The Götterdämmerung Strategy: What Were They Thinking?

If I try to get an idea of how the lizard people meant to game out a post-2020 strategy, I can come up with only an inchoate notion that there would be some type of master reset sustained by media consensus and having both legislative houses and the executive in the hands of the Democrats. Then there would be a series of woke reforms, including defunding police, forgiving student debt, bullet trains, largesse for the Lumpenproletariat, and whatever else.

A glimmer of difficulty arose fairly early in this phase when it began to be recognized that the 2022 election would still be held, and the Great Realignment would be enacted only through the slimmest congressional majorities, which would be threatened in the off-year election. Among other things, the initial post-2020 fantasy envisioned eliminating the Senate filibuster, which proved not to be attainable, and that forced a dial-back of other priorities.

Thus at this point, much more aware that the 2022 election would likely close their window of opportunity, the lizard people have focused on getting everything done before then. This probably matched Speaker Pelosi's rumored intent to step down as speaker after that election. In fact, rumors surfaced from time to time over the past several years that, in exchange for being restored as Speaker in 2019 after her normally expected retirement when the Democrats lost the House in 2016, she had promised to retire in 2022.

Thus she expected to enact the Great Reset agenda via a pair of infrastructure bills in 2021, getting it all done before the start of the 2022 election cycle, when by this point conventional wisdom expects Republican control of congress to return. The problem with this strategy is that it simply doesn't think past 2021 -- who cares if everything falls apart after this year? Speasker Pelosi will retire! The Götterdämmerung won't be her problem! The COVID strategy fails? The border collapses? The Taliban humiliates us? Inflation? None of those bills will come due until next year, when the Speaker will retire!

(In fact, this reminds me of the last time everyone thought the world was going to end -- was it December 2012 according to the Mayan calendar? A few people said that if they really believed that, the thing to do would be to run up a huge credit card debt just before the big thing happened. Another Götterdämmerung strategy.)

The immediate problem for Speaker Pelosi is that vulnerable House Democrats are worried that the world in fact won't end when the Speaker retires, and they'd like to have careers after 2022. Pelosi's bundled infrastructure bill strategy involves the bipartisan Senate compromise version, which, however, she won't bring to a vote in the House unless the Senate bypasses the filibuster and passes her second, much larger, Great Reset bill via reconciliation. Then the House will vote on both together.

The moderate Democrats' concern is that if this strategy wins now, they lose in 2022. Thus they've started to push back.

A group of moderate House Democrats is threatening to torpedo their party's $3.5 trillion spending plan unless House Speaker Nancy Pelosi brings the bipartisan infrastructure bill for a vote first – an act of direct defiance to the speaker and a bold exertion of power with Democrats holding just a slim majority in the chamber.

"Some have suggested that we hold off on considering the Senate infrastructure bill for months – until the reconciliation process is completed. We disagree," the group of nine Democrats said in the letter. "With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this once-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package."

The group added: "We will not consider voting for a budget resolution until the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passes the House and is signed into law."

. . . Even if the moderate Democrats eventually cave to Pelosi and vote for the budget resolution, it's no guarantee that the reconciliation bill will make it out of the Senate. Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., have said that they aren't willing to vote for $3.5 trillion in spending. And if Democrats pare down the package to please those two, there is a chance they could lose some more progressive votes.

Given the events just of the past week, the idea that we can run up a big credit card debt because the world is going to end isn't working well. Even if the world will end in 2022, there are problems we need to solve now, and the man in the photo at the top of this post seems less and less capable of addressing them. He looks hunched, defeated, struggling to concentrate, in an empty room. What we have in 2021 and upcoming months looks to be a serious dilemma. Let's not even think about 2022.