a “single tank of gas,” figuratively speaking. It’s not gas; you plug it in. Five hundred thousand of them — these stations along the way.

Is there any sentient voter who isn’t tired of this:

I don’t want to punish anyone’s success. I’m a capitalist. I want everyone to be able to — if they want to be a millionaire or billionaire, to be able to seek their goal. But all I’m asking is: Pay your fair share. Pay your fair share. Pay your fair share. And right now, many of them are paying virtually nothing.

It’s getting old!

And I think Biden had trouble reading his script when he came to another golden oldie: “For much too long, the working people of this nation and the middle class of this country have been dealt out of the American deal, and it’s time to deal them back in.” The American deal? I think he meant “dream,” but deal me out!

You would never know that Biden was recently vice president of the United States for eight years. He sounds like a maverick outsider fighting against the man.

I would love to see the live time reaction of likely voters to Biden’s recitation on the dials used by political consultants. In his remarks Biden invoked his popular vote in the 2020 election as indicative of support for his Spendapalooza. Something tells me that this is not to be taken at face value.

The proceedings yesterday had as their sole purpose pressuring Democrats to pass the infrastructure bill before Biden took off for Rome, yet it failed. The Democrats’ socialist contingent resisted. Nancy Pelosi called off the vote she had hoped to hold last night.

Reading the insider reports by Axios (“President Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi huffed and puffed Thursday, but it was progressives who threatened to blow the whole House down if their demands weren’t met”), Politico (“Biden already won”), and Punchbowl News (“[Biden] was unable to crack the progressives’ opposition”), I am unclear whether this was a defeat for Biden. They seem to disagree.

However, the Biden/Pelosi deadline was an artifact of political theater. They will get it — whatever it is — done some time later. And what they will get done is going to be monumentally bad in ways that we will have to live with for a long time.

Notice: All comments are subject to moderation. Our comments are intended to be a forum for civil discourse bearing on the subject under discussion. Commenters who stray beyond the bounds of civility or employ what we deem gratuitous vulgarity in a comment — including, but not limited to, “s***,” “f***,” “a*******,” or one of their many variants — will be banned without further notice in the sole discretion of the site moderator.

Responses