Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[y66]

Joe Biden came to the White House at a pivotal moment in American history. We had become a country dividing into two nations, one highly educated and affluent and the other left behind. The economic gaps further inflamed cultural and social gaps, creating an atmosphere of intense polarization, cultural hostility, alienation, bitterness and resentment.

 

As president, Biden had mostly economic levers to try to bridge this cold civil war. He championed three gigantic pieces of legislation to create a more equal, more just and more united society: the Covid stimulus bill, the infrastructure bill and what became Build Back Better, to invest in human infrastructure.

 

All of these bills were written to funnel money to the parts of the country that were less educated, less affluent, left behind. Adam Hersh, a visiting economist at the Economic Policy Institute, projects that more than 80 percent of the new jobs created by the infrastructure plan will not require a college degree.

 

These gigantic proposals were bold endeavors. Some thought them too bold. Economist Larry Summers thought the stimulus package, for example, was too big. It could overstimulate the economy and lead to inflation.

 

Larry is one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever known and someone I really admire. If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him. But I’m a journalist with a sociological bent. For over a decade I have been covering a country that was economically, socially and morally coming apart. I figured one way to reverse that was to turbocharge the economy and create white-hot labor markets that would lift wages at the bottom. If inflation was a byproduct, so be it. The trade-off is worth it to prevent a national rupture.

 

The Biden $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed and has been tremendously successful. It heated the overall economy. The Conference Board projects that real G.D.P. growth will be about 5 percent this quarter. The unemployment rate is falling. Retail sales are surging. About two-thirds of Americans feel their household’s financial situation is good.

 

But the best part is that the benefits are flowing to those down the educational and income ladder. In just the first month of payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit piece of the stimulus bill kept three million American children out of poverty. Pay for hourly workers in the leisure and hospitality sector jumped 13 percent in August compared with the previous year. By June, there were more nonfarm job openings than there had been at any time in American history. Workers have tremendous power these days.

 

The infrastructure bill Biden just signed will boost American productivity for years to come. As Ellen Zentner of Morgan Stanley told The Economist recently, it’s a rule of thumb that an extra $100 billion in annual infrastructure spending could increase growth by roughly a tenth of a percentage point — which is significant in an economy the size of ours. Federal infrastructure spending will be almost as large a share of annual GDP as the average level during Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

 

But Summers was right. The stimulus — along with all the supply chain and labor shortage disruptions that are inevitable when coming out of a pandemic — has boosted inflation. In addition, Americans are exhausted by a pandemic that seems to never end.

 

And they are taking it out on Democrats. A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll revealed that voters now prefer Republican congressional candidates in their own districts by 51 percent to 41 percent. That’s the largest G.O.P. lead since this poll started asking the question, 40 years ago.

 

If presidencies were judged by short-term popularity, the Biden effort would look pretty bad. But that’s a terrible measure. First-term presidents almost always see their party get hammered in the midterm after their inauguration. That’s especially true if the president achieved big things. Michigan State political scientist Matt Grossmann looked at House popular vote trends since 1953. Often when presidents succeeded in passing major legislation — Republicans as well as Democrats — voters swung against the president’s party. Look, just to take a recent example, at how Obamacare preceded a Democratic shellacking in 2010. People distrust change. Success mobilizes opposition. It’s often only in retrospect that these policies become popular and even sacred.

 

Presidents are judged by history, not the distraction and exhaustion of the moment. Did the person in the Oval Office address the core problem of the moment? The Biden administration passes that test. Sure, there have been failures — the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, failing to renounce the excesses of the cultural left. But this administration will be judged by whether it reduced inequality, spread opportunity, created the material basis for greater national unity.

 

It is doing that.

 

My fear is not that Democrats lose the midterms — it will have totally been worth it. My fear is that Democrats in Congress will make fantastic policies like the expanded Child Tax Credit temporary to make budget numbers look good. If they do that the coming Republican majorities will simply let these policies expire.

 

If that happens then all this will have been in vain. The Democrats will have squandered what has truly been a set of historic accomplishments. Voters may judge Democrats harshly next November, but if they act with strength history will judge them well.

[y66]

It is a feat of epic proportions to speak for four hours straight and not produce a single memorable phrase, original insight or even a joke. McCarthy thinks he is a wit but so far he has proved he is only half right.

[y66]

November 18, 2021

 

This morning, on the podcast of Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows went after McCarthy, suggesting that Trump should replace him. Then, on Trump loyalist Steve Bannon’s podcast, Meadows suggested that if the Republicans win control of the House of Representatives in next year’s elections, Trump should become Speaker of the House, which would drive Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.” Bannon suggested he could hold the position for 100 days and “sort things out” before running for president in 2024.

 

While the Trump loyalists were putting the screws to McCarthy, the economic news continued to be good. A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development on Thursday showed that the United States is the only G7 country to surpass its pre-pandemic economic growth. That growth has been so strong it has buoyed other countries.

 

Meanwhile, the administration's work with ports and supply chains to handle the increase in demand for goods appears to be having an effect. Imports through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach are up 16% from 2018, and in the first two weeks of November, those two ports cleared about a third of the containers sitting on their docks.

 

Then the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) released its score for the Democrats’ $1.85 trillion Build Back Better Act. The CBO is a nonpartisan agency within the legislative branch that provides budget and economic information to Congress. The CBO’s estimate of the costs of the Build Back Better Act will affect who will vote for it.

 

The CBO’s projection was good news for the Democrats; it was in line with what the Democrats had said the bill would cost. The CBO estimates that the bill will increase the deficit by $367 billion over ten years. But the CBO also estimates that the government will raise about $207 billion over those same ten years by enforcing tax rules on those currently cheating on them. These numbers were good in themselves—in comparison, the CBO said the 2017 Republican tax cuts would cost $1.4 trillion over ten years—but they might get even better. Many economists, including Larry Summers, who has been critical of the Biden administration, think that the CBO estimates badly underplay the benefits of the bill.

 

The CBO score also predicted that the savings from prescription drug reforms in the bill would come in $50 billion higher than the House had predicted.

 

As soon as the score was released, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the House would vote on the bill tonight, suggesting that she had the votes to pass the bill.

 

And then something interesting happened. Kevin McCarthy took to the House floor to slow down the passage of the Build Back Better Act, throwing the vote into the middle of the night. The minority leader put on a Trump-esque show of non-sequiturs, previewing the kind of speech he would make to rally Republicans behind him if the Republicans retake the House in 2022. The speech was angry, full of shouting, and made for right-wing media: it was full of all the buzz-words that play there. McCarthy spoke for more than three hours—as I write this, he is still speaking.

 

But the blows he was trying to deliver didn’t land. The Democrats made fun of him, catcalled, and eventually just walked out, while the Republicans lined up behind McCarthy looked increasingly bored, checked their phones, and appeared to doze off. When Axios reporter Andrew Solender asked a Republican aide for some analysis of the speech, the aide answered: “I’m watching the Great British Baking Show.”

[kenberg]

The David Brooks column was interesting, whatever "interesting" means. I have often thought of him as the least conservative Conservative around. So I looked him up on Wik:

https://en.wikipedia...ks_(commentator) :

Brooks has said that "if you define conservative by support for the Republican candidate or the belief that tax cuts are the correct answer to all problems, I guess I don't fit that agenda. But I do think that I'm part of a long-standing conservative tradition that has to do with Edmund Burke ... and Alexander Hamilton."^[45] In fact, Brooks read Burke's work while he was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago and "completely despised it", but "gradually over the next five to seven years ... came to agree with him". Brooks claims that "my visceral hatred was because he touched something I didn't like or know about myself."

 

I also read Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France when I was in college. . Very possibly that is the only aspect of our personal lives that David Brooks and I have in common, and really not that either since Brooks probably remembers what's in it. I find him an interesting guy. He describes his friend Larry [summers] as one of the most intelligent people he has ever known and then "If I were an economist, I might have agreed with him." An interesting phrase. The piece is a mixture of optimism and pessimism and I need to think about it a bit. Definitely interesting.

[y66]

What disarray? Democrats are getting stuff done

 

The House of Representatives finally voted Friday morning to approve the “Build Back Better” bill — the Democratic omnibus containing money for family support, health care, climate and lots and lots of other stuff. Despite constant speculation about divisions within the party, the Democrats were remarkably united, with all but Representative Jared Golden of Maine supporting what turned out to be the party consensus.

 

The finish line is still weeks away; the Senate is expected to make significant changes, after which it will return to the House for what should be final passage. Still, the vote amounted to more vindication of the two-bill strategy the Democrats adopted, which has already produced an infrastructure bill signed into law with bipartisan support. It’s unlikely that either the most liberal or more moderate House Democrats would have voted for the bill on Friday without reasonable confidence that all 50 Democratic senators are willing to go along.

 

The item most likely to be reduced or stripped out in the Senate is the increased deduction for state and local taxes, something that several of the relatively moderate Democrats from New York and New Jersey want to vote for even if it doesn’t end up in the final bill. This way, they’ll be able to tell their constituents that they fought hard for it, even if the result turns out to be less than they wanted. Originally, it was those moderates who didn’t want a House vote until both chambers had signed off on identical legislation. Eventually, they settled for a negotiated public deal that didn’t have full details. It seems likely that including SALT at this stage basically turned the House vote from a negative to a positive.

 

As far as that two-bill strategy? It did take more trust among Democrats than some outside observers thought was there. But not much more. The most liberal Democrats had originally demanded that both bills pass at the same time, but they eventually decided to settle for a sufficiently public commitment from the moderates, crucially including Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Why? For one thing, it showed the advantages of negotiations within the party, where relationships appear for the most part to be fairly good and incentives align for teamwork. For another, the ideological split among Democrats is somewhat overrated. Yes, the House Progressive Caucus has serious policy differences with the moderate Democrats, but its members are also pragmatists who realize that Senator Bernie Sanders isn’t president and they don’t have the votes to get all their preferences enacted.

 

The moderates may not quite be mainstream Democrats, but we’re not talking about old-style conservative Democrats, either. All of them are more liberal than the most liberal Republicans in Congress, and it’s not particularly close. That’s a huge difference from the 1980s, and even a significant difference from the Congresses in 2007-2010 when Nancy Pelosi was speaker for the first time. Silly Republican claims about “socialism” aside, the Democrats are indeed passing a very liberal agenda.

 

Could the whole thing still fall apart? Sure. The House shouldn’t be a problem; after having voted yes on Friday (and in preliminary votes even earlier) there’s little incentive to kill the bill when it returns. But all it takes is a single Democratic senator to bring everything down. Still, it does seem unlikely that events would have reached this stage without some confidence that Manchin and Sinema would be on board, and one would imagine that those senators would have given more of an indication long before now if they intended to oppose final passage. Which gets back to the point about shared incentives: Even as both Manchin and Sinema have strong electoral incentives to establish themselves as clearly more moderate than the party, they also have incentives for the party to thrive overall.

 

So it sure looks likely that some version of Build Back Better, modified by the Senate, will wind up passing. And if that happens, this will have been (for better or worse) one of the most productive Congresses in a long time. With one year remaining to do more.

[Winstonm]

I am not as well-versed or as well-educated as most on the WC so others may correct me but it seems to me that history suggests that the passage of large government programs - at least here in the U.S. - has stimulated the overall economy to a much greater effect that anyone could even imagine at the time of passage.

 

The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones; so just let it be, Kevin!

[Winstonm]

Are there any lawyers here?

I just watched a bit of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial. Day 7, Part 2.

The prosecutor is about to show some drone footage and points out that the operator uses the "pinch and zoom" capability on the Ipad.

 

All hell breaks loose because the defence attorney states that (~1:04:48).

 

 

 

The Judge agrees that this is a valid proposition and that the prosecution needs to find an expert to testify that the zoom feature simply enlarges the original image without affecting what was already there.

 

Well, the verdict is in: Not Guilty on all counts. I wasn't there. I didn't watch the trial on tv. I don't know Wisconsin state law. I cannot second-guess the verdict - but it feels so wrong.

Will there be any federal charges or is Yippee Ki-yay the new normal?

[y66]

Struggling with the Rittenhouse verdict? Read this by Eric Levitz in New York Magazine.

[pilowsky]

Well, the verdict is in: Not Guilty on all counts. I wasn't there. I didn't watch the trial on tv. I don't know Wisconsin state law. I cannot second-guess the verdict - but it feels so wrong.

Will there be any federal charges or is Yippee Ki-yay the new normal?

I watched quite a bit of the trial.

And the moment when the verdict was announced.

 

The defence appeared to argue that because a person carrying an AR-15 is being attacked by someone else with a skateboard then the person with the AR-15 is acting in a reasonable manner if they fend off skateboard man by shooting him.

If that's justice then I'm a banana.

[Winstonm]

I watched quite a bit of the trial.

And the moment when the verdict was announced.

 

The defence appeared to argue that because a person carrying an AR-15 is being attacked by someone else with a skateboard then the person with the AR-15 is acting in a reasonable manner if they fend off skateboard man by shooting him.

Paraphrasing Billy Budd: what does banana have to do with the law?

[Chas_P]

I cannot second-guess the verdict - but it feels so wrong.

What about it do you feel "wrong"? Please expound.

[kenberg]

I have been thinking a little more. Fundamentally, the whole thing should not have happened. Repeating myself, going to an out of control demonstration, or riot or anything like it, is really stupid. Chasing someone who is armed with a rifle is really stupid. But even stupider is that it would be legal to d that not happening so. Probably it was not completely legal. He purchased the gun illegally for one thing. There is a reason that it's illegal for a 17 year old to buy such a weapon. But there were police there. He needed to be told to take his gun and go home. There is something really crazy about just letting it all play out.

 

He wanted to help? No doubt there could have been ways to volunteer assistance in a safe and supervised environment. But of course that wouldn't suit him.

 

The verdict was probably legally correct. I was watching PBS Newshour tonight and Jonathan Capehart was talking. JC is Black, if that matters, and he is at least somewhat on the liberal end of things. He said he had watched a lot of the films and read the Wisconsin law and believed the shooting was legally justified. "Legally justified" means in accordance with the law. That's what the jurors were to act on, and I gather that they did.

 

Police should have handled the problems Kenosha was having. If not that, then the National Guard. Not some 17 year old with a rifle driving up from Illinois.

 

The jury was given an awful situation. A bunch of guys looking for trouble found trouble and now two of them are dead and the jurors are given the thankless, and perhaps dangerous, task of evaluating guilt. They applied the law. Capehart, mentioned above, was part of a discussion with Gary Abernathy. GA is much more conservative. He mentioned that there are celebrations and he observed "There is nothing to celebrate, the whole thing was a tragedy". Yep.

 

I won't repeat all the details of a story I have told before but when I was 9 or so my mother used my father's shotgun to convince a drunk who demanded to come in the house to see his ex-wife (she was staying with us) that he would not be coming into the house. That's different. She had not gotten my father's shotgun and then gone out seeking somewhere to use it.

 

So yeah, I think the jury got it right but it's all a bit sickening.

[Winstonm]

I have been thinking a little more. Fundamentally, the whole thing should not have happened. Repeating myself, going to an out of control demonstration, or riot or anything like it, is really stupid. Chasing someone who is armed with a rifle is really stupid. But even stupider is that it would be legal to d that not happening so. Probably it was not completely legal. He purchased the gun illegally for one thing. There is a reason that it's illegal for a 17 year old to buy such a weapon. But there were police there. He needed to be told to take his gun and go home. There is something really crazy about just letting it all play out.

 

He wanted to help? No doubt there could have been ways to volunteer assistance in a safe and supervised environment. But of course that wouldn't suit him.

 

The verdict was probably legally correct. I was watching PBS Newshour tonight and Jonathan Capehart was talking. JC is Black, if that matters, and he is at least somewhat on the liberal end of things. He said he had watched a lot of the films and read the Wisconsin law and believed the shooting was legally justified. "Legally justified" means in accordance with the law. That's what the jurors were to act on, and I gather that they did.

 

Police should have handled the problems Kenosha was having. If not that, then the National Guard. Not some 17 year old with a rifle driving up from Illinois.

 

The jury was given an awful situation. A bunch of guys looking for trouble found trouble and now two of them are dead and the jurors are given the thankless, and perhaps dangerous, task of evaluating guilt. They applied the law. Capehart, mentioned above, was part of a discussion with Gary Abernathy. GA is much more conservative. He mentioned that there are celebrations and he observed "There is nothing to celebrate, the whole thing was a tragedy". Yep.

 

I won't repeat all the details of a story I have told before but when I was 9 or so my mother used my father's shotgun to convince a drunk who demanded to come in the house to see his ex-wife (she was staying with us) that he would not be coming into the house. That's different. She had not gotten my father's shotgun and then gone out seeking somewhere to use it.

 

So yeah, I think the jury got it right but it's all a bit sickening.

 

The problem is not the verdict but the law...or lack thereof. Yippee-Ki-yay.

[awm]

The disturbing thing is that the US has seen many incidents where someone shows up to a large gathering of people with a military-style weapon and starts shooting, killing multiple people. The NRA (and Republican Party) answer to this is that the way to stop it is "a good guy with a gun" and that people should be more proactive (and more armed) and physically stop the shooter.

 

Okay, you're in a large group of people (say at a protest), and someone shows up with a military-style weapon that he's waving around, pointing at people, while he's arguing loudly with members of the crowd. Are you feeling threatened? Like you might be a mass-shooting casualty? Maybe you want to try to disarm this person, or even pull your own gun on him?

 

Even if you initially show restraint, suppose this person now actually shoots and kills the person he was arguing with. You could be next! Do you want to disarm this person now? Pull your own gun on this person now? Isn't it time to be "a good guy with a gun" (or perhaps "a good guy with a skateboard") and try to prevent the next mass-casualty event?

 

Well, according to this ruling (and apparently Wisconsin law), the bozo with the military-style weapon is actually within his rights to shoot anyone that's trying to stop him -- if he shoots you when you're trying to disarm him (or shoot him, or skateboard-ize him, or otherwise stop him from killing dozens of people) then it's self defense.

 

And if you want to go on a violent killing spree, all you have to do is show up somewhere, wave your gun around, scream and act angry, and then wait for someone to try to confront you before you start firing.

 

As Winston would say, Yippee-Ki-yay.

[Cyberyeti]

What about it do you feel "wrong"? Please expound.

 

You don't turn up in another state at a demonstration like that with an assault rifle unless you're looking for trouble. It looks like he was looking for an excuse to use it and plead self defence.

 

Also the selection of a Trump supporting judge and rejection of pretty much every black juror gives the sense that this was not a fair trial.

 

Do you really think if Rittenhouse was poor and black in otherwise identical circumstances he'd have got the same outcome ? He'd probably have been shot by police on the day, but otherwise have definitely been convicted.

[pilowsky]

The term "chaos tourist" was used by someone.

[kenberg]

A simple point: When I was 17 there were things to cope with. Everyone else can say the same. I did not think that bringing my shotgun with me to my trigonometry class was the solution.

We need to look for reasonable solutions to the problems that we have in society.

[Winstonm]

The disturbing thing is that the US has seen many incidents where someone shows up to a large gathering of people with a military-style weapon and starts shooting, killing multiple people. The NRA (and Republican Party) answer to this is that the way to stop it is "a good guy with a gun" and that people should be more proactive (and more armed) and physically stop the shooter.

 

Okay, you're in a large group of people (say at a protest), and someone shows up with a military-style weapon that he's waving around, pointing at people, while he's arguing loudly with members of the crowd. Are you feeling threatened? Like you might be a mass-shooting casualty? Maybe you want to try to disarm this person, or even pull your own gun on him?

 

Even if you initially show restraint, suppose this person now actually shoots and kills the person he was arguing with. You could be next! Do you want to disarm this person now? Pull your own gun on this person now? Isn't it time to be "a good guy with a gun" (or perhaps "a good guy with a skateboard") and try to prevent the next mass-casualty event?

 

Well, according to this ruling (and apparently Wisconsin law), the bozo with the military-style weapon is actually within his rights to shoot anyone that's trying to stop him -- if he shoots you when you're trying to disarm him (or shoot him, or skateboard-ize him, or otherwise stop him from killing dozens of people) then it's self defense.

 

And if you want to go on a violent killing spree, all you have to do is show up somewhere, wave your gun around, scream and act angry, and then wait for someone to try to confront you before you start firing.

 

As Winston would say, Yippee-Ki-yay.

The way the law is enforced is that after the first shots were fired anyone in the crowd could have shot and killed the kid and claimed self defense. There's the Yippee ki-yay. Fastest gun , fair fight. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3d082401-552b-42da-8f78-0769dc234a5d

[awm]

The way the law is enforced is that after the first shots were fired anyone in the crowd could have shot and killed the kid and claimed self defense. There's the Yippee ki-yay. Fastest gun , fair fight. https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/3d082401-552b-42da-8f78-0769dc234a5d

 

Surely you mean any WHITE person in the crowd, but otherwise I agree with your point. Vigilante law here we come!

[Winstonm]

Surely you mean any WHITE person in the crowd, but otherwise I agree with your point. Vigilante law here we come!

Who knew that Moses broke the stone tablet that contained all the footnotes, like the footnote to “Thou shalt not kill” that said “unless thou fear for thy own life, then fire away.”

[Chas_P]

Who knew that Moses broke the stone tablet that contained all the footnotes, like the footnote to “Thou shalt not kill” that said “unless thou fear for thy own life, then fire away.”

Yes. Rosenbaum and Huber definitely were heroes and martyrs. Hopefully statues of them will soon be erected.

[y66]

In its

, “S.N.L.” returned to the familiar format of a “Justice with Judge Jeanine” parody, with Cecily Strong playing the program’s vociferous host, Jeanine Pirro.

 

Reflecting on the highly charged Rittenhouse proceedings, Strong said, “That lovable scamp was put through a nightmare of a trial just for doing the bravest thing any American can do: protecting an empty used car lot in someone else’s town.”

 

She then introduced Mikey Day as Judge Bruce Schroeder, who oversaw the trial, saying that he had been “as impartial as a dance mom clapping harder than anyone.”

 

Day said that the rules he followed during the trial were “all standard procedure.”

 

“That’s why I ordered that the prosecution not use the word ‘victims,’” he said. “They were rioters. And they weren’t shot. They were ‘gadoinked.’ But that did not give my client an unfair advantage in any way.”

 

Strong asked him, “Do you mean the defendant?”

 

“Oh yeah, sure, I keep doing that,” Day replied.

 

Strong brought out two liberal commentators, played by Chloe Fineman and Chris Redd, who saw the verdict from very different perspectives.

 

“I was shocked,” Fineman said. (“You were?” Redd responded. “‘Cause I wasn’t.”)

 

“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” she said. (“I have,” he answered. “Many, many times.”)

 

“This is not who we are,” Fineman declared. (“I feel like it kind of is,” Redd answered.)

 

The sketch also featured Alex Moffat as Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, in a brief sendup of the eight-hour speech he gave from Thursday night into Friday morning. Strong said of him, “And that brave man stopped the Build Back Better bill from being passed. Until the next day, when it passed in two minutes.”

 

As in its previous iteration, the segment concluded with an appearance from James Austin Johnson as former President Donald J. Trump. He delivered a couple of free-association riffs on Chris Christie, Bill Maher, Dua Lipa and “Gossip Girl,” and boasted that he had “built it back even better.”

 

“I did wall,” Johnson said. “Big, beautiful wall. But it’s not just wall, because when you put wall down through a grass field, frankly, that’s road. And if you take wall and lay it across the river, frankly, Jeanine, you are doing bridge.”

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/20/us/pelosi-democrats-biden-agenda.html

 

WASHINGTON — On a Wednesday night in September, while President Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse.

 

Credit: C-SPAN

On the other end of the line was Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, a crucial swing vote on Mr. Biden’s sweeping social policy bill, and Ms. Pelosi, seated in the V.I.P. section behind the dugout at Nationals Park, was trying to persuade him to embrace $2.1 trillion in spending and climate change provisions she considered essential for the legislation.

 

In a moment captured by C-SPAN cameras that went viral, Ms. Pelosi appeared to grow agitated as Mr. Manchin, according to sources apprised of the call, told her that he could not accept more than $1.5 trillion — and was prepared to provide a document clearly laying out his parameters for the package, benchmarks that House Democrats had been clamoring to see.

 

The call reflected how Ms. Pelosi’s pivotal role in shepherding Mr. Biden’s agenda on Capitol Hill has reached far beyond the House that is her primary responsibility and into the Senate, where she has engaged in quiet and little-noticed talks with key lawmakers who have the power to kill the package or propel it into law.

 

Her efforts — fraught with challenges and littered with near-death experiences for the bill — finally paid off on Friday with House passage of the $2.2 trillion social policy and climate change package.

 

Along the way, Ms. Pelosi, who is known for delivering legislative victories in tough circumstances, was forced repeatedly to pull back from a floor showdown on the bill as she labored to unite the feuding liberal and moderate factions in her caucus. A crucial but less-seen part of her task was sounding out and cajoling a pair of Democratic holdouts in the Senate, Mr. Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who were opposed to major elements of Mr. Biden’s plan and had the power to upend whatever delicate deal Ms. Pelosi was able to strike.

 

It was only after her call with Mr. Manchin at the baseball game that Ms. Pelosi discovered that the West Virginian’s demands were contained in a sort of makeshift contract he had delivered to Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, in late July. The document, which was signed by both men, had been kept secret — including from her — for months.

 

“I would have liked to have known that,” Ms. Pelosi, said in an interview on Friday, recounting how she felt blindsided. “However, it was what it was.”

 

Mr. Manchin’s insistence on holding down the cost of the package threw a wrench into Ms. Pelosi’s plan to quickly advance the monumental social policy bill, sending it instead through a series of tortuous twists and turns until Friday morning, when she finally managed to pass it.

 

She is still not done, with the Senate now getting a chance to reshape the measure in the hope of eventually sending it back for final House approval and Mr. Biden’s signature. Mr. Manchin is still demanding major changes, such as the jettisoning of a new four-week paid family and medical leave program that Ms. Pelosi has made a top priority.

 

But in the weeks since their call, Mr. Manchin has privately expressed an openness to embracing a costlier plan than the one he initially insisted upon, and the speaker now says she is confident that the measure approved by the House will re-emerge from the Senate mostly intact.

 

“They may want to hone or sharpen this or that, and that’s a negotiation,” Ms. Pelosi said of the Senate. “But 90-some percent of that bill is what it is.”

 

Initial approval of the legislation in the House was a considerable achievement in itself, considering unanimous Republican opposition and the deep Democratic divisions over the package. And it came in spite of whispers in the corridors of the Capitol that lawmakers no longer feared Ms. Pelosi as much as they had in the past, since she is believed to be nearing the end of her tenure.

 

In the end, as she did with the financial bailout in 2008, the Obama-era stimulus plan in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, among others, Ms. Pelosi found a way to win when it appeared she could lose. This time, she did so with a bill that contains history-making initiatives for the environment and substantial health care, child care, family leave and educational programs that she and her Democratic colleagues have sought for decades.

 

Ms. Pelosi, 81, acknowledged in an interview on Friday that it was a legacy piece of legislation, even if she was not willing to entertain questions about her own future.

 

“We must pass it, and then we have to see it for me to have an almost religious experience of appreciating what it is,” Ms. Pelosi said in her Capitol office, not long after the vote to approve the bill, which was delayed until Friday morning by an angry eight-hour stemwinder from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader. “But it’s a big deal.”

 

While her main responsibility was wrangling the House, Ms. Pelosi devoted considerable time to Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, both of whom hold the power to scuttle the deal in the evenly divided Senate if they balk.

 

Ms. Pelosi has ties to both. She has bonded with Mr. Manchin, who like Ms. Pelosi grew up in a political family, over their shared Italian heritage and Catholicism and her work on health and pension benefits for coal miners, represented in her office by a statue of a miner gifted to her by Mr. Manchin.

 

When Ms. Pelosi wanted to send a message to Mr. Manchin about voting rights this year, she had it delivered on a literal silver platter given to her by Robert C. Byrd, the former Senate leader from West Virginia whom Mr. Manchin often cites as a guiding star. The tray, which is warmly inscribed in appreciation for Ms. Pelosi’s fund-raising work on delivering a Democratic Senate majority in 1987, was a reminder for Mr. Manchin of the speaker’s past relationship with his predecessor.

 

“I thought he should see it,” Ms. Pelosi said with a chuckle.

 

Ms. Pelosi knew Ms. Sinema as an activist in Arizona even before she was elected to the House, where they developed a mutual respect and rapport. It was warning signs from Ms. Sinema in late September that led Ms. Pelosi to begin the delicate task of separating the social policy bill from a bipartisan infrastructure measure that had already passed the Senate with Ms. Sinema as a main author.

 

Progressives were adamant that they would only back the public works bill after they were assured that Senate Democrats, notably Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema, were committed to voting for the social policy bill — an assurance that did not, and still does not, exist.

 

With the deadline for a vote approaching, Ms. Pelosi opened a back channel to Ms. Sinema through former Representative Joe Kennedy III, a friend of Ms. Sinema’s who entered the House with her in 2013.

 

He reported back that Ms. Sinema was ready to abandon the social spending bill entirely if she did not quickly see the House developing a path forward on the public works measure. In response, Ms. Pelosi sent a letter to her colleagues on Sept. 26 saying the House would take up the infrastructure bill the next day, a plan that drew vehement opposition from progressives and led to a stalemate for weeks.

 

As for Mr. Manchin, Ms. Pelosi intensified her outreach to him following a Sept. 16 video conference call she had with Mr. Biden and Mr. Schumer. The three Democrats, who have been friends and colleagues for decades, deepened their bond during the talks, ribbing and encouraging each other in their vastly varying styles.

 

During that particular call, according to people with direct knowledge of it, Mr. Biden told the two congressional leaders that he had been encouraged by his discussions with Ms. Sinema and Mr. Manchin, though they agreed it might be to their benefit to have Ms. Pelosi talk to Mr. Manchin as well.

 

“I’m with ya,” Mr. Biden told Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer of their plans.

 

“Put an F-word in front of that,” Mr. Schumer said enthusiastically.

 

“Now that you’ve resorted to that language, I’m going to thank you, Mr. President,” retorted the speaker, who frowns on profanity.

 

“Nancy does not allow me to curse,” Mr. Schumer responded. “I try to curb my foul mouth in front of her, with some degree of success.”

 

“Every time I look at Nancy, I think of myself as some altar boy,” said the president.

 

When she went back to Mr. Manchin, he had a reassuring message.

 

“There is a place we can come together,” he told Ms. Pelosi, according to people with knowledge of the conversation. “I feel quite certain. I always want to make a deal.”

[kenberg]

It's ok, I suppose, for SNL to do a comedy routine about the trial, comedy is what they do, but two people are dead so it's not really all that funny. During the actual trial, the judge was widely criticized for expressing hope that the transportation bottlenecks wouldn't slow down the delivery of their Asian food lunch. I did not see his remark to be in any way a slur on Asians but I did think that maybe he should go easy on the humor during a murder trial.

 

There will be a discussion about changing the law on self-defense. The following occurred to me. Sometimes (often?) in a traffic accident both parties share some blame. I believe that this is often resolved by asking who had the last chance to avoid disaster. A guy stops his car in the middle of an intersection. He shouldn't do that. A guy coming into the intersection crashes into him. Could he reasonably have been expected to stop? I think that is often the crucial question in assessing primary responsibility for the crash. One could argue about which driver was the bigger idiot, but I think who had the lat opportunity to avoid disaster is often the paramount legal question. I suspect that this was a good part of the thinking of the jury. Coming to an out-of-control demonstration was stupid. Chasing a guy with a gun was stupid. As it reached the closing stage, who had the last chance to bring a safe end to their confrontation?

Any law about self-defense will be applied, or be hoped to apply, in a wide variety of situations. You can't list them all in advance. So there must be some basic overview of when it applies. This "who had the last chance to prevent disaster?" criterion would get a lot of votes I think.

[y66]

I'm constantly amazed at how hard some of our politicians work, especially some of the old vets like Pelosi, Biden and Sanders. It's not just the oldsters however. Here's my favorite member of Congress (D-VA, age 42), fielding a constituent's question about inflation at a town hall meeting last Wednesday: