JustOneMinute

The Long Sought Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal Is Announced

Joe Biden and a group of Senators announce they have a deal for a $600 billion infrastructure package. That's a long way from the several trillion dollar package Democrats had been looking for.

Biden insists that this slimmed-down deal will move in tandem with a larger Democrat-only package that will be a reconciliation cramdown:

Mr. Biden’s endorsement marked a breakthrough in his efforts to forge an infrastructure compromise, but it was far from a guarantee that the package would be enacted. Both the president and top Democrats say the plan, which constitutes a fraction of the $4 trillion economic proposal Mr. Biden has put forth, can only move together with a much larger package of spending and tax increases that Democrats are planning to try to push through Congress unilaterally, over the opposition of Republicans.

“If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Mr. Biden said during remarks in the East Room of the White House. “It’s in tandem.”

Mickey Kaus tries to game this out and comes away thinking that Biden and his party will be under tremendous pressure to deliver something before the midterms. If the only bill that gets to Biden's desk is this little thing, he'll sign it.

Save The Filibuster!

Sen. KSyn argues that the filibuster promotes bipartisan buy-in and leads to longer lasting legislations. She does not mention the ten years of scuffling over the ACA as an example of the perils of cram-down lawmaking. But she should have!

Long time readers may take a dim view of Matt Yglesias, who was a young fire-breathing progressive twenty years ago. However, like so many of us, he seems to have mellowed with age. Or I have. Hmm, motion is relative, yes?

In any case, he makes an interesting argument about "The rise and importance of Secret Congress". His piece obviously violates the first rule of Secret Congress Club but his gist is this: in the current (and likely ongoing) hyper-politicized Nationalization Of Every Issue, neither side wants to give the other a visible win. Visible! As long as no one is paying attention, Congress can grind out legislation.

I'm not sure whether his Substack allows free trial views so here is an extended excerpt:

The core of the Secret Congress theory is that on highly salient issues, lawmaking is dominated by the question of which party controls which chambers and by how slim their majorities are. Under these circumstances, polarization is high and compromise is rare. Congress is prone to gridlock, and when solutions pass, they pass on a near party line. 

• • Highly salient successes tend to be the most famous legislative achievements of a president’s term (the ACA for Obama, the TCJA for Trump, the ARP for Biden). 

  • Highly salient failures tend to be what people point to when they call Congress gridlocked: the 2013 Manchin-Toomey background checks bill, Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the American Health Care Act, the Dream Act, etc.

But while these highly salient issues are the subject of heated debate in Regular Congress, Secret Congress keeps plugging away in obscurity. 

The key is that public attention creates incredibly perverse incentives. Members of the minority (rightly) think that any popular, well-known bill that passes on a bipartisan basis is going to help the standing of the president. David Mayhew’s book “Divided We Govern” studies the 1946-2002 period and finds that periods in which the president and Congress are on opposite sides generate just as much legislation as periods of unified government. Another classic Mayhew book, “Congress: The Electoral Connection,” is about how members of Congress like to win elections. Getting bills passed helps members win re-election by giving them things to take credit for. But in an era where congressional voting is so highly correlated with presidential approval, and primary electorates say they’d rather have members that fight the other party than help their own state, it’s extremely risky for a member of Congress to let an opposite-party president be seen as successful.

In their essay “The Logic of Conditional Party Governance,” political science professors John Aldrich and David Rohde write, “As conflict increases, so do the negative consequences to members of either party from a legislative victory by their opponents.” But, when something has low salience, its passage isn’t seen as conceding ground to the other side. No Republican congressman is going to be primaried for voting for the low-salience Endless Frontiers Act, because it doesn’t count as “giving Biden a win.” 

Plausible. One obvious implication: the President's use of the 'bully pulpit' to sway public opinion probably hardens battle lines and makes compromise less likely. The good news - if we need a President who puts people to sleep rather than fires up half and antagonizes half, with Biden in office we have the man for the moment.

Another perverse incentive he notes is that activist groups (I think of lefty groups but there are righties as well) can't fundraise off of subtle silence and suasion:

But here’s a tough pill. The way a lot of contemporary activism and advocacy works is that you want to be able to show your funders that you are making progress. That tends to mean doing things that are intended to get attention, making a lot of noise in the press, building alliances with other activist groups, and otherwise demonstrating that your loud-and-proud activity is making an impact. This conceit tends to make its adherents very skeptical of popularism — the view that elected officials and party-aligned groups should emphasize a small number of high-polling ideas. They want to say that their advocacy work is helping expand the set of political possibilities. The Secret Congress theory suggests this is not only false but backward. Aggressive, partisan-affiliated public advocacy can help you pass bills if it leads to landslide electoral victories, but in a non-electoral context, you are more likely to make headway by staying chill.

"Staying chill"?!? That is not how we do things these days.

Happy Father's Day All!

Away we go.

Ross Douthat praises Biden for ignoring the crazies in his own party and dealing with Russia sensibly. Which he describes as Trump with better optics and a friendlier press. Do you remember four years of 'Trump is Putin's stooge"? Many do not!

Now comes Biden, making moves in Russia policy that are essentially conciliatory — freezing a military aid package to Ukraine, ending U.S. sanctions on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Germany to Russia, a return of ambassadors — and setting up a summit that can reasonably be regarded as a modest propaganda coup for Putin. And suddenly almost everyone wants to act as though the Trump years never happened: Not just the Republicans accusing Biden of being soft on Moscow, but the Democrats who have apparently decided that it’s fine to hand concessions and photo ops and promises of “stability” to the regime that just yesterday was the Great Reactionary Enemy, the liberal order’s greatest threat.

But this isn’t actually a column about liberal amnesia or hypocrisy. It’s a column about the wisdom of the Biden administration, in recognizing that certain Trump-era hysterias within its party can be safely put to sleep.

Some of those hysterias belong to the progressive left, and plenty has been written about Biden’s refusal to let woke Twitter set all his political priorities. But the Russia hysteria was a paranoia of the center, an establishment overreaction, so it’s notable to see Biden and his team steer away from it as well.

In this case, what the White House seems to grasp is that pieces of Trumpist foreign policy are worth preserving: not the dodgy business ties (well, depending on where Hunter Biden resurfaces) and the weird man-crushes on dictators, but the general idea of a U.S. foreign policy reoriented away from Europe and the Middle East and reorganized to contain the threat of China, with late-1990s fantasies about the inexorable expansion of the liberal order left behind.

This reorientation does not require friendship with Putin, which would be morally undesirable and strategically unlikely. But it requires treating Russia policy primarily as the management of a weak and therefore mischief-making competitor, rather than a grand crusade against a number-one geopolitical adversary. Hence the summit and its talk of “strategic stability,” hence the conciliatory moves that if Trump had made them would have headlined every hour on MSNBC.

Notably, Biden can get away with this — meaning his stiff-arms to the center-left Resistance as well as the woke left — not just because of the power of Draper-ish partisan amnesia, but because his core support within the Democratic Party didn’t belong to either of the groups he’s stiff-arming.

His discussion of the divisions within the Dem Party is interesting but disturbing - as he notes, the Woke Left are the young and restless, so their crazy ideas won't be going away anytime soon.

 

 

 

Narrative Uber Alles

Andrew Sullivan denounces critical race theory and the ongoing media attempt to circle the wagons. Another obvious recent example of woke 'narrative uber alles' "reporting" was the media's lack of curiousity with the Wuhan lab leak theory.

Thursday Action

Away we go.

I do have to say - I can't take the Biden fan-boys seriously. C'mon, all his foreign policy chops? What happened to 'wrong about everything'?

Putin-Biden would have been a mismatch twenty years ago and it hasn't gotten better. Well, that isn't a fair comparison anyway, since Putin's combination of physical energy, mental acuity and ruthlessness put him ahead of all our recent Presidents. But ask me about John McCain, who may have been the one guy that could have impressed Putin. His POW resume is scary. And either Bush 41 or Reagan would have done fine, especially since Putin would have been a mere lad.

The Texas Power Grid Struggling Again?

I'm getting too old for this. Becoming an expert on the Texas power grid doesn't seem like much of a hobby for my sunset years.

Texas grid operator urges electricity conservation as many power generators are unexpectedly offline and temperatures rise

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas says a large number of power plants are offline, but it could not provide details as to what may be causing the “very concerning” number of outages. At the same time, the state is experiencing near-record demand for electricity in June.

I'm sure the late spring(!) heat wave isn't helping but c'mon - Texas gets hot in the summer is news? Texas gets cold in the winter and hot in the summer and the gird can't handle either?!?

Well. Each morning in my (relative) youth I rode the Metro North commuter rail into the Greatest City in the World. I learned that light rail is the most economical and reliable form of mass transit EVER! Unless it is too hot, too cold, too sunny, too rainy, or there are too many squirrels playing near the tracks. Metro North sort of had the reverse Post Office motto - almost nothing could fail to derail them.

If Texas is going to mess with us and undermine the case for light regulation with their stupid grid problems there will be outrage. Probably not from me, however.

Not Yet Ready For The Weekend Open Thread

Away we go. Jonathan Turley is very interesting on the Supreme Court's recent display of collegiality:

In the latest decision, Borden v. United States, the lineup of justices was strikingly non-ideological. Justice Elena Kagan wrote the opinion for Justices Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Neil Gorsuch, with a concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas — three liberal justices and two conservatives agreeing to limit the meaning of a "violent felony" for purposes of the Armed Career Criminal Act.

Last week, the decision in Van Buren v. United States was a majority of three liberals and three conservatives. In that case, the most senior justice was Breyer; he assigned it to his conservative colleague, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who wrote for Justices Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, Kagan and Brett Kavanaugh. Although he was on the other side in Van Buren, Justice Thomas joined his liberal colleagues in Borden.

These decisions follow a litany of unanimous decisions from the court, which seems to be sending a message in the timing of the release of their opinions: The justices do not rule on cases to send messages to Congress, but they do control what cases are accepted and when those decisions are released. It is hard not to view the last few weeks as a type of judicial “harrumph” to the continuing calls for court-packing. While we expect more ideological splits in a few upcoming cases, these cases reaffirm that they are not so rigid or “hopelessly divided,” as Democratic leaders and other critics have suggested. .

I suspect its not just Roberts who is worried about the court's current public perception as hopelessly partisan and divided.

Meanwhile, Back In Lafayette Park...

Its Narrative versus Reality at Lafayette Park. Or is it Narrative versus Narrative? ABC News on the Inspector General's report about the clearing of Layayette Park prior to Trump's controversial photo op last summer:

Police did not clear Lafayette Square so Trump could hold 'Bible' photo op: Watchdog

Trump claimed the inspector general's report "totally" exonerated him.

Well, OK-ish. The IG is a Trump-appointed holdover, so there's that. And regardless of when the clearing of the park was originally planned, I'm skeptical that the tempo wasn't affected by the surprise news of an impending Presidential visit. My emphasis on the word "planning" below:

U.S. Park Police did not clear Lafayette Park and the nearby area of protesters on June 1, 2020, so President Donald Trump could walk from the White House over to St. John’s Church, but learned of his interest in surveying the site hours after they already had begun planning to clear the area to put up new fencing, according to a new watchdog report.

And later in the story:

Interior Department Inspector General Mark Greenblatt, nominated by Trump, called the events of June 1 a "a particularly tumultuous event in a tumultuous time" and said their review looked at why U.S. Park Police decided to clear Lafayette Square when and in the manner they did, and whether the president's plans to come out of the White House influenced those decisions. The review ultimately found park police had been planning to clear the area for days to install anti-scale fencing and that the decisions on the ground were not changed because of the president or White House's plans.

"We did not find evidence that a potential presidential visit to the park or the St John's Church influenced the park police's decision making, or their deployment, you know, in their operation to clear out the park. So that's the big, the big finding of our report is, is the is the clear evidence of why they decided to do so and when they made the decision, and on the flip side, the lack of evidence related to the President's potential visit influencing that decision," he said on ABC News Live.

...

Citing interviews, radio dispatches, videos and other records from Park Police, the 38-page report echoes claims from senior Trump administration officials last year that the park wasn’t cleared for Trump’s controversial photo op.

One Park Police commander told the inspector general's office they were caught off guard about Trump's plans during a conversation with Attorney General Bill Barr, who asked, "Are these people still going to be here when POTUS [President of the United States] comes out?" according to the report.

"The USPP operations commander told us he had not known until then that the President would be coming out of the White House and into Lafayette Park. He said he replied to the Attorney General, 'Are you freaking kidding me?'" the report reads.

But it does not explore why so many officers used as much force as they did against peaceful protesters in the area that day -- or dig deeper into the actions of the Secret Service and other federal entities on the ground.

I'm surprised the White House would schedule a Presidential stroll without calling ahead. But that was the Park Police story and the IG didn't vex others to hear their version.

Greenblatt told ABC News that even though his office did not speak to Barr, the White House, or Secret Service for this review, it would have done so if the evidence indicated there was pressure from any of those sources that had an impact on Park Police decisions.

"We would have pursued evidence had it gone elsewhere. But we found that the U.S. Park Police officials on the ground, they owned the decision and the corroborating evidence supported that," he said on ABC News Live.

Well. Fire and brimstone from Glenn Greenwald, who dislikes the legacy media more than he dislikes Trump. Hot Air has more excerpts from the report.

 

Tax Returns Of The Rich And Famous

Thanks to a leak from (almost surely) a politically motivated IRS staffer, ProPublica has access to the tax returns of many of the wealthiest Americans.

Their breakthrough  insight: Bezos, Buffet, Gates et al are seeing huge, untaxed gains in the stocks they own. Hence their tax rates relative to 'economic' income are tiny. This is a stunning revelation to everyone except those who have spent more than five minutes studying the subject of wealth and taxes.

From their story:

ProPublica has obtained a vast trove of Internal Revenue Service data on the tax returns of thousands of the nation’s wealthiest people, covering more than 15 years. The data provides an unprecedented look inside the financial lives of America’s titans, including Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg. It shows not just their income and taxes, but also their investments, stock trades, gambling winnings and even the results of audits.

Taken together, it demolishes the cornerstone myth of the American tax system: that everyone pays their fair share and the richest Americans pay the most. The IRS records show that the wealthiest can — perfectly legally — pay income taxes that are only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions, if not billions, their fortunes grow each year.

...

America’s billionaires avail themselves of tax-avoidance strategies beyond the reach of ordinary people. Their wealth derives from the skyrocketing value of their assets, like stock and property. Those gains are not defined by U.S. laws as taxable income unless and until the billionaires sell.

To capture the financial reality of the richest Americans, ProPublica undertook an analysis that has never been done before. We compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in that same time period.

We’re going to call this their true tax rate.

It takes far too long but eventually they get to the obvious - if the problem is the tax code doesn't recognize unrealized capital gains, the solution would be to change the code so it does recognize unrealized gains as income. That is Sen. Ron Wyden's proposal. (Ages ago I was suggesting something similar.)

As to the little matter of IRS privacy and the law, well, whatever. I have no doubt the Biden DoJ will go hard after these leakers.

 

Big News Out There, Probably

Too many distractions.

A Heckuva Gun Violence Awareness Day

This headline is a bit of a shocker:

Federal Judge Overturns California’s 32-Year Assault Weapons Ban

Whoa, what? Don't get me started on the "logic" of an AWB. My basic position is that semi-automatic rifles with detachable magazines are dangerous; making them black and adding a pistol grip and a bayonet mount does not make them significantly more dangerous. Consequently, the AWB is a brain-locked yet highly emotive debate centered on ignorance and fear and focused on cosmetics rather than substance. Fighting an epidemic of alcohol deaths (about 80,000 per year) by banning gin but not vodka would be about as sensible.

That said, the ignorant and fearful get votes, too, and the idea that California (or NY, Massachusetts, Illinois, or pick your favorite Blue state) can not regulate this aspect of public safety will cause a MAJOR political storm. If the Supreme Court restricts abortion and expands gun rights prior to November 2022, prepare for un-civil war.

But what is the likely timing? This is one judge - normally the liberal Ninth Circuit would rein him in. A solid clue on timing is this:

Judge Benitez was appointed as a district court judge in 2003 and confirmed by the Senate the following year.

In 2017, he blocked a new California law that would have banned magazines of more than 10 rounds. A three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld his ruling last year in a split decision, but the appeals court said in February that an 11-judge panel would rehear the case.

A 2017 ruling is still up in the air? I can see why the gun comntrollers want to keep this away from the Supreme Court but this is a strong delay game. Long time NCAA hoops fans are recalling the old "four corners" attack. Sorry, 'attack'>

Lower The Cone of Silence

The Vanity Fair piece describing the interest if some US officials in preserving a 'see-no-evil' probe of the Wuhan lab is a big deal. Its also a big deal for Fauci, whose emails confirm what we all knew - he was a supporter of gain of function research and wasn't eager to see the Wuhan lab put under a microscope.

This email caught my eye. Fauci is flagging for attention a troubling published paper:

More than a year prior, however, Fauci sent an email to NIH Principal Deputy Director Hugh Auchincloss on Feb. 1, 2020, with an attachment labeled “Baric, Shi et al - Nature medicine - SARS Gain of function.pdf” and the subject line, “IMPORTANT.” Fauci’s message had a tone of urgency, saying, “Hugh: It is essential that we speak this AM. Keep your cell phone on. I have a conference call at 7:45 AM with [Health and Human Services Secretary Alex] Azar. It likely will be over at 8:45 AM. Read this paper as well as the e-mail that I will forward to you now. You will have tasks today that must be done. Thanks, Tony.”

That is almost surely this paper that went on to become controversial. Baric and Shih are credited as authors, Baric is a leading GoF researcher in the US, and check the title:

"A SARS-like cluster of circulating bat coronaviruses shows potential for human emergence"

Potential for human emergence! Yike! And why are they so sure? The abstract is high-level techno-babble, but the gist is clear: they sliced, diced and recombined viruses, produced live candidates, and found some to be infectious in test tubes and hapless little animals.

Here we examine the disease potential of a SARS-like virus, SHC014-CoV, which is currently circulating in Chinese horseshoe bat populations¹. Using the SARS-CoV reverse genetics system², we generated and characterized a chimeric virus expressing the spike of bat coronavirus SHC014 in a mouse-adapted SARS-CoV backbone. The results indicate that group 2b viruses encoding the SHC014 spike in a wild-type backbone can efficiently use multiple orthologs of the SARS receptor human angiotensin converting enzyme II (ACE2), replicate efficiently in primary human airway cells and achieve in vitro titers equivalent to epidemic strains of SARS-CoV. Additionally, in vivo experiments demonstrate replication of the chimeric virus in mouse lung with notable pathogenesis. Evaluation of available SARS-based immune-therapeutic and prophylactic modalities revealed poor efficacy; both monoclonal antibody and vaccine approaches failed to neutralize and protect from infection with CoVs using the novel spike protein. On the basis of these findings, we synthetically re-derived an infectious full-length SHC014 recombinant virus and demonstrate robust viral replication both in vitro and in vivo. Our work suggests a potential risk of SARS-CoV re-emergence from viruses currently circulating in bat populations.

Sort of like when I was a kid and I would test to see if something was flammable by holding a match near it. Not always the best technique if safety is a consideration.

 

Where's The Beef?!? And Pork!

Fortunately Biden is President, because if Trump was in charge and we had allegations that Russia is hacking our hot-dog production prior to the 4th of July, MLB and the NBA playoffs would be cancelled and the media would be 24/7 on "Where's the beef?".

Memorial Day, or, How Can I Remember The Post I Can't Forget?

It's Memorial Day, a day on which we honor our war dead and I hark back to a happier time - candidate Obama, observing the moment in 2008:

Obama's intro to his Memorial Day speech in New Mexico:

On this Memorial Day, as our nation honors its unbroken line of fallen heroes -- and I see many of them in the audience here today -- our sense of patriotism is particularly strong.

They've fallen - but they've gotten back up!  Well, he was in New Mexico...

To quote a Hollywood great, we've all passed a lot of water since then.