What About Sen Schumer?

I'm continuing to look at current public figures through the lens of what I learned working for incompetent tech managers. One of the key characteristics I began to see with all such incompetents was an inability or unwillingness to recognize the calendar. A deadline can be set many months away, and even a detailed project plan can be made and approved, but somehow people at that level of incompetence can't quantify days, weeks, or months and match those quantities to levels of effort.

Let's look at the current tasks that face Sen Schumer as Senate Majority Leader. By general consensus, his most important one is raising the debt limit, which Treasury Secretary Yellen has been insisting must be done by roughly October 18, now less than two weeks away. But there's actually less time than that, because the Senate goes on recess next week.

Schumer's problem is that he has a 50-50 Senate, with Minority Leader McConnell able to keep all 50 Republican votes in line on this issue. McConnell has been insisting that Schumer use the reconciliation process to raise the debt limit, which Schumer would be able to do with his 50 votes plus Vice President Harris able to break the tie. The problem for Schumer, which he's been aware of for some time, is that it would take several weeks to do this. And Schumer has said he's unwilling to do this.

Schumer claimed Wednesday the Senate “cannot and will not go through a drawn-out and unpredictable process sought by the minority leader.”

And Schumer doesn't have Sen Manchin's support for this strategy.

The West Virginia Democrat, who holds a pivotal vote in the 50-50 Senate, indicated to CNN that he disagrees with the strategy top Democrats are pursuing in the standoff with Republicans over raising the national debt limit. Manchin said that Democrats "shouldn't rule out anything," including a budget process that Democratic leaders have made clear they will not employ.

But Schumer has few other options. For now, McConnell has been blocking any move by Republicans to bypass filibuster or pass the measure by unanimous consent. Acccording to the New York Times of all places,

Hardball tactics by Republicans on the debt ceiling are not new. Showdowns in 1995 and 1996 shut down the government but also helped foster a balanced-budget agreement. A new Republican House majority in 2011 pushed the government so close to default that Standard & Poor’s downgraded once-unassailable U.S. debt, but it also produced the Budget Control Act, which crimped spending for years.

. . . This year was different: Republicans filibustered one measure to raise the debt limit and keep the government funded. On Wednesday, they are expected to block another measure, passed by the House, that does only one thing: lift the debt ceiling.

“There’s no bargaining,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, a moderate independent. “They’re just stamping their feet and saying no.”

. . . With every passing day, the crisis becomes more unavoidable. Each day Democrats decline to give in to Mr. McConnell’s demands to use the reconciliation process makes it that much more difficult for the maneuver to be completed in time to avoid a default. And each day the Democrats demand that Republicans blink, they reply that Democrats are to blame for not using the process when they had time.

, , , Democrats might have no choice but to pursue is changing the filibuster rules so the borrowing limit increase, and any in the future, can pass with 50 votes.

But with Manchin not supportimng Schumer, it doesdn't look like he has 50 votes to do this.

It looks like he's been badly outmaneuvered.

Who're They Trying To Kid?

What I learned from workling for incompetent tech bosses was that past a certain point, their credibility was shot with everyone. and they were either out the door, transferred, demoted, or kicked upstairs. Usually, though, that point was too late to save the business. It's starting to look as if Speaker Pelosi and President Biden have reached a similar point.

Over the weekend, she set a new "deadline" of October 31 to pass the infrastruceure bill (BIF).

In a "Dear Colleague" letter released on Saturday, Pelosi said that “more time was needed” to pass the infrastructure bill along with the larger, $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package after scrambling over the past two days to get enough votes.

. . . “There is an October 31st Surface Transportation Authorization deadline, after last night’s passage of a critical 30-day extension,” Pelosi wrote. “We must pass BIF [bipartisan infrastructure framework] well before then – the sooner the better, to get the jobs out there.”

What does she mean by "well before" October 31? The problem is that after the Friday session, the House is in recess until October 19. which leaves less than two weeks to reach this agreement. As far as anyone could tell, the past two weeks showed a great flury of feckless activity from the Speaker with no actual progress. How will this change over the next two-week period?

Will President Biden be any better equipped to solve the impasse on, say, October 30 than he was last Friday? His plans seem to be eqaully vague and unrealistic.

Speaking with reporters Saturday, Biden pledged to "work like hell" to get both the bipartisan and reconciliation infrastructure bills passed as his ambitious domestic agenda hangs in the balance.

. . . "There is no reason why both these bills couldn't pass independently except that there's not the votes to do it that way," Biden said.

. . . "There's nothing in any of these pieces of legislation that's radical, that is unreasonable that is--when you look at it, individually."

The problem is, of course, that the leftist Democrat faction will not allow the legislation to be looked at individually. We're caught somewhere between MFU1 and MFU2. I still like Stein's Law: That which cannot continue must stop.

The Sad Case Of Marine LTC Scheller

My uncle was a lieutenant in the Army in the mid-1950s. When he got out, he left his collection of manuals with my parents, where I found them in our attic. Among them was the Manual for Court Martial, which I eagerly studied. One of the offenses I discovered was Contempt Toward Officials, which struck me as so strange that I still remember it. Although the wording has changed slightly since the time I read it, the current version is probably very close:

Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Homeland Security, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

This immediately came to mind when I learned of Marine LTC Scheller's YouTube video:

In August, Scheller posted a video denouncing senior military leadership in the wake of the Kabul attack that killed 13 U.S. service members. He called on top civilian and military leaders to admit the mistakes they had made in the course of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

. . . He criticized Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and the nation's top military officer, Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley for their incorrect predictions that the Afghan National Security Forces would be able to withstand Taliban attacks and for the closure in July of Bagram Air Base, which meant that evacuations would go through Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport.

At which point, I remembered the words I'd read 60 years ago and simply said hoo boy. But in the video, he made it plain that he fully understood the consequences of his action:

“I feel like I have a lot to lose,” he said, adding that he thought through “what might happen to me. . . if I dared to post it. But I think what you believe in can only be defined by what you’re willing to risk.”

Accordimng to the first story above,

Scheller hasn't been charged yet, but according to legal documents, he is facing potential charges of conduct unbecoming an officer, contempt toward officials, disobeying a senior officer and failure to obey an order or regulation.

It isn't completely clear why he was suddenly jailed, but based on published interpretations, he was ordered not to make further public statements but continued to make them in defiance of the order. I hate to say this, but if those are the circumstances, I can't disagree.

What's puzzling is that, although supporters have raised close to $2 million for his defense, he appears to be distancing himself from them.

Despite his popularity in conservative circles, including more than two dozen GOP lawmakers who sent a letter calling for his release from confinement, Scheller recently spoke out on social media to distance himself from the former president.

"President Trump . I was told by everyone to kiss the ring because of your following and power," he said in a Facebook post last Saturday. "I refuse. While I respect your foreign policy positions, I hate how you divided the country. I don’t need or want your help. You do not have the ability to pull US together."

I was basically thrown out of ROTC when the instructors concluded, I thought at the time and think now correctly, that I wasn't officer material. Being officer material unquestionably means subordinating your personal opinions to the orders of your superiors. I respected that at the time and still respect it. The ROTC did me one of the biggest favors anyone did me at that time of my life.

So I have a basic issue with LTC Scheller. The biographical details I've seen include that he graduated from Officer Candidate School, which is certainly a more rigorous evaluation of potential officer material than ROTC. He then appears to have risen steadily in the Marine Corps. How many times, I've got to ask, did he have to say, "Boy, that sucks. General ____ is incompetent. But I have a career, and I'm a loyal officer. I'll make the best of it."

He signed on to the whole program. Now after 17 years, he's decided he wasn't officer material after all. He's basically gone rogue, or at least that's the appearance. I suspect his counsel will have to argue that he wasn't of sound mind when he made his statements -- that is, if he'll let his counsel do that.

It's a sad case. It's not something conservatives should be taking up.

What Are We Learning?

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 to me that at minimum, it would have given both an idea of how big a task they had to accomplish and what sort of resources they'd need to accomplish it. Certainly they'd have been able to recognize that it would need more than the few days they had to get something done this week.

If I were to extrapolate back to the tech bosses I knew back in the day, it would be an indication of how little understanding they had of what real work amounted to and how ill-equipped they were to manage any significant effort. Their response was to ignore whatever wasn't happening and blithely assume it could all be fixed by "working all weekend" at some point down the road. This is exactly what we saw with Speaker Pelosi.

And then, astonishingly, when "working all weekend" didn't fix the problem, at the very last minute, they brought in the big gun -- Joe Biden. Biden would give a 40-minute pep talk, and they'd all come together.

How completely unrealistic this prospect was is indicated by the ground rules of the president's visit -- no press, no outsiders, no recording, no Zoom. It's clear that without a teleprompter, it would be too risky to have inadvertent gaffes, misspeaks, or lacunae get out. That in turn is an indication of what confidence insiders had in the prospect of Biden's visit accomplishing anything at all.

Related to this is the odd sense from public remarks by Reps Hoyer and Clyburn, the number two and three House Democrats, that Pelosi's frenzy of activity was meaningless -- Hoyer was perectly aware of the outcome from the start, and Clyburn wasn't even whipping the vote. This suggests to me that they have little confidence in Pelosi, nor, I would think, in her ability to manage the bills in the future.

“It’s not a success,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said in a brief interview Friday night. “We need to pass both these bills, that’s going to be our objective.”

For happy talk, this is pretty half-hearted. The story goes on,

While several Democrats hoped Biden’s rare appearance Friday — his first in-person huddle with House Democrats as president — would rally support for the $550 billion infrastructure bill, he actually did the opposite.

The infrastructure bill “ain’t going to happen until we reach an agreement on the next piece of legislation,” Biden declared in the private caucus meeting.

The announcement stunned Democrats, from moderates who have been promised a vote on the infrastructure bill from the leadership for weeks, to rank-and-file members who just wanted to know the next steps.

. . . "It was a shocking failure to meet the moment," added one Democratic moderate, who emerged disappointed that Biden hadn’t delivered a call to action for the caucus.

And this is Politico. The good news is that the people running the country right now are incompetent, and even some insiders know this. The bad news is that they're incompetent.

Kabuki

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.

The source says that most progressives have not even been contacted and asked to switch their vote. They say only two members have been contacted at all, adding the calls did not come from Speaker Nancy Pelosi or Majority Whip Jim Clyburn.

Elsewhere, Clyburn said himself that he hadn't even tried to whip the vote. Whatever negotiations were taking place, they weren't with individual House members. So with whom, if anyone, were Speaker Pelosi and other leaders negotiating? Bernie Sanders emerged from the woodwork during the week:

Sanders, in a series of tweets posted on Tuesday, said the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Thursday without the reconciliation package would be “in violation of an agreement that was reached within the Democratic Caucus in Congress.”

He also said such a move would “end all leverage that we have to pass a major reconciliation bill.”

And it's hard not to think Sanders had the final word last night:

"It is an absurd way to do business, to be negotiating a multi-trillion-dollar bill a few minutes before a major vote with virtually nobody knowing what's going on. That's unacceptable. And I think what has got to happen is that tonight, the bipartisan infrastructure bill must be defeated," Sanders said.

But of course, the root problem wasn't Sanders, though it's become more clear in recent days that Sanders is an author, if not the principal author, of the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package. The problem is Sen Manchin, who for now holds the cards and is fully aware of it.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is in the driver’s seat and letting liberal Democrats in the House and Senate know that he plans to set the terms for the budget reconciliation bill that they hope to use to enact President Biden’s "Build Back Better" agenda.

. . . By declaring that his top-line limit would be $1.5 trillion — a full $2 trillion less than the number he voted for in the Senate budget resolution last month — Manchin made it clear that the reconciliation bill isn’t passing anytime soon.

I've been wondering for some time who's been pulling the Democrat strings. For a while, I believed it was Speaker Pelosi. The problem is that the events of the past couple of weeks place Pelosi in the position of the tech bosses I used to work for, who promised to work all weekend, didn't deliver, and eventually lost their jobs. Pelosi is a disposable pawn at this point, and I suspect she's now on her way out. Given the tensions of the past week, Sanders's mask is coming off, and he's now the Democrat power -- or that is, he would be if Manchin weren't thwarting him.

At this point, not only is Pelosi on her way out, by January 2023 if not sooner, but both Biden and Schumer are also irrelevant. The contest is between Sanders and Manchin.

There Is No OSHA Vaccine Mandate

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 employees to ensure their workforce is fully vaccinated.” Nothing.

As the piece indicates,

[T]he White House has no idea what the current plan is for OSHA to create this rule that will require a national mandate for private sector workers. The emphasis is on voluntary compliance as an outcome of the decree that a mandate would be forthcoming.

In fact, this part of the plan is working. Consider United Airlines:

United Airlines is preparing to fire almost 600 employees who failed to comply with the company’s COVID-19 vaccination policy by the Sept. 27 deadline, company executives told employees Tuesday.

United was one of the first major US companies to announced [sic] a vaccine mandate for its 67,000 US employees, the overwhelming majority of whom have complied.

, , , President Joe Biden announced earlier this month that his administration will mandate that companies with over 100 employees require their employees get vaccinated or have them test regularly for the virus.

Company executives, though, have said the announcement was light on specifics and are awaiting details so they can implement a plan.

The problem for a company like United that goes ahead with "voluntary compliance" is that while this may provide a pretext for the action and allow some degree of both virtue signaling and public relations cover, it still leaves the company open to legal challenge. The story above says,

United did not provide a breakdown of the kinds of employees who haven’t yet been vaccinated, but nearly 400 workers represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers had not uploaded proof of vaccination by Tuesday, District 141 President Mike Klemm told CNBC.

The union represents more than 25,000 United employees.

Klemm said the union plans to file wrongful termination grievances if the workers who refused to be vaccinated are fired, according to the outlet.

And I'm still left with the question of what is a valid "proof of vaccination", especially if it's something you "upload", as the story puts it. Do you upload an image of your vax certificate? Can't this easily be photoshopped? I went on the web and found this:

Seems like I could edit this into something with my name on it just with MS Paint, cut and paste a photocopy and scan it, or buy something better on the black market. How does United's HR department have the time and resources to check 60,000 of these things?

The only bright side for United is what's implied in the Dilbert cartoon above. If a vaccination mandate requires a company to fire X percent of its workers, that's basically a free pass to downsize without a buyout for the workers who are cut. I'm surprised that more companies don't go for this, except that maybe the smarter ones are recognizing that "voluntary compliance" isn't a free pass, and in the end, nearly all whom they terminate will either get hefty settlements or be reinstated.

"Highly Overrated Person"

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 then, which progressives have demanded to win their votes for it.

But it is not clear that the infrastructure bill can pass the House, even if Pelosi calls the vote.

What struck me was less Pelosi's reversal than what she let out in the course of her statement: a week or 10 days ago, she "heard the news that this number had to come down". Well, wouldn't this be important? Apparently she kept it to herself until Monday night, which was pretty much past the last minute.

Why would she do that? I think it's fairly plain. She'd been telling the House moderates that she'd schedule a separate vote on the $1.5 trillion infrastructure package on Monday, while she'd been telling the Progressive Caucus she'd tie them together. Her solution was going to be to pull the rug out from under the moderates by "postponing" Monday's vote to Thursday, while hoping Sen Sinema might not notice, since the senator was on record saying if no vote took place Monday, she was a "no" on the bigger bill.

It sounds as though Sen Sinema did in fact notice this, and I assume important people contacted Pelosi about the problem (my money is on Sen Schumer). As a result, Pelosi made her Monday night announcement that the vote would take place on Thursday after all. Yeah, that's definitely gonna happen.

But then Bernie Sanders weighed in:

Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) on Tuesday urged House Democrats to block the $1.2 trillion “bipartisan” infrastructure bill, defying House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) agenda of passing the legislation Thursday.

. . . “I strongly urge my House colleagues to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Congress passes a strong reconciliation bill,” the Sanders pleaded.

. . . “We had to accommodate the changes that were being necessitated,” Pelosi reportedly told Democrat members about the reconciliation package. “And we cannot be ready to say until the Senate passed the bill, we can’t do BIF [bipartisan infrastructure deal].”

“[W]e’re still waiting for the number because you cannot prove the design on the legislation without the number,” Pelosi explained. “And the president is working on that piece. He’s working on that piece.”

Pelosi’s reported attempt to whip the vote in favor of passing the “bipartisan” bill has not convinced far-left House members. Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) told reporters Monday the bills are linked together and warned a Thursday vote could fail.

Indeed, as Pelosi said, Biden is working on that piece.

President Joe Biden canceled his trip to Chicago this week to stay in Washington to haggle with lawmakers over the administration's two large legislative priorities, a White House official said Tuesday.

. . . The battle over the $3.5 trillion price tag centers on Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, centrist Democrats who have insisted that it be reduced. But they have not named their price, which has led to protracted negotiations.

And neither Manchin nor Sinema has yet named a top-line number, even after meeting with Biden yesterday, and their statements after the meetings have been vague bromides about "progress". It's plain that Manchin and Sinema hold the cards and see no particular urgency in reaching a solution.

At this stage, their strategy is going to be to run out the clock while letting the House Democrats kill the infrastructure bill. What's becoming clear is that neither Pelosi nor Schumer nor Biden ever gave much thought to a Plan B. Pelosi in particular relied on making conflicting promises to the progressives and the moderates within her caucus, without gaming the situation out.

Highly overrated person.