With Democrats Like These, Who Needs Republicans
October 3, 2021
We at Paying Attention have
been painfully focused on the depredations of Joe Manchin regarding the
Democrats’ attempts to enact the agenda Joe Biden ran on and handily won the
presidency. Thanks to gerrymandering, endless dirty tricks and rampant
voter-suppression techniques and laws, Ratpublicans, despite receiving
significantly fewer votes throughout many so-called Red States, still managed
to maintain an overly powerful minority in the House and Senate.
“I’ve
never been a liberal.”
Joe Manchin, September 30, 2021
“No
fucking shit.”
Ed Venture, slightly later, September 30, 2021
We have been remiss by not
giving discredit where discredit is due. Freshman
senator Kyrsten Sinema (“D”-AZ) has been every bit as full-of-shit as Manchin. The
drug and medical industrial complex has prescribed $750K for Sinema, who once
so medicated voted against helping reduce drug costs for Americans. While
working diligently to keep Democrats from helping Americans recover from
Turmp’s Make America Crippled agenda, she will not do interviews and has not
given even a hint of what she wants to cut from the Build Back Better bill.
Sinema recently met with a gaggle of corporate sugar-daddies/lobbyists who
fawned over her (i.e., bought her) with gobs of green, “suggesting” she vote
against the Democrats’ mandate to pass critical, bold legislation to save this
country from Mitch Fucking McConnell and his Sedition Caucus.
Ratpublicans are
anti-environment, anti-voting rights, anti-poor people, and just to show how
much they are the party of Turmp, McConnell has decided that the government
need not bother paying the debts accrued under Turmp, despite warnings from all
quarters that doing so would mean economic disaster for the country and for
countless American households. What the fuck does Moscow Mitch care? McConnell insisted that
Democrats deal with the Debt Ceiling on their own, and then filibustered efforts
to do so. Every single Ratpublican senator stood with McConnell and voted to shut
down the government and destroy the American economy by stiffing creditors.
Every. Single. One.
Every poll taken in the last 10
months shows that the American public supports Biden’s social safety net bill,
both as a whole, and almost all of its constituent parts. Things like
guaranteed pre-K, child-care, adding community college to K-12 public
education, Medicare for all, a permanent child tax credit, cheaper drug prices
for seniors, more equitable taxation of the super-rich, seriously addressing the climate crisis, etc. have massive
support. Even in states like Joe Manchin’s West Virginia.
Sinema, hanging on every word
and one arm of Ratpublican Rob Portman.
Another state where these
policies are popular, Arizona, also has a faux-Democratic senator – Kyrsten
Sinema. Sinema, though better educated, is coming across as no less ignorant,
arrogant and anti-democratic (not to mention anti-Democratic) than intellectually
insufficient hacks like Marjorie Traitor Greene and Lauren
“When-do-we-get-to-pry-her-fucking-guns-from-her-cold-dead-hands” Boebert. This
is not a gender thing – there are certainly more than enough Men-tal midgets
and Men-tal defectives in Congress: Matt Gaetz, Louis Gohmert, Madison
Cawthorn, Deven Nunes, Gym Jordan, Kevin McCarthy, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, the historically ignorant Ron Johnson, and of
course Florida governor Ron Duh-Santis come gurgling to mind like an attack of e-coli for the
brain. And keep an eye out
for up-and-dumber Dan Crenshaw (R-TX). Wow, that’s quite a list. Are there that
many more men because there are just more of them in government or because men
are just worse? We may never know.
Manchin and Sinema represent a
very small minority in their party and in reality, they represent their large
corporate donors above all else. Let them deny it all they want. I thought that
in a democracy the majority was supposed to be allowed to enact their agenda.
Ninety-six percent of Dems in the Congress want to enact the agenda that they
and Joe Biden ran and won on. We have a few holdouts who can obstruct whatever
they want, for whatever reason they want, most notably Manchin and Sinema. They
have expressed more fealty to the filibuster than to their party, their constituents
(who by large margins support most of the Build Back Better package), or the
Constitution. While it is their prerogative to disagree with policy, shouldn’t
they respect the overwhelming majority of their party? This is not a rhetorical
question. And the answer is YES.
The funny thing is, killing
this recovery package, the first one that finally, and significantly favors the
working class (and the environment) in almost 100 years, will likely serve to
kill the political futures of the two most high-profile bill killers. Unsurprisingly, Sinema is blaming progressive Democrats and not every single Ratpublican for holding up Joe Biden’s signature legislation. Is she more full of shit
than Manchin? You make the call.
Then there are the admitted Ratpublicans,
would rather see Democrats fail than see Americans succeed. They just can’t get
enough of Manchin's and Sinema’s corporate whoring.
I. Mangrey, obviously.
