How Is This "Negotiation" Anything But A Charade?

Media reports from both ends of the spectrum on what's being hyped as "negotiations" on the BBB and BIF bills are in a strange never-never land. I noted yesterday that the Washington Examiner says the BBB is "still unwritten", but this doesn't stop CBS News from referring to a 2,465 page bill and listing a series of line items. So how does Susan Ferrechio, Chief Congressional Correspondent for the Examiner, who wrote that piece, still have a job if someone from CBS can give a page count?

CBS calls it the standard $3.5 trillion in that piece, but this story by Sean Moran, who happens to be a a congressional reporter for Breitbart News, calls it "the $3.1 trillion reconciliation bill, or the Build Back Better Act". This is just one of the many discrepancies over the actual numbers for both the BBB and BIF that I've seen in recent weeks.

The only conclusion I can draw is that none of these people is working real hard. Sean Moran goes on to say,

Since Senate Democrats only have a one-member majority, either Manchin or Sinema could tank the Build Back Better Act by withdrawing their support.

A promising middle school student who follows current events knows this is incorrect: the Senate is tied, nobody has a majority, but the vice president, currently a Democrat, casts the deciding vote in a tie. How does a professional journalist anywhere on the spectrum get this so wrong? The whole press corps, with only a few exceptions, is lazy and ignorant, and they get away with it. People like me have to spend some amount of time and energy every morning double checking these paid and prestigious experts.

But we're basically getting the same happy talk about "progress" that we got last month. The Hill has this story:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) met separately Monday with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) as liberals and centrists in the party struggle to cut a deal on President Biden's sweeping spending plan.

Except it isn't "President Biden's sweeping spending plan"; reports are that Sanders is the author. Biden has been detached at best. The story goes on,

"I would hope that we're going to see some real action within the next week or so," Sanders told reporters. "We discussed the way forward."

But NBC News reports,

As the clock ticks with few signs of progress, the White House is holding a series of meetings this week to pressure Democrats to resolve their differences and reach a deal on President Joe Biden's sweeping economic policy bill.

. . . "The president is certainly feeling an urgency to move things forward, to get things done. I think you've seen that urgency echoed by members on the Hill who agree that time is not unending here and we're eager to move forward with a unified path," White House press secretary Jen Psaki said.

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a key centrist holdout who has rejected the proposed $3.5 trillion level, expressed doubt that a deal could be reached by the end of the month.

"There's an awful lot that's going on. I don't know how that would happen," he told reporters Monday.

For now, I think what's happening is that Pelosi is quietly dropping the Götterdämmerung strategy the Democrats adopted after the 2020 election: if the world is going to end, the thing to do is run up your credit cards just before it does so you don't have to pay them back. Conservative Treehouse, a blog on the Kraken right, summarizes this strategy:

Joe Biden is an appointed figurehead for a background agenda driven by Obama’s Chicago Marxists. The Biden far-left policy agenda is strategically a massive throw everything at the legislative process in an effort to create major change in a short period of time. Biden is the disposable front man for this operation, and Pelosi is the facilitating legislative cohort.

. . . Everything you would normally consider to be a concern that would limit the extremes of any legislative effort has been removed. They plan to lose next year, so they have nothing to lose right now.

I question that this anything like a strictly Marxist agenda -- Marx had nothing to say about climate change or gender dysphoria, for instance -- but it's correct to see it as an attempt to run up the credit cards before the world ends.

The problem is that Visa is already declining charges well before you've bought the yacht. The actual strategy for now is to transition to "never mind" without seeming to. So just as we did last month, we're goinng to see happy talk about we're gonna work all weekend until something else comes up and the whole thing drops off the screen. The point now is exclusively to save face.

I suspect the press knows this and isn't putting much effort into the story.