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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Can Biden continue to inspire support from even within his own party? In fact, other than in the preceding sentence, how often do people see Biden’s name linked with ‘inspire’?
He was a compromise president pushed to be more progressive in his policies by the need to keep the support of reform-leaning Democrats demanding change for America.
He was elected more because of his longevity on the Hill, and the relationships he had built as a don’t-rock-the-boat kinda fella.
But last week 37 Representatives – members of the Democratic Party from California to New York, from Illinois to Texas, from Oregon to Florida – took a stand and said it was not ok for this Joe to throw ordinary Joes under the MAGA bus just because he didn’t have the cojones to stare down Kevin McCarthy.
The first time I heard the term “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” was when working on the marketing of Kevin Costner’s iconic film, Field of Dreams. It was a story about hope and inspiration, of belief in the face of adversity.
It was about working all summer long and risking the farm, quite literally, about trusting one’s heart for that one moment of miracle.
America deserved that miracle this spring but White House Joe listened to his business friends and cut backroom deals.
Our hopes were dashed.
McCarthy’s creds have been enshrined with the alt-right and the MAGA-maniacs now know that they can continue to cut away the foundations of our country’s social contract with the people of Main Street, and grant bigger and better tax cuts with impunity to their wealthy Wall Street sponsors.
That they can slash funding for the IRS to catch the well-heeled tax cheats while indiscriminately lavishing largesse on greedy military contractors and expanding the world wide war.
That Manchin can now build his Mountain Valley Pipeline, destroying West Virginians’ communities and health in the name of personal profit... for him and his yacht-affording buddies.
Kudos to members of the Progressive Caucus in the House, including a number of Representatives from California, who voted against this travesty.
Kudos also to Jon Fetterman, Edward Markey, Jeff Merkley, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren who were the lone Democratic Senators to stand up to the McCarthy-Biden bill.
The future of our country now has a name. It is the Progressive Caucus, the ones in Washington who dare to speak up when the Democratic Party acts Republican-lite and takes from the poor to give to the rich, only sugar-coating the process with anti-gun, anti-abortion tropes and woke language.
The Democratic Party has shown its true colors these past few elections by opposing grass-root candidates in the primaries and, when they won anyway, refusing to support them against Republicans. That cost the country the House.
Toothless Joe is no Shoeless Joe Jackson (who did not attend the meeting where the fix was supposedly put in and protested until the day he died that he played the best he could). There is something grand and brave about a movie where a voice tells a Midwest farmer to build a baseball diamond so that Shoeless Joe Jackson can materialize out of the cornfield and hit a few fly balls.
Sometimes it’s ok to make concessions but only if one has fought the good fight. Much as the MAGA-nuts may object to in what McCarthy let slide from the House Republicans Limit, Save and Grow Act, the optics are that he has come out the winner. Free to help loose the ferocity of Trump voters in the face of the facts of the ex-whatever’s multiple calumnies.
And Biden is now over a barrel. Precedent has been set to wring out further concessions, the wealth of the uber-rich are safe from the taxman, and Manchin’s mob have been unleashed to destroy the ecology of West Virginia, free from interference from sympathetic courts.
This so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act that Biden signed without the removal of the Trump tax giveaways, will exponentially exacerbate the national debt, debunking the Republican declaration that their legislation was to rescue the country from careening into bankruptcy.
Biden looks like the old man he is, giving up concessions that, in aggregate, really matter to a majority of Americans. No tilting at windmills, yes, but isn’t there something ultimately grand in a Don Quixote?
Are there still ways to correct the worst concessions or is the fix really in? At this point, it appears unlikely, what with the wingnut Republican House and the turncoats in the Senate.
Biden’s long-prized bipartisanship has once again catered to Wall Street sensibilities focused on limiting taxes for the wealthy and on short term profits over the long term damage to our society.
If all of us don’t rise up and demand that the Democratic Party encourage more progressives to run and win across America, that they strongly endorse a progressive replacement for ailing Joe, we will be handing the keys to the country back to Trump in 2024, him and the crazies he created in his own image.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
