In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

The thing that's struck me about the whole BIF-BBB drama of the past couple weeks is how much it keeps reminding me of the incompetence I saw at the tech companies I used to work for. The constantly repeating pattern is of organizations that have months to finish a project, but nothing gets done until the deadline is just days away. Then the bosses who let this happen cover it up with a frenzy of promises and happy talk until here's simply no option but to admit the whole scheme has collapsed. One little-noticed vignette came out this week when it was revealed that Sen Manchin gave Sen Schumer a written version of his $1.5 trillion top line in July -- but Schumer neglected to tell Speaker Pelosi about it until just this past week . Then Pelosi's response was just to continue the happy talk about how we're gettring closer and closer until even she was finally forced to give up the game. Why did Schumer not tell Pelosi about Manchin's top line in July? It seems t...

Speaker Pelosi worked all weekend to get a deal on the $1.5 trillion infrastuture vote, except it was only Thursday. Why am I skeptical of this whole story? Earlier in the day, Rep Hoyer was pretty sure the big vote wasn't going to happen. The No. 2 Democrat in the House of Representatives had a one-word answer when reporters asked if he was confident the $1 trillion bill would pass in a vote scheduled later in the day. "Nope," said Representative Steny Hoyer. CNN also reported during the day , A source familiar with the whip operation of the House Progressive Caucus tells CNN that the group just completed a status check with their members and their number of “no” votes remains “solid.” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the caucus, has said repeatedly that at least half of her members were prepared to vote "no" if there wasn’t a guarantee around the wider spending package. That would mean somewhere in the range of 45 to 50 "no" votes. T...

I've been posting on the information I've seen that there's in fact no realistic way OSHA can enforce a mandate that all employers of more than 100 people require them to be vaccinated in the name of "workplace safety". In fact, given the constraints of regulatory rule making, this would likely take so long that any COVID crisis would be over long before such a rule could go into effect. This report on a question posed by a reporter to Press Secretary Psaki makes the situation even clearer. The absence of even a scintilla of material to indicate the White House or any federal agency is organizing an action plan of how to structure the guidance itself is telling. The silence of the machine tells us it is not turned on. The bureaucracy has not been triggered. The machinery of the federal government has not been instructed to begin any process to execute on the instruction that OSHA will, “ develop a rule that will require all employers with 100 or more ...

The news aggregators, if they mentioned this story at all, put it somewhere below Dog the Bounty Hunter in yesterday's developments, but this kept me thinking all day : House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democrats on Monday that passage of the $550 billion [sic] infrastructure bill must not wait for President Joe Biden's multitrillion-dollar safety net bill, saying the larger package is not yet ready for a vote. . . . "I told all of you that we wouldn't go on to the [infrastructure bill until] we had the reconciliation bill passed by the Senate. We were right on schedule to do all of that, until 10 days ago, a week ago, when I heard the news that this number had to come down," Pelosi said, according to the source. "It all changed, so our approach had to change. . . . The development indicates that the vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill is likely to happen in the House on Thursday, whether or not there is a deal on the separate bill by ...

One thing that puzzles me in the current state of legislative action is how little skepticism there is among journalists and commentators across the board over whether any of their do-or-die agenda items will succeed at all. I've been bringing little to my perception other than my experience of everyday people who promise to get things done but don't, and I see similar patterns at the national level that keep being confirmed. This may be because elites are simply insulated from ordinary affairs that need basic planning skills and competence in execution. So when I saw Speaker Pelosi moving the deadline for Monday's vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill to Thursday while getting the $3.5 trillion package done as well, and getting the continuing resolution through the Senate on top of that, I pretty much knew nothing like that is going to happen. This story simply confirms what I've been seeing here and there for weeks: The $3.5 trillion package, written...

I said yesterday that today would be a test of Bruce's Law, "When there's an important deadline falling due next Monday, and the bosses promise everyone's going to work all weekend to meet it, this won't happen." The much-predicted September 27 vote on the bipartisan $1.5 trillion infrastucture bill has been moved to September 30 , or maybe just "sometime this week". (I've been calling it the $1.5 trillion bill, but I've seen numbers from $1.2 to $1.7 trillion.) House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced a new date for the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, after committing to moderate Democrats in August that the vote would take place by Monday, September 27. On Sunday, in a "Dear Colleague" letter, the speaker told Democratic lawmakers the House would begin debate on the bill on Monday and hold the vote on Thursday. . . . Pelosi told ABC she believes the House will pass the infrastructure bill "this week," ...

On Thursday , I began to formulate what I'm calling Bruce's Law, which might be expressed as, "When there's an important deadline falling due next Monday, and the bosses promise everyone's going to work all weekend to meet it, this won't happen." In fact, when you might expect the office to be a beehive of urgent actitity on Saturday and Sunday, things will be dead quiet, and nobody will be there. The New Yorker piece I linked yesterday , which is aimed at an elitist audience sympathetic to Biden's agenda, reflects the conventional wisdom surrounding tomorrow's key deadline to vote on the $1.5 trillion bipartisan infrastructure package: On Wednesday, Biden spent five hours with Democratic members of Congress, in various groupings, in search of an elusive deal, and will surely be working the phones right up until Monday’s deadline for the House vote on the infrastructure bill—and beyond. There it is, we'll be working on it all weeken...