American Politics IX: Winter is Coming

[Aggicificicerous]

That’s not how that works

The bottom line, here, is that the Johnson Treatment didn't work on Senators who didn't actually want anything
it didn’t work on guys who were just fuss and bullshit. you couldn't give the Johnson Treatment to Strom Thurmond back in the day, either. it worked on someone who actually had tangible goals that could be done by LBJ, and LBJ was one of the best people on the world to be able to find out what people could want and actually deliver it to them-but LBJ had tons more leverage than Biden does and a very different senate ( a 60+ seat majority in a senate that mostly operated under majority rule)
Like how do people think the Johnson treatment worked exactly
It wasn’t some automatic magic wand to get people to “yes”
you just can't do much with somebody who wants for nothing. And you can't go around them because the opposing party is deaf, dumb, and blind to legislative process and their constituents reward them for it

I'd say there are quite a few things Manchin wants. One of them is favourable deals for his home state. He's still a politician who's running for reelection, and I believe he narrowly beat out the Republican candidate (could be mistaken on that one). He'd love to bring home something big. He's got a hell of a lot of skeletons in his closet too. His whole family is into coal, and it's corrupt as hell. For a senator like Sinema, I'd agree with you. She's almost impossible to negotiate with. Manchin though? He can bought, he can be blackmailed.

[Page]

I've come to conclude that QAnon is like if John Wick went to kill the cashier at the gas station to avenge his dog. Their hatred is entirely justifiable but aimed at the wrong target.

[The Jamesian Republic]

I've come to conclude that QAnon is like if John Wick went to kill the cashier at the gas station to avenge his dog. Their hatred is entirely justifiable but aimed at the wrong target.

The target is among themselves.

[Necroghastia]

I've come to conclude that QAnon is like if John Wick went to kill the cashier at the gas station to avenge his dog. Their hatred is entirely justifiable but aimed at the wrong target.

The target is among themselves.

Sus

[The Jamesian Republic]

The target is among themselves.

Sus

Their enemies are within themselves.

[Bear Stearns]

I've come to conclude that QAnon is like if John Wick went to kill the cashier at the gas station to avenge his dog. Their hatred is entirely justifiable but aimed at the wrong target.

A huge chunk of the American ruling class are degenerates, predators, and rapists who have nothing but contempt for the rest of the the country. I don't get how after the Epstein thing anyone can still look at these people with respect.

QAnon was wrong in thinking Trump would fix it.

[Great Algerstonia]

The target is among themselves.

Sus

jeSUS christ get out of my head

[Kowani]

This is neither strategically feasible, politically wise, or even slightly realistic

BBB is going nowhere and it’s wasting time.

yes, the time wasting was locked in when we didn’t learn lessons from the ARP and let Manchinema dictate the pace of negotiations but that’s not inherent to BBB
But more importantly, the immediate consequence of this plan is a massive spike in child poverty
One of the main reasons you can’t just “set it back for later” is that’s a)not how the senate works and b) that’s massively harmful for lots of people

Republicans want inflation and the border crisis solved and if that can be done then they might be more willing to vote.

I need you to understand these are not legitimate concerns, they’re attacks that the GOP dredges up to hurt Biden (and they’re directly standing in the way of the inflation fixing)
You can’t attack Biden for the number of arrests or the amount of fentanyl seized at the border as evidence of him being weak and the border being “out of control” as a legitimate position
But that’s what they’re doing-because it’s all kabuki designed to work the refs and drag down Biden’s approval ratings

They’re never going to vote for his policies because giving the other side political wins is bad for republicans (notably not in reverse, Pelosi/Schumer were giving trump $4 trillion in infrastructure spending and he walked out because the house was investigating his crimes)

That’s not how that works

The bottom line, here, is that the Johnson Treatment didn't work on Senators who didn't actually want anything
it didn’t work on guys who were just fuss and bullshit. you couldn't give the Johnson Treatment to Strom Thurmond back in the day, either. it worked on someone who actually had tangible goals that could be done by LBJ, and LBJ was one of the best people on the world to be able to find out what people could want and actually deliver it to them-but LBJ had tons more leverage than Biden does and a very different senate ( a 60+ seat majority in a senate that mostly operated under majority rule)
Like how do people think the Johnson treatment worked exactly
It wasn’t some automatic magic wand to get people to “yes”
you just can't do much with somebody who wants for nothing. And you can't go around them because the opposing party is deaf, dumb, and blind to legislative process and their constituents reward them for it

I'd say there are quite a few things Manchin wants. One of them is favourable deals for his home state.

We did that-there were billions of dollars for WV in BBB. We were literally shoveling money at his state, we could have built him a goddamn spaceport. It didn’t matter one iota.

He's still a politician who's running for reelection, and I believe he narrowly beat out the Republican candidate (could be mistaken on that one).

Yes, and his calculation is that he has a better chance of being re-elected by opposing the spending than by voting for it
Is he right? Fuck if I know, maybe. But that’s not relevant to what he believes

He's got a hell of a lot of skeletons in his closet too. His whole family is into coal, and it's corrupt as hell.

do you see how this poses a problem for the climate provisions in any bill we can come up with

For a senator like Sinema, I'd agree with you. She's almost impossible to negotiate with. Manchin though? He can bought, he can be blackmailed.

There was a way-we did it in January! But it’s not “negotiating”

…I’m not going to bother with the absurdity of trying to blackmail a sitting us Senator

[Aggicificicerous]

There was a way-we did it in January! But it’s not “negotiating”

…I’m not going to bother with the absurdity of trying to blackmail a sitting us Senator

Blackmail was the wrong term to use. But his arm can be twisted.

He doesn't want BBB not because it's offering his state money, but because it conflicts with his corporate donors. That doesn't mean he can't be bought.

[Autumn Wind]

Republicans want inflation and the border crisis solved...

No, they don’t. They want them to continue to be festering problems so they can raise money of of them. They might prefer that inflation and illegal immigration decline once they’re back in power, but they don’t want to actually “solve” them.

[Umeria]

Biden invites Manchin into his office. "Hey Joe, good to see you. How's your family been? That's good to hear. Although I heard your daughter might be in some legal trouble. Yeah, she got caught red handed price-gouging EpiPens. She can go to prison for that, you know. All it would take is one call to the Attorney General. By the way, how are you planning to vote on Build Back Better?"

Tell me why it can't be done.

[Senkaku]

The bottom line, here, is that the Johnson Treatment didn't work on Senators who didn't actually want anything

The problem isn’t that Manchin “doesn’t want anything,” it’s that Biden is unwilling to threaten the things he wants as leverage, because Biden ultimately wants to use Manchin to secure an outcome they both want without taking the blame for it. There are ways he could retaliate (and if we’re actually talking about the full Johnson Treatment, I’m confident a bit of extrajudicial surveillance à la ‘60s could find some useful skeletons in Manchin’s closet).

[Aggicificicerous]

Biden invites Manchin into his office. "Hey Joe, good to see you. How's your family been? That's good to hear. Although I heard your daughter might be in some legal trouble. Yeah, she got caught red handed price-gouging EpiPens. She can go to prison for that, you know. All it would take is one call to the Attorney General. By the way, how are you planning to vote on Build Back Better?"

Tell me why it can't be done.

Exactly. And not only can she go to jail, but I wonder what connections would an FBI investigations would turn up.

[Senkaku]

Biden invites Manchin into his office. "Hey Joe, good to see you. How's your family been? That's good to hear. Although I heard your daughter might be in some legal trouble. Yeah, she got caught red handed price-gouging EpiPens. She can go to prison for that, you know. All it would take is one call to the Attorney General. By the way, how are you planning to vote on Build Back Better?"

Tell me why it can't be done.

Because Biden doesn’t want to do it. “The Biden agenda” is not actually supported by Biden, it’s just the list of things he felt he had to say during the primary to get elected that everyone around him thought he could wriggle out of later. They genuinely think the American people are stupid enough to believe Joe Manchin is the only thing stopping BBB and voting rights and a whole host of other priorities that they’d have you believe are shared by the whole Democratic Party.

[Kowani]

There was a way-we did it in January! But it’s not “negotiating”

…I’m not going to bother with the absurdity of trying to blackmail a sitting us Senator

Blackmail was the wrong term to use. But his arm can be twisted.

He doesn't want BBB not because it's offering his state money, but because it conflicts with his corporate donors. That doesn't mean he can't be bought.

how are you going to buy him
shovel more money into his coal business?

The bottom line, here, is that the Johnson Treatment didn't work on Senators who didn't actually want anything

The problem isn’t that Manchin “doesn’t want anything,” it’s that Biden is unwilling to threaten the things he wants as leverage, because Biden ultimately wants to use Manchin to secure an outcome they both want without taking the blame for it. There are ways he could retaliate (and if we’re actually talking about the full Johnson Treatment, I’m confident a bit of extrajudicial surveillance à la ‘60s could find some useful skeletons in Manchin’s closet).

this is pure conspiracism, sen
biden is unwilling to use every method at his disposal by punishing wv because...manchin hasn't given much indication that he actually cares about west virginians-and "biden tanks wv project proposal because manchin stood up to him" is not really a punishment for manchin, it's a campaign ad
this is not a very hard calculus!

biden has tons of things he could do without the senate getting involved!
but him not taking those actions means he has other considerations that he considers more important-wrongly imo, but they're still there
politicians are not sunday morning cartoon villains strategizing how best to fuck over the american people for no reason other than Being Evil
well, usually

[Cannot think of a name]

Manchin’s other problem with BBB: He doesn’t trust poor people

After months of haggling with President Joe Biden and other Democrats, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) dashed his party’s hopes on Sunday by announcing he wouldn’t vote for the Build Back Better legislation.
Publicly, his biggest gripes are about the cost of the bill. But privately, Manchin has told his colleagues that he essentially doesn’t trust low-income people to spend government money wisely.

In recent months, Manchin has told several of his fellow Democrats that he thought parents would waste monthly child tax credit payments on drugs instead of providing for their children, according to two sources familiar with the senator’s comments.
Continuing the child tax credit for another year is a core part of the Build Back Better legislation that Democrats had hoped to pass by the end of the year. The policy has already cut child poverty by nearly 30%.
Manchin’s private comments shocked several senators, who saw it as an unfair assault on his own constituents and those struggling to raise children in poverty.
Manchin has also told colleagues he believes that Americans would fraudulently use the proposed paid sick leave policy, specifically saying people would feign being sick and go on hunting trips, a source familiar with his comments told HuffPost.
Manchin’s office declined to comment for this story.
In a statement on Sunday, he said he opposed the Build Back Better agenda largely because of its cost.

What in the let them eat cake…fuck this dude.

[Hemakral]

What in the let them eat cake…fuck this dude.

yeah.
The more I read about Manchin, the less I like him. The man's in love with money and power, and that's never a good thing.

[Fiorina-Fury 161]

What in the let them eat cake…fuck this dude.

yeah.
The more I read about Manchin, the less I like him. The man's in love with money and power, and that's never a good thing.

Most politicians are. He just isn't as good at hiding it.

[Aggicificicerous]

how are you going to buy him
shovel more money into his coal business?

Business for West Virginia. That's what pork spending is for, it's what earmarks are for.

[Cannot think of a name]

I repeat myself

We’re getting a bit more sense here of the final blow up that led to the demise of the BBB. Apparently the real blow up was that the White House put out a statement last week in which the President said he believed he was making progress on finalizing a Build Back Better deal with Joe Manchin. The key apparently was that he named Manchin specifically rather than Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema or Manchin and the rest of the caucus or whatever else.

In other words, in what was actually a positive and cordial statement he pointed to Manchin by name. In other words, kinda sorta implicitly saying that Manchin was the hold up but that he was optimistic they’d get to a deal. This apparently set Manchin off and led him to torpedo the negotiations and basically the President’s whole domestic agenda. How do we know this? Steven Clemons goes into the details here and Clemons is very close to Manchin.

As Clemons explains, Manchin saw his being named in the statement as “a breach of process, a breach of spirit, a breach of Joe and Joe working this out.” He seems to believe it was Biden’s staff rather than the President himself who committed the lapse. This is what Manchin was apparently referring to this morning when he told a West Virginia talk radio station: “They drove some things, they put some things out that were absolutely inexcusable.”
[…]
None of this changes the reality of the demise of serious climate action or a refundable child tax credit or universal pre-K or a bunch of other things. But it does illuminate the last year and makes clear that ‘getting tough’ on Manchin wasn’t really a tool the White House had in its arsenal. Just putting out a press release that named him and made him feel bad and somehow made him think people would blame him for what was happening made him go postal.

So, he got triggered by that? Really? Well, he was going to get blamed if he did tank it (which he is). I suspect they're going to blame him almost fully for their loses come next year.

How wrong would they be, really?

[Kowani]

how are you going to buy him
shovel more money into his coal business?

Business for West Virginia. That's what pork spending is for, it's what earmarks are for.

we just tried that
it didn't work

[Rusozak]

how are you going to buy him
shovel more money into his coal business?

Business for West Virginia. That's what pork spending is for, it's what earmarks are for.

How about we just disband West Virginia as a state?

[Hemakral]

yeah.
The more I read about Manchin, the less I like him. The man's in love with money and power, and that's never a good thing.

Most politicians are. He just isn't as good at hiding it.

I occasionally fool myself into optimism.

[Howling Fantods]

Business for West Virginia. That's what pork spending is for, it's what earmarks are for.

How about we just disband West Virginia as a state?

I agree, they're raison d'etre has been null ever since the end of the civil war

[Senkaku]

this is pure conspiracism, sen

Is it? He was fine letting Pelosi try to separate the bills until the progressives heaped the pressure on; then he convinced them (somehow— despite a lack of obvious carrots or sticks, not unlike the Manchin case) to go along with it. He won’t do shit about student loans, his people are ridiculing the idea of providing free covid testing— I don’t think it’s “pure conspiracism” at all to suggest the man is not as committed to the “Biden agenda” as he’d like people to believe. This whole thing feels very much like an exercise in setting someone else up to take the fall for a failure the White House saw coming a mile away and wasn't too concerned about anyways.

biden is unwilling to use every method at his disposal by punishing wv because...manchin hasn't given much indication that he actually cares about west virginians-and "biden tanks wv project proposal because manchin stood up to him" is not really a punishment for manchin, it's a campaign ad
this is not a very hard calculus!

Well, it might be worth a shot, since apparently literally nothing else will work? Indulging the proud tradition of abusing the security services to investigate political rivals seems like a risky but fruitful avenue too— I mean the worst case is that it doesn’t work, in which case not much has really changed, has it?

biden has tons of things he could do without the senate getting involved!
but him not taking those actions means he has other considerations that he considers more important-wrongly imo, but they're still there

Him not taking actions that he could have taken at almost any point doesn’t suggest to me that he’s holding off because of “other considerations,” it suggests he doesn’t actually want to take them.

What makes more sense: that he hasn’t cancelled student debt because he’s spent most of his career fighting to make sure that never happens, or that he’s just holding off on it despite massive & damaging public pressure because he has some other doubleplus-secret political iron in the fire and can’t take the time to instantly do something enormously popular? Do you really think, say, descheduling marijuana and pardoning people incarcerated for offenses related to it would leave him with less legitimacy and political capital to fight centrists in his party on other priorities?

politicians are not sunday morning cartoon villains strategizing how best to fuck over the american people for no reason other than Being Evil

No, they’re people trying to keep their jobs, act on their beliefs, and feather their nests, just like everyone else. Suggesting he’s not committed to the full policy slate he promised in the primary is pretty fucking far from suggesting he’s a “Sunday morning cartoon villain.”