Looking At The Vax Mandate Lawsuits

The coverage of the Fifth Circuit's ruling to stay temporarily the Biden OSHA rule mandating vaccinations for employees of firms with over 100 workers has been remarkably shallow. The basic outline is this:

An appeals court ruled on Saturday to temporarily halt President Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 employees or more.

The ruling came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a challenge to the mandate requiring employers with over 100 or more employees to get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing directly with the court.

The challenge included the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah and South Carolina.

. . . OSHA’s rule includes sending agents to inspect businesses to determine if they are abiding by the mandate. If a business is found to not be in compliance, a company could be fined $136,532.

Paxton argued in the announcement of Texas’s challenge that the mandate goes outside of OSHA’s “limited power and specific responsibilities” and is “flatly unconstitutional.”

The court agreed, finding "grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the mandate and ordering The Biden administration to respond to the group's request for a permanent injunction by 5 PM today. However, I really had to dig to find the legal reasoning behind the suit and the court's action. This is just further basis for my long-held view that reporters on any spot on the political spectrum have the mental capability of promising eighth graders.

It turns out that the Texas argument is very similar to the US Supreme Court's ruling last August 26 blocking the CDC's extension of an eviction moratorium.

The ban on evictions, a two-month order, was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pause covers parts of the United States that are experiencing what the CDC calls "substantial" and "high" spread of the coronavirus.

. . . The court's majority said the CDC exceeded its authority with the temporary ban.

The majority opinion says that the CDC for its order relied on "a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination."

"It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts," the majority writes, adding: "If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it."

This decision appears to be based in turn on long-established doctrine that regulatory agencies can't issue regulations beyond their scope. The CDC regulates public health measures. It can't suddenly be put to enforcing an eviction moratorium. The Texas argument, which the circuit court agreed with, is that OSHA generally regulates physical workplace safety, not public health. If Congress wants to expand OSHA's mandate, it must change the existing law.

An additional factor, not mentioned in the Texas case, is that the Secretary of Labor has announced that truckers are sorta kinda exempt, since they work alone in their cabs and don't interact with others. But this is pretty clearly an arbitrary political move intended to prevent mass firings of truckers, which would further disrupt the supply chain. Truckers must interact with other people at shippers' and destination locations, as well as on the road at truck stops.

So far, it appears that almost all of the numerous lawsuits filed against the OSHA vaccine mandate rely on the above doctrine. This is likely reasonable, since it's based on arguments toward which the current US Supreme Court has already been friendly.

However, it leaves aside the question of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which requires that employee medical records not be accessible by corporate management. This exists on one hand to prevent employees' medical records of, say, HIV or abortion being used against them, but now a medical record of vaccination must be provided to the same employer in one arbitrary circumstance. In addition, more general rules requiring, for instance, fast food workers or bouncers to see confidential medical records for entry to a business are also a problem that isn't addressed in these lawsuits.

We'll have to see how this develops.

No, It Isn't Cognitive Decline

I ran into three vignettes over the weekend that I think provide some insight into the big guy's mental state. The first, via Drudge, is from the UK Daily Mail: Camilla 'hasn't stopped talking about' hearing the President 'break wind' during chat at Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow

An informed source has told The Mail on Sunday that Camilla was taken aback to hear Biden break wind as they made polite small talk at the global climate change gathering in Glasgow last week.

'It was long and loud and impossible to ignore,' the source said. 'Camilla hasn't stopped talking about it.'

The photo above from the story is at least confirmation that this could have taken place. Indeed, the expression on the duchess's face, not to mention the big guy's, suggests it might even have occurred as the shutter snapped.

Curious, I did a web search on flatulence and discovered it isn't normally indicative of an underlying medical condition but can be controlled through diet or via over-the-counter remedies like Beano. What's the story with President Biden?

Naturally, I'm neither a doctor nor a dietician, but in the context of what we already know about him, I would say it's something like the Louis XIV syndrome.

Louis XIV suffered from serious digestive problems from swallowing food without chewing. This caused Louis XIV to break wind very frequently which filled whatever room he was in with horrendous odor. To deal with his digestive problems, Louis XIV was prescribed with laxatives for years. He would frequently visit the toilet up to 15 times a day due to the laxatives.

Notwithstanding, King Louis was definitely a babe magnet. Charming and attractive women sought his company, presumably seeing deeper qualities beyond the stench. My sense of President Biden is that he understands that whatever he does, the press and the political establishment will cover for him, and this is yet another example of the circumstance.

The second vignette is the very strange story of the FBI raids on the residences of James O’Keefe and others connected with Project Veritas as part of an investigation into a possibly stolen diary said to have been kept by President Biden's daughter, Ashley.

O’Keefe says he was approached by a tipster he didn’t know who offered him the diary (or a copy) but who also said they were negotiating a sale of the diary to another site. O’Keefe said Project Veritas tried to verify the diary was real and that the things discussed in it had really happened but ultimately could not do either. “At the end of the day, we made the ethical decision that because in part we could not determine if the diary was real, if the diary in fact belonged to Ashley Biden, or if the contents of the diary occurred, we could not publish the diary in any part thereof,” O’Keefe said.

Project Veritas attempted to give the diary to an attorney for Ashley Biden who refused it and then they wound up giving it to law enforcement so it could be returned to its owner.

The provenance of the manuscript, according to the stories on line, is very similar to that of Hunter Biden's laptop: apparently it was left behind when she moved out of an apartment and made its way to alternate media sources who shopped it around. If true, like the Hunter Biden laptop, this is abandoned property and not stolen. Indeed, once it came to O'Keefe's attention, he attempted to return it to Ashley Biden's attorney and finally gave it to law enforcement himself.

The issue is whether any crime occurred at all, but even if it did, why the FBI would be involved. As various commentators have said, that the FBI would be chasing it down is strong reason to conclude it is authentic. The original site that published it presents it as scans of original handwritten pages. It doesn't appear to have been transcribed at all. Entries suggest someone represented as Ms Biden is trying to recover from indefinite forms of childhood sexual abuse that do apparently include inappropriate showers with her father.

What we do know of the big guy's conduct includes bizarre public invasions of young girls' personal space, hair sniffing, inappropriate touching of adult women, and naked swimming in front of female secret service agents. None of the implied allegations from his daughter's diary comes, if authentic, as a complete surprise. Again, the impression this gives is that Biden has been more or less in the background through most of his public career, but nevertheless has developed a habit of impunity, with a sense that the establishment and press will cover for him.

The problem is that if this investigation results in an indictment, the whole story will definitely come out. There is some deeply flawed judgment involved here, but not cognitive decline. There's a clear sense of actions, potential consequences, and things that apperently need to be kept from public view that we would not see in a case of dementia or disorganized thinking.

The third vignette is the episode of shouting at a reporter who questioned why the big guy called reports of negotiations to pay illegal immigrant families compensation for enforcement actions "garbage":

I would characterize this as "shame rage", anger at being caught in an untruth, but he's also fully aware that if he blows up at the reporter directly, it will look bad. So he just shouts and gestures. This is organized behavior. It isn't intelligent, and it displays poor judgment, but it isn't cognitive decline.

However, I don't think this will go without its own consequences. By the way, this guy has gone to weekly Roman Catholic mass all his life, it would seem. Something's really wrong here, but it isn't medical.

Sen Manchin Is The De Facto Interim Legislative Leader

It seems to me that the key takeaway from last night's legislative maneuvering is that the winner was Sen Manchin, who succeedced in using Tuesday's election outcomes to nudge Speaker Pelosi off the position she articulated on Wednesday that the outcome would not change her legislative agenda, which was presumably to link the BIF with the BBB and pass both at the same time. By Friday, it had become plain that this would be impossible, and the House leadetship was forced to cobble up a last-minute Plan B, which amounted to passing the BIF first with Republican support -- a Manchin prescription -- while deferring action on the BBB, eventually to go to the Senate, where Manchin's agenda will also prevail.

Speaker Pelosi used up a great deal of time, energy, and political capital allowing the House progressives to wag the dog on the legislative agenda, but accomplished nothing. As Matt Lewis put it on Yahoo News,

After a long on-again, off-again back-and-forth standoff over whether they would muster the votes to pass President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, progressives finally folded like a cheap suit late Friday night and passed it, in exchange for almost nothing.

Consider how progressives’ demands have shifted these last few months. They went from saying they would pass a bipartisan infrastructure bill only after the Senate passed a $3.5 trillion social spending bill to passing that bill in exchange only for an agreement for a House bill on a half-sized $1.75 trillion package if the Congressional Budget Office agrees it would pay for itself and knowing that there’s little chance even if that happens that it will make it through the Senate intact.

Progressives and Nancy Pelosi can dress this up however they like. But the trade House Democrats made was passing a mainstream, popular bill that will become law, in exchange for some progress on a sprawling progressive bill that won’t—at least not anytime soon and certainly not without major overhauls.

. . . The corollary to progressives folding is Joe Manchin winning. That’s the other headline, based on the likelihood that infrastructure week has finally arrived, after all this time. Despite all the criticism and harassment and pressure, he never budged.

Clearly a Democrat, Lewis offfers additional insight from that perspective:

It’s baffling to me why progressives ended up holding out just long enough to help torpedo Democrats’ chances in the Virginia governor’s race—and then acceded to this vote just days later. My only theory is that they feared being blamed for the loss (which explains why Jayapal started signaling the decision to back down on Monday), but couldn’t get the votes in before Friday.

At minimum, it sounds like this is the end of the Götterdämmerung strategy. On Thursday, my view was that it was unchanged, for now, but this suggests I was already thinking it was on shaky ground. But this transcript of Speaker Pelosi's weekly press comference Thursday illustrates her current state of mind and the extent of the bigger problem:

So, we are getting some Byrd and privilege. I think mostly we're getting privilege scrub because privilege scrub is deadly to a bill. Byrd? Well, it's important. You have to take it out, but a privilege violation can take you out. So, we're, again, getting that as we go along as well. But when we pass a bill, then they will see it in its aggregate and make some –

Q: Any concerns that any of this is, quote, ‘messaging’ because they have to take some of those things out regardless, no matter what you send over? And you said you weren't going to send a messaging bill.

Speaker Pelosi. No, no. We're not sending a messaging bill. But we want to be sure that what we send is not Byrd-able or Byrd bath or privilege scrub. They're the two exercises in case – bathing exercises we're engaged in, and we're getting a good response.

Stein's Law: That which cannot continue must stop. As someone said, Speaker Pelosi is a highly overrated person. If Sen Manchin is able to step into the vacuum until another adult can take over, so much the better. Something like this needs to happen at the White House, too.

They've Been Working All Weekend For Months

As I write this morning, the reports are that Speaker Pelosi intends to hold a vote on the BBB today, having postponed it from yesterday. This, of course, is what we've been hearing since September -- a "vote as early as [insert day]", followed by an imperious but belated notice from the speaker that "I'll let you know" when they have the votes, which never quite turn up. Last week, President Biden visited the House to beg the full Democrat caucus for their votes, but that didn't work.

The word was the leadership blamed him for not begging them hard enough, so as of last night, he was calling individual holdouts to beg all the more.

President Joe Biden, having failed twice to convince House Democrats to back his legislative agenda, resorted Thursday to personally calling lawmakers to beg them to vote for the $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act.

I don't see Joe Biden as a closer. The establishment media has been perpetually optimistic about these impending votes, despite their track record of never quite taking place. Buried deep in its story about what might happen today, Politico provides a certain amount of detached analysis:

Several moderate Democrats chafed at the idea of voting on a bill with several provisions that are dead on arrival in the Senate — one of the clearest requests they’d had from the start, alongside a warning that such a vote would invite GOP attack ads.

As far back as this summer, moderate Reps. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.) and Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) warned party leaders they wouldn’t back legislation that hadn’t cleared the Senate’s political tripwires — namely, Manchin and Sinema — as well as the budgetary ones that would determine whether the bill could pass the upper chamber without a filibuster.

Those anxieties intensified after the party’s battering in Virginia and other down-ballot races on Tuesday, when the most vulnerable Democrats watched culture-war issues consume even suburbs that have trended blue.

“It seems like we're making the [social spending bill] more complicated and something that's harder to pass,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.). He's one of the dozen-plus beleaguered moderates who have urged leadership to pivot their attention to the Senate-passed infrastructure deal, rather than ramming through a rushed bill.

. . . Even if House Democrats' swing doesn't whiff, some saw the push for Friday's vote as already insufficient.

“If there was supposed to be a rush, the rush should’ve been before Tuesday’s election,” said Rep. Filemón Vela (D-Texas), one of nine moderates who demanded an infrastructure vote in September.

But in fact, there was a rush to get a vote last Thursday, when the plea went out to preserve the president's prestige going into his trip to Rome and Scotland, and he delayed his departure to beg in person -- despite the tradition that presidents don't go to Capitol Hill unless the votes are already in hand.

However, I think the real reason for last week's rush was to get the vote before the results from Tuesday's election further spooked the moderates. Here's how I think of this right now:

• The moderates still aren't locked in, and they're indeed now spooked. If they vote "yes", they're locked into that unpopular vote going into a tough 2022 campaign, not even assured the BBB will pass the Senate, given Sen Manchin's reservations.
• President Biden's prestige is insufficient to change their minds, and I can't imagine how excruciating a personal call from the big guy must be, given his awkward stammering, gaffes, and misspeaks.
• Especially given Tuesday's outcomes, the likelihood of losing the Democrat House majority next November is even greater, which also increases the likelihood of Speaker Pelosi's retirement. Her impending lame duck status limits her ability to take revenge for "no" votes, which had been the source of her power in the past.

Add to this Rep Jayapal's remarks this morning:

Congressional Progressive Caucus Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) said on Friday that it’s worth Democrats passing the party’s sweeping social spending and climate change package even if they lose the House in next year’s midterm elections.

. . . "Of course it's worth it if we're making people's lives better,” Jayapal said.

Rep Jayapal, along with the other progressives, has a safe seat. She'll keep her job no matter what. The moderates, not so much. Her statement makes it clear that the leadership is willing to sacrifice them for this vote, which is simply another side of the Götterdämmerung strategy. Some people will in fact survive the end of the world, just not the suckers. Updates on the process so far indicate there are still moderate holdouts:

Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine), a centrist who represents a district carried by former President Trump, emerged from Pelosi's office reiterating that there should be a CBO score.

Asked if there will be a vote on Friday, Golden said: "That's a good question. I don't know."

Golden may be a tough get for Democratic leaders on the social spending package anyway.

For now, I think the existing pattern will repeat, and no vote will take place.

For Now, The Götterdämmerung Strategy Is Unchanged

Meaningful statements from President Biden and Speaker Pelosi about the outcomes of Tuesday's elections have been slow to emerge. Asked early Wednesday about whether the results changed the agenda for the House, Speaker Pelosi said, "No". And according to the AP,

Biden looked at the results and suggested no reset was necessary for his White House.

He spoke with certitude of the many factors grinding on Americans — the lingering pandemic, rising costs at the gas pump, uncertainty about the economy — as problems that would go away if he could just get his agenda passed.

“If I’m able to pass, sign into law my Build Back Better initiative, I’m in a position where you’re going to see a lot of those things ameliorated quickly and swiftly,” the president said.

And,

“I’m not sure that I would be able to have changed the number of very conservative folks who turned out in the red districts who were Trump voters,” Biden said. “But maybe. Maybe.”

Voter surveys tell a different story. Three-quarters of voters said drawn-out negotiations in Washington over Biden’s governing agenda were an important factor in their vote. Those voters were more likely to back Youngkin, according to preliminary results from AP VoteCast, a survey of Virginia voters.

According to The Hill,

House Democrats said Wednesday they were switching tactics [but not strategy] and plowing ahead with a vote on President Biden’s sweeping social spending and climate package later this week, without getting a commitment from key Sen. Joe Mnchin (D-W.Va.) that he will support the legislation

. . . A Pelosi spokesman also confirmed that votes will be held this week and that the Speaker plans to bring Build Back Better to the floor first. But she has vowed to hold votes on Biden’s agenda in the past, only to run into opposition from her own party that forced her to delay the votes.

The difference this time seems to be that Pelosi is restoring paid family leave to the House version of the bill, something Manchin will not support in the Senate. This is presumably in the hope of getting the House progressives to support both the BBB and the BIF, with Sen Schumer left to clean up the discrepancy later. However, as I write this Thursday morning, I see no indication that the promised votes, already delayed from Tuesday, will occur by tomorrow, and next week the House is in recess. Pelosi's track record is not good here.

The bottom line appears to be that a 2022 defeat in the midterm elections has always been baked into the Democrats' Götterdämmerung strategy, and from the start, their intent has been to run up the credit cards in anticipation of the end of the world, when they wouldn't see the payments falling due. The defeats on Tuesday simply confirmed the wisdom of this strategy in their view.

Interestingly, the Republicans are looking past the end of the world.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the campaign arm for House Republicans, announced an expansion to the list of Democrat House seats they hope to flip in the upcoming midterm elections, where the majority in the House of Representatives are on the line.

. . . In May, the NRCC expanded their list of offensive seats by ten seats, which brought their total to 57 vulnerable Democrats at the time. Since then, multiple Democrats have either decided to run for higher office or have announced retirement, ultimately leaving the House and ruining House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) chances of keeping a Democrat majority in the House.

But the problem continues to be that the credit cards could be declined well before the world ends. A commentator who's been off the screen for some years, Mickey Kaus, suddently reemerges:

There’s a remote—but increasingly less remote— possibility that Dems will wind up with neither of their two big spending bills: 1) the bipartisan “BIF” hard infrastructure (bridges, roads, etc.) bill and 2) the partisan Dem social spending laundry list, aka “Build Back Better” (BBB).

. . . Still an unlikely scenario, as it’s always been almost inconceivable that the Democrats would screw things up so badly they’d end up passing nothing. But this achievement is now within reach, and if it happens, it looks like there will be an obvious fall guy: Ron Klain, President Biden’s chief of staff.

I;ve been going at the current political situation from the standpoint of character issues, especially a serious lack of competence among the key players combined with the Dunning–Kruger effect, and I'm inclined to believe the outcome of achieving nothing is more liely than Kaus thinks.

What I've Been Saying

As of yesterdy, it looks like Sen Schumer at least is still spinning blarney about a Senate vote on the BBB bill, now "the week of November 15". I feel confident this is just yet another version of "we're gonna work all weekend" that we've been hearing since September. How the results of yesterday's elections affect what changes, if any, are made to the BBB text or the schedule is hard to predict, but my guess is that Speaker Pelosi, Sen Schumer, and President Biden will simply double down on their exising positions. As of yesterday, Sen Manchin made his position clear:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he didn’t sign off on a framework for a $1.75 trillion social spending bill before it was released from the White House and that he didn’t think there was a “rush” to get a deal.

“No,” Manchin said, asked if he had signed off on the framework, adding that if he had, his current pushback wouldn’t be “genuine.”

“The White House knew exactly where I stood. There was a couple of concerns that we had that we needed to work through,” Manchin said.

. . . But Manchin indicated that while he thinks Democrats will ultimately pass something — saying they are “going to get something done” — he didn’t view the weeklong break, scheduled to start on Nov. 22, as a hard deadline.

“I’m not putting restraints on timing. I just think it’s going to take quite a while. ... I think time's going to be needed. We’re not in a rush right now,” Manchin said.

He added on Tuesday that he wants a Congressional Budget Office analysis on the impact and the costs of the bill and still didn’t support including Medicare expansion or paid leave in the bill.

Even so, later in the day, Manchin told CNN he

didn't rule out the ambitious time frame that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out earlier Tuesday: putting the bill on the chamber floor during the week of November 15. Manchin, who hours earlier had said it would take "quite a while" to get a deal, said Tuesday evening: "We have all next week. We're going to work into it next week -- as they are working. So if everyone works real hard, I've said, we can get it done before Thanksgiving. We're going to get something done."

But this is nothing new; Sen Manchin has been expressing vague optimism about how quickly they can come to a deal since September -- they just never quite come to the deal he wants. Meanwhile, Republicans have had little to say, I assume on the basis that if your adversaries are destroying each other, you shouldn't get in their way. However,

Tuesday on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) sounded off on the ongoing negotiations among Democrats for their infrastructure bill, which he described as a “hostage” bill.

Host Maria Bartiromo asked Hagerty if he expected a vote on the infrastructure package this week like the Democrats believe could happen.

Hagerty said he thinks it would be “very difficult” for the Democrats to get a vote in this week and suggested “it could well be” next year before Democrats could get a vote in.

But the conventional wisdom has been that if the negotiations for the bill last into 2022, the midterm election year calculations mean it has little chance at that point. The conventional wisdom had also been that the results of yesterday's elections would affect those calculations. The data is certainly in from yesterday's elections.

How this will affecst the actual Democrat strategy is yet to be seen. The link just above continues Sen Hagerty's assessment:

If you look at what the Democrats did and what they’ve been signaling all along, they created their hostage with the so-called infrastructure bill, but the whole point of this hostage was to use it as a way to force moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin, like Kyrsten Sinema and others to vote for this massive socialization of America tax and spending spree that they’ve been talking about.

It's generally recognized that this hostage strategy has failed, and Biden's agenda, stalled by the progressives on one hand but unpopular with the voters on the other, was a factor in the elections' outcome. As of yesterday, it was doubtful the Democrats could easily change course.

“I’ve watched all the attack ads on Terry McAuliffe and not a single one has talked about the [infrastructure bill] not passing. They’ve all been about other things,” Jayapal told reporters, acknowledging the Virginia race was more about state issues than far-left priorities.

Jayapal is one of many far-left members to have blocked the $1.2 trillion bipartisan vote on Thursday. After Manchin’s comments on Monday, however, she changed her position and now supports passing the infrastructure measure this week.

, , , But with the Virginia race closing on Democrats, it may be too late to pass legislation and appear to not be an obstructionist.

“Everything has an impact on everything,” admitted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “I think at the end of the day, what happens in Virginia is what the candidate stands for, the nature of the campaign, the degree to which the candidate is resonating with the people.”

Sen Manchin And The Leadership Vacuum

With Presidednt Biden out of the country and dozing off on the world stage, Sen Manchin picked a most peculiar time to hold a press conference. According to the Washington Examiner,

Sen. Joe Manchin hit the brakes on a newly touted social welfare spending deal, arguing it needs much more work and consideration before he throws his support behind it.

. . . He accused Democrats of playing “shell games” with the cost estimates of the latest deal, which is half of the initial $3.5 trillion Democrats hoped to spend.

. . . “How can I in good conscience vote for a bill that proposes massive expansion of social programs when vital programs like Social Security and Medicare face insolvency, and benefits can start being reduced as soon as 2026 in Medicare and 2033 in Social Security?” Manchin said. “How does that make sense? And I don't think it does.”

Manchin said he would not decide whether to vote for the bill until the text of the measure is written and, in the meantime, demanded Democrats pass the infrastructure bill, which the Senate approved with bipartisan support last summer.

My first impression is that this announcement simply bypassed both the president and the congressional leadership, and it particularly undermined the impression President Biden had been attempting to create that there is progress on the BIF-BBB deal, with votes imminent. According to Philip Klein at the National Review,

Before leaving for Rome, the White House released a framework that officials tried to present as some sort of breakthrough in ongoing Congressional negotiations. While Biden did not make the explicit claim that he had secured 51 votes in the Senate, the heavy impression was that there was more or less agreement on the broad strokes and they were just ironing out a few minor details.

. . . He went to Capitol Hill to meet with House Democrats in what was supposed to be a speech followed by a vote passing his infrastructure bill.

Instead, Biden took off to Rome and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed the vote yet again. Still, Democrats gave the impression that they were just working on a few odds and ends and expected to vote Tuesday. Progressives claimed they were all in and just waiting for Manchin and Senator Kyrsten Sinema to publicly commit to the framework.

But now that Manchin has said that the framework is full of “shell games” and “budget gimmicks” to hide the true cost of the proposal, last week’s theatrics look even more absurd.

What struck me in the immediate aftermath is that the chief reaction came not from Speaker Pelosi or Leader Schumer, but from the junior Rep Jayapal, the chair of the progressive caucus.

Jayapal now says she trusts Biden to get Manchin on board on the bill as it stands now. Trusting Biden to handle Manchin is a new direction for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, notes Heather Caygle. When Biden asked them to trust him with that task last week, Jayapal and other progressives balked:

Why not just “let the president” deal with Manchin from the beginning? The obvious answer: Biden wasn’t dealing with Manchin at all, at least not effectively. Don’t forget that House progressives thought that Biden was bringing them a turnkey BBB with support from both Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema on Thursday, only to feel “bamboozled” when it turned out that Biden hadn’t bothered to nail down those votes.

. . . And this all starts with Joe Biden, whose dilettante approach to agenda implementation got badly exposed in this debacle. Biden doesn’t want to do any work, not even with Manchin, preferring to keep insisting that he’s the smartest guy in the room and everyone else needs to just recognize his brilliance.

It appears that Speaker Pelosi issued a statement only after Rep Jayapal's, and it effectively echoed Jayapal: "The House, Senate and White House continue to move forward with the Build Back Better Act." My takeaway from this episode is that for now, the two main players are Rep Jayapal and Sen Manchin, with Manchin, who's said he's happy with neither bill passing, holding the winning hand. This in turn is another indication that both Speaker Pelosi and President Biden are lame ducks.