The Stacey Plan

Home Again: President Biden is back from Europe.  According to right wing media his trip, particularly his much anticipated meeting with Vladimir Putin was an embarrassing failure; their evidence for that assertion is that Biden went in prepared and carried notes.  House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy slammed Biden, asserting that he had given Putin a pass; of course he had nothing to say when the Former Guy said that he believed Vlad over our intelligence agencies during their infamous Helsinki summit.  Trying to prove their independence, mainstream media which mostly had good things to say about Biden’s performance and his Vlad meeting spent a whole news cycle upset that he had snapped at a question from CNN’s Kaitlin Collins after she inaccurately reported on something she’d said he said.  Notably, he didn’t go full FG on her, he just expressed some sharp dismay for which he then apologized.  Does anyone remember the FG apologizing for far, far worse? Anyway, though Biden didn’t come home with any obvious deliverables like one or both of the Americans in Russian prisons, he and his staff report that he made it clear that we’d respond in kind, perhaps even targeting Russia’s oil industry, for further serious cyberattacks on our infrastructure.  Putin who deflected questions about his habit of murdering and/or imprisoning dissidents by bringing up our “mistreatment” of those nice tourists who invaded the Capitol building on January 6, actually complimented Biden yesterday calling him a “professional” who “does not miss a thing,” lending credence to Biden’s assertion that he had made it clear to Putin that further serious cyberattacks and incursions into places like Ukraine won’t go unpunished.  While Putin appeared to have left his meeting convinced that Biden has all of his marbles, Texas Congressman Ronny Jackson isn’t convinced and/or is a publicity seeking troll.  The disgraced former White House doctor who once said that the FG was a svelte picture of health embarrassed himself by demanding that Biden take a cognitive test. Of course, if he was really concerned about mental stability, he’d direct his attention to his state’s Governor, Greg Abbott,  who seems little concerned about doing anything to fix the state’s crumbling electrical grid but is rediverting $250 million of state funds to kick start a crowdsourcing campaign to get the FG’s border wall construction project back in gear.  The last guy who tried to do a GoFundMe for the wall was Steve Bannon, and he only escaped prison after getting one of those last minute pardons.

The Supremes:  It appears that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is here to stay.  Yesterday by a vote of 7 to 2, with newbie justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh joining a majority that also included Clarence Thomas and Chief Justice John Roberts along with all of the more liberal justices including Stephen Breyer who wrote the majority opinion, the Supreme Court ruled that the eighteen 18 Republican-led states and two individuals who brought the case had not suffered the sort of direct injury that gave them standing to sue.  Though the court decision hinged on a technical issue, the consensus view is that Obamacare is now an enshrined social service up there with Medicare and Social Security.  Republicans won’t admit it but mostly they’re relieved as having to deal with millions of people losing health insurance during the next election cycle wasn’t what they really wanted. In another much watched case SCOTUS ruled unanimously in favor of Philadelphia’s Catholic Social Services ruling it was okay for them to discriminate against gay couples because their contract with the city allows officials to make exceptions to things like their ban against discrimination based on sexual orientation.  The decision hinged on the technicality of the Philadelphia contract but portends an uphill battle for LGBTQ rights going forward as the more conservative members of the court indicated that they are likely to do whatever they can to  “protect” religious rights.

Politics Unusual:  Something’s cooking on both the infrastructure and voting rights fronts.  With regard to infrastructure funding, right now a bipartisan group that includes enough Republican Senators to actually get to 60 votes, is filling in the details on a plan that would provide about $1 trillion for largely traditional infrastructure.  In parallel, Bernie Sanders and the more progressive wing of the party are working on a $6 trillion kitchen sink plan that funds everything including the expansion of Medicare. There’s no way that Bernie’s $6 trillion plan can pass even through reconciliation because quite a few of the more moderate Democrats are unlikely to sign on but it’s also not clear that Nancy Pelosi’s contingent in the House will get on board for the more modest bipartisan plan. We might actually see two plans, a modest one that passes with bipartisan support and another one with some though not all of Bernie’s wish list items that goes through reconciliation.  On the voting rights front West Virginia’s Joe Manchin has come up with a proposal of his own that includes some but not all of the Democrat’s desired laundry list.  Among other things his proposal would make Election Day a holiday, require 15 days of early voting and ban partisan gerrymandering, it would also support voter IDs. Yesterday progressive star, voting right advocate Stacey Abrams said that she thinks that Manchin’s approach works.  Of course immediately after she signed on Republican leadership said that the idea was awful with Senator Roy Blunt and Mitch McConnell renaming the proposal the Abrams rather than the Manchin plan, saying that it would result in a socialist takeover of the government. That’s the kind of response that might actually result in Manchin giving up on bipartisanship.  Stay tuned.  

Viral Musings:  The seven day average count of new US coronavirus cases is down to 12,800. There were 312 deaths yesterday with the CDC still reporting the total count as under 600,000 and the NY Times reporting it at 600,524.  The overall vaccination picture is promising but large pockets of the unvaccinated remain, particularly in the south and in minority communities countrywide, leaving the opening for some localized hotspots to emerge as the more contagious and virulent Delta strain starts to dominate.  Yesterday the Biden administration announced the allocation of $3.2 billion to further the development of COVID antivirals in the quest to find a Tamiflu like drug to blunt the effects of the disease’s progression immediately after its diagnosed.   And the NY Post reports that contrary to some social media postings claiming that the mRNA vaccines affect fertility, scientists at the University of Miami have concluded that they do not lower sperm count or quality.

 Happy Juneteenth tomorrow to everyone except those 14 House Republicans who voted against recognizing that the emancipation of the slaves is something worth celebrating.