I avoided reading up on it too deeply, because it seemed to be much bigger than I was expecting, and I didn't believe they'd get something that big through congressional gridlock.
I basically assumed there were some poison pills baked in, and nothing much would come of it.
The ACA is severely limited, but getting anything at all passed was a superhuman effort. It was a ton of ground-level politicking, taking advantage of a brief moment of Obama's extraordinary popularity. It might be his only real legislative accomplishment, but it's the most influential piece of legislation in decades.
Obama and Biden had somewhat similar styles in that regard. Obama led the country out of the 2007 recession. For the most part it wasn't flashy, just slow and steady growth without drama. (He was known as No Drama Obama among the DC bureaucrats.)
He himself was much prettier than Biden and inherently more interesting as a human being, so he got more celebrity. But his actual governance was also similarly "quiet, serious, and disciplined".
It is possible that Obama would have been a better post-Trump President than Biden--I'm certain he'd win against Trump in a landslide--but we'll never know. Certainly it is the case that sometimes it is the opportunities you have--or what the country is ready for--that makes for the success of a presidency, along with a giant gob of good luck.
No Drama Obama, No Cryin' Biden.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/manu...
not to take away from the bill itself, but it seems like the most important thing was that Democrats just controlled house/senate/white house at the same time and couldn't be easily blocked
Correct. It's a job where you get very little done, you're constantly cutting ribbons and going to boring galas to fundraise, your life is put under a microscope, and the other side will investigate you and your family and maybe even try to throw you in jail.
Hard pass. No sane person wants the job.
Trump gets over a third of the GOP vote by just lying and so opposition to him as hard as you can't call him out on his lies which makes defeating him impossible, you can't beat the make believe land where everything is possible.
Biden will likely be the nominee as typically the incumbent gets first dibs per tradition.
Technically he needs to win the primary but at minimum the average person needs to be worse off in 2024 than they were in 2020.
Tha might be the case due to inflation and GOP court decisions. But then that leaves the bigger hurdle, who is best to beat Trump the candidate who already did or someone else.
It doesn't matter what the real answer is it matters what people feel.
One almost needs to destroy their life to get the job, and even then the chances seem to be so low that you'd more likely end up with a destroyed life and not a political office.
I don't like either of Trump and Biden. Yet, Trump was very good achieving peace in Middle east, Israel, toning down war rhetoric in Korea and brought China to center as the potential troublemaker of future. He also set the stage for eventual Afghan withdrawal. Not to mention the vaccines were developed under his administration. Now some people will point out that it is not really Trump and all that, but that is the point. Even if American people elect a complete buffoon like Trump, lot of good things happened at critical time as they should have.
Biden, who is clearly mentally unfit for the job, might end up as one of the greatest presidents despite the corruption and scandals. Under his leadership COVID is over, NATO expanded, Russia collapsed, China is seen as enemy by everyone, Europe-US ties are re-energized, India showed more alignment with West, AI revolution has kicked off. Some people will point out that lot of these things are pure luck or someone else's achievements, but that is the point. Institutions are so strong that you can elect a vegetable and the country runs pretty well.
It's not actually clear to me that Biden is mentally unfit for the job.
Certainly there has been some decline; watching videos of Biden in debates in 2012 side by side with 2020, the difference is obvious. But it's not clear that this has been in areas where it's actually necessary. A President doesn't (necessarily) need to think quickly in the moment; they need to be able to listen to the correct advisors, make the correct connections, be willing to apply pressure to foreign leaders, etc. It's not clear that there's any particular role of President that Biden is failing at due to his mental state.
All of this is yet another point in favor of your broader one. You say:
> Institutions are so strong that you can elect a vegetable and the country runs pretty well.
I say, institutions are so strong that you can't tell if you elected a vegetable. Biden is by no means the first in such a situation; Reagan notoriously was showing signs of Alzheimers by the end of his presidency, and the day-to-day was run by Nancy with the country none the wiser.
Obama was 47 when first elected in 2008.
The Republican party runs on several broadly unpopular or unwise policy platforms (anti-abortion, anti-weed, anti-welfare, anti-healthcare, anti-immigration, anti-science) and is hesitant to actually implement any of them for fear of igniting opposition.
Recently they’ve taken the side-channel of stuffing the courts and then legislating from the bench, since judicial appointees are immune to voter pressure.
Time will tell how this all plays out for the Republican party. In the short-term, it causes tremendous damage to our institutions.
In the long-term, my best guess is that the current Republican platform will collapse within 10-20 years as the current leadership ages out, and there will be a phase change where the Republican platform recrystallizes around a more modern set of conservative values that appeals more to younger voters. The party itself will likely survive because the two-party system is too stable.
Trumpism is the modern set of conservative values that appeals more to younger voters. Trump was the one that killed GOP efforts to privatize social security and cut Medicare, and he’s been critical of the party’s more extreme positions on abortion.
We just had an election where the GOP won 3 million more votes than Democrats. Trump and Biden are tied in national polling: https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4155482-biden-trump-vi...
Meanwhile, Democrats have managed to fend off Trump only through a coalition that includes AOC, most of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and Liz Cheney. How long do you think that’s sustainable? Democrats have been forced into a neoliberal corner where they can’t actually do anything liberal (raising taxes, criminal justice reform, welfare expansion).
Democrats jumped there headfirst led by Clinton in 1992, and have not, since then, been any farther out of a “neoliberal corner” than they are today (which is not that far, to be sure, but its absolutely not the case that its something they recently backed into in response to Trump.)
Just look at the electoral map. Obama beat Romney by about the same margin as Biden beat Trump. But Obama’s margin in Michigan was 10 points, while Biden’s was 3. Obama’s 7 point margin in Wisconsin evaporates to 1 point.
Where did those other votes come from? To a significant degree, it was from affluent suburbs were the management class lives. Democrats now are utterly reliant on the very people they need to heavily tax to deliver any of their progressive promises. You can’t have a meaningful liberal party which counts among its base Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Fortune 500 executives.
And it shows. Supposed democrats will now happily say we need immigration so we can have cheap strawberries. And they’ll embrace social ideas that alienate non-college educated working class people, because their priorities are different. A Facebook engineer can make whatever theoretical statements he wants about universal paid paternity leave. But at the end of the day, he or she gets 5 months from a big profitable corporation, and has no incentive to make the political compromises necessary to advance such a policy.
Social issues are really the only thing where the party is unified and can push through changes, especially through the administrative state. We didn’t get a permanent child tax credit, or paid family leave, but we did get abortions and DEI in the military.
His core support groups are anti-immigrant groups like CIS, FAIR and NumbersUSA. What is common between all these groups ? They are all founded by John Tanton one of the most pro-abortion and eugenics supporting individual in USA and also responsible for some of the initial Planned Parenthood organizations.
Tucker Carlson was the person who first wrote about this connection 15 years ago.
Trump's key aides like Stephen Miller, Bannon, Lee Cissna, Chad Wolf, Cucinelli all came from the umbrella of pro-abortion Tanton groups.
Arguing this when it was his three court picks that removed the fifty year old right to an abortion in this country is just a bizarre assertion. Whatever his words, personal positions on the issue (I don't doubt he's paid for a few), etc., he's been the single most effective for anti-abortion folks since Roe v. Wade.
Six week abortion bans are a different matter, both legally and practically. That’s where Trump (and many other business-oriented conservatives depart from the religious conservatives). There’s a reason the Mississippi test case in Dobbs was a 15-week ban with exceptions.
Court picks aren't political hacks. Trump elected fantastic SC judges all conservative, recommended by key Conservative and Libertarian think tanks and their judgement is very much rooted in principles. Congress should consider making abortion the rights.
I do not like the judgement either but I think it was a very good judgement perfectly in alignment with the US constitution and law.
Maybe personally and up until he started to run for 2024 maybe even rhetorically. But a lot of that is because other GOP politicians wanted the issue evergreen, as a perpetual carrot to dangle in front of the social conservative electorate.
Trump's the one taking victory laps for delivering on it via the people he put on the Court, and that's not something that just happened randomly or accidentally.
Remember, Roe did not say "abortion should be permissible sometimes." It created out of thin air a right to elective abortion until viability, and made that the law in all 50 states. It was an aberration in the developed world both procedurally (the ECHR has consistently refused to recognize a "right" to abortion, leaving it to legislation) and substantively (few countries allow elective abortion up to viability).
Trump is taking credit for overturning Roe--a case virtually everyone who is still a Republican agrees was wrongly decided. But at the same time, he's advocating substantive abortion laws that reflect the center of public opinion: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/campaigns/trump-repu....
It cannot be stressed enough, moreover, that the abortion laws Trump is advocating, which generally reflects public opinion, were impossible under Roe.
No, he was laughed at because he's sort of a buffoon, and steel tariffs just raised the cost of everything for people using steel; it didn't have any big impact on 'steel jobs'. It didn't create big demand for more US-made steel. That said, IIRC, they're still in place, and current admin should remove them (perhaps gradual removal over 2 years?)
He did nothing meaningful to spur US-based manufacturing, despite talking a big game. But that was basically Trump all over. (attempting to not get too political here)
Why pretend that Trump was the first person to talk about creating manufacturing jobs when it has been a hot political topic since the first time jobs started disappearing in the US?
The Biden push for requiring federal purchases to have more 'made in USA' components seems a combination of stupidly simple, long overdue, and easy to understand. Govt requiring more stuff made in the US - and giving some tax cuts to help spur it - seems like it's a basic way to ignite manufacturing stateside.
Yes, I recently wrote about my own frustration with this: https://enki.org/2023/08/01/steel-prices/
Now now, I think you are being too generous. In fact, it takes a lot of effort to actively set the country back socially, culturally, and environmentally. Give credit where credit’s due. They work (in reverse) hard.
Arizona (Phoenix), Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Carolina (Charlotte), Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Green Bay (and Milwaukee), Houston, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Minnesota (Minneapolis, St. Paul), New England (Boston), New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Seattle, Tampa Bay, Tennessee (Nashville), Washington D.C.
There's a saying: "Only Nixon could go to China", from the fact that only a president renowned for vehement anti-communism could open relations with communist China. The Democrats, at least since Bill Clinton's administration, have been very pro-free trade, after 2016 the Republicans were ready to do this sort of thing, but the Democrats were still pro-globalization. It's because the Democrats were the second party to swing against the idea that all trade is good no matter what the country or industry, that they were able to get stuff passed better.
It should also be said that covid closing of borders, post-covid supply chain problems, and Russia's invasion of Ukraine all swayed opinions as well.
Are industries with tariff subsidies competitive at international price points? Given domestic subsidy, will they be efficient enough to compete in international markets?
How do non- free-trade, non- fair-trade agreements affect other trade agreements?
Trade Protectionism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protectionism
"Can’t build a decent car, can’t make a TV set or a VCR worth a f, got no steel industry left, can’t educate our young people, can’t get health care to our old people, but we can [... war euphemism]" -- George Carlin (1992)
Have subsidies saved comparably inefficient [domestic manufacturing] markets, or have trade protectionist subsidies resulted in net unintended consequences when the externalities of "all you peoples' special deals" are accounted for?
Are information services and financial services a viable strategy for long-term growth in GDP?
Of the top 3 battery or solar producing countries, the US isnt one of them. Longi, Chinas flagship battery company, has been doing this for 23 years while the US is just now getting around to starting a domestic plant to compete. Frankly i dont imagine it will be competitive at all, as it would also be competing with other decades old players in Japan and Korea.
15 years ago it would have made sense to buy up one of these competitive players but that time has passed, and the cannibalistic nature of outsourcing in neoliberal capitalism means a domestic industry is seen as a liability, not a strength. heck, owning any means of production instead of a brand is as well so its no surprise Ford's just kicking this one over to China to solve.
tl;dr the climate bill is about national security, not climate.
It is a climate bill. It is also about re-industrializing America, decoupling from China, securing supply chains, and national security. All of those things.