~46~ Lame Duck Unfit Uncle Joe Biden ~46~

[MDlaxfan76]

ok, and now back to reality.

There's going to some minor increases in taxes on the very wealthiest and corps...there's also going to be some loophole tightening and enhanced resources to actually collect from scofflaws, mostly focused on the very, very wealthy.

But the point of infrastructure is that it'll ultimately lower costs and enhance commerce over the long haul. While there are indeed cost overruns and some outright dumb projects, for the most part these expenditures really do pay off versus neglect. It's an investment not an expense. And we have lots of history indicating that's the case (again, yes, you can point to boondoggles, I'm talking overall).

The more interesting debate is not on these hard assets and their ROI, but on the soft stuff coming in the reconciliation bill. If the Dems pull it off, it's indeed going to be very interesting to see how these changes impact society's productivity...yes, there will be unintended negative consequences, but will they outweigh the benefits?...we really don't know.

[kramerica.inc]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

[old salt]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

...he even used to double clutch his '67 Vette, even though it had a Muncie 4 spd. When he'd cruise the 'hood, Cornpop & his bad boys used to yell at him "grind me a pound, whiteboy".

[Typical Lax Dad]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

...he even used to double clutch his '67 Vette, even though it had a Muncie 4 spd. When he'd cruise the 'hood, Cornpop & his bad boys used to yell at him "grind me a pound, whiteboy".

What else has come out of Muncie that’s worthwhile?

[old salt]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

...he even used to double clutch his '67 Vette, even though it had a Muncie 4 spd. When he'd cruise the 'hood, Cornpop & his bad boys used to yell at him "grind me a pound, whiteboy".

What else has come out of Muncie that’s worthwhile?

Wingless 410 c.i.d. sprint cars racing on dirt tracks
https://hoseheadforums.com/forum.cfm?ThreadID=88294

[Typical Lax Dad]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

...he even used to double clutch his '67 Vette, even though it had a Muncie 4 spd. When he'd cruise the 'hood, Cornpop & his bad boys used to yell at him "grind me a pound, whiteboy".

What else has come out of Muncie that’s worthwhile?

Wingless 410 c.i.d. sprint cars racing on dirt tracks
https://hoseheadforums.com/forum.cfm?ThreadID=88294

Kokomo or Muncie? I thought you would say Ball Mason Glass Jars.

[old salt]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

...he even used to double clutch his '67 Vette, even though it had a Muncie 4 spd. When he'd cruise the 'hood, Cornpop & his bad boys used to yell at him "grind me a pound, whiteboy".

What else has come out of Muncie that’s worthwhile?

Wingless 410 c.i.d. sprint cars racing on dirt tracks
https://hoseheadforums.com/forum.cfm?ThreadID=88294

Kokomo or Muncie? I thought you would say Ball Mason Glass Jars.

My Mom used them for pickles & strawberry preserves.

[Typical Lax Dad]

Politics
Biden Tells Of The Time He Drove A Corellian Freighter And Made The Kessel Run In Less Than 12 Parsecs
July 30th, 2021

MACUNGIE, PA—In a rally at the Mack Truck facility in Lehigh Valley this week, President Biden boasted that he made the Kessel run in less than 12 parsecs back in the days when he was a hard-working interstellar freight driver.

"Yeah, these Mack Trucks are impressive, real impressive," said Biden, "but I gotta say, these are nothing compared to the Correllian light freighter I used to drive around smuggling contraband while avoiding Imperial patrols. That's no joke!"

The audience of union workers who had been forced to attend clapped politely, but seemed confused as to the meaning of Biden's odd statement.

The all-female White House communications team skillfully clarified Biden's statement the next day, saying that while Biden technically never piloted the Millenium Falcon, he did watch Star Wars once, and even rode along on the Star Wars Galaxy's Edge Millenium Falcon Ride at Disney when it first opened.

"The message we should all take away from this is that President Biden respects the hard work of our Hollywood science fiction movie makers, theme park designers, and blue-collar Mack Truck builders," they said.

Biden later began to tell the story of the time he brought balance to the force before his mic was quickly cut off.

https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-tells ... 12-parsecs

...he even used to double clutch his '67 Vette, even though it had a Muncie 4 spd. When he'd cruise the 'hood, Cornpop & his bad boys used to yell at him "grind me a pound, whiteboy".

What else has come out of Muncie that’s worthwhile?

Wingless 410 c.i.d. sprint cars racing on dirt tracks
https://hoseheadforums.com/forum.cfm?ThreadID=88294

Kokomo or Muncie? I thought you would say Ball Mason Glass Jars.

My Mom used them for pickles & strawberry preserves.

Are those Sprint races in Kokomo?

[old salt]

Are those Sprint races in Kokomo?

Yes. Looks like that video was the non-wing 410 sprints that are part of the regular racing program most weeks during the season at Kokomo. http://www.kokomospeedway.net/schedule/

They run run for a track championship there & at other IN tracks. Many of the best & will financed IN teams run the national USAC circuit for non-wing sprints. http://usacracing.com/schedule-and-results

Non-wing sprint racing is concentrated in IN with USAC as the national circuit.
Winged sprints predominate in most of the rest of the US, with World of Outlaws & the All Star series as the national touring series.
The cars are much the same. They are set up differently. The down force of the wing makes the winged cars faster & easier to drive.
imho -- the non-winged cars are more fun to watch & requires more skill from the drivers.

On 4/9/21 they were a prelim race to the World of Outlaws, who are the premier national touring circuit of winged sprint cars.

[Typical Lax Dad]

That area of the country may as well be in a time capsule. Indiana is such a strange state. Those races are fun….so are the offshore power boat races.

[youthathletics]

That area of the country may as well be in a time capsule. Indiana is such a strange state. Those races are fun….so are the offshore power boat races.

Love some offshore racing. Was in a 42’ Fountain doing 130.....insane.

[old salt]

That area of the country may as well be in a time capsule. Indiana is such a strange state. Those races are fun….so are the offshore power boat races.

They still run the unlimited hydroplanes at Madison IN, on the Ohio river on July 4 weekend every year.
Madison is stlll like the movie, which was accurately based on a true story.
Now that they're jet turbine powewred, the unlimited hydros are faster, but not as impressive, since they're no longer "thunderboats", powered by WW-II fighter plane engines.

[Typical Lax Dad]

That area of the country may as well be in a time capsule. Indiana is such a strange state. Those races are fun….so are the offshore power boat races.

They still run the unlimited hydroplanes at Madison IN, on the Ohio river on July 4 weekend every year.
Madison is stlll like the movie, which was accurately based on a true story.
Now that they're jet turbine powewred, the unlimited hydros are faster, but not as impressive, since they're no longer "thunderboats", powered by WW-II fighter plane engines.

I will look for that movie…..hillbilly is an accurate term in the trailer. I went to school with some hillbillies…..I liked the hydroplane races.

[seacoaster]

Infrastructure:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

"On the day President Biden’s first attempt at a bipartisan infrastructure deal collapsed, he dialed up a Republican senator he saw as a potential negotiating partner for a renewed push.

In that June 8 phone call, Biden told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that he wanted a public works agreement with Republicans in the neighborhood of $600 billion. More notably, Biden showed deep interest in provisions on energy resiliency that Cassidy had been working on for weeks.

That embrace of a favored provision hit home with Cassidy. “The president made it clear that that was essential for him,” the senator said. “Since the president had said it must be there, obviously that was very helpful.”

Cassidy would ultimately become one of five Senate Republicans, who, along with five Democrats and the White House, reached an agreement last week on a sweeping infrastructure package that includes $550 billion in new spending to revitalize the nation’s roads, strengthen public transit, repair water systems and expand broadband networks.

The months of arduous negotiations leading to last week’s agreement make up only the first hurdle. In coming days, the package must clear the Senate — where it garnered 67 votes in a recent test vote — and also survive the House, where many discontented liberals see the agreement as inadequate.

Still, the infrastructure talks have served so far as evidence for Biden’s insistence that bipartisanship can prevail even in a virulently divided political atmosphere and that his Senate roots could help him navigate a Republican Party whose voters often do not even acknowledge his legitimate win in November.

Biden’s phone call with Cassidy was only one example of Biden’s contact with Republicans during the talks. He regularly called GOP senators, White House aides say, while presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti was on virtual speed dial on the Republican negotiators’ phones. After he inadvertently angered Republicans by attaching public conditions to the deal, Biden personally phoned Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to ask how he could quell the uproar.

And as talks reached their critical endgame, he deputized Ricchetti, a longtime friend and adviser, to closet himself with Portman and hammer out the final details.

“I’m working with Democrats and Republicans to get this done, because — while there’s a lot we don’t agree on — I believe that we should be able to work together on the few things we do agree on,” Biden told a crowd of autoworkers in Lower Macungie Township, Pa., last week. “I think it’s important.”

The nearly four months of negotiations with Senate Republicans reflected a markedly different dynamic from Biden’s push for emergency coronavirus relief earlier this year, when the president’s brief negotiations with Republicans were promptly eclipsed by Democrats moving on unilaterally to enact $1.9 trillion in pandemic aid.

On infrastructure, Biden repeatedly made it clear in conversations with Republicans that he was serious about achieving a bipartisan deal, according to interviews with senators, congressional aides and administration officials. His chief emissaries to the Capitol — Ricchetti; Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council; and Louisa Terrell, Biden’s legislative affairs director — echoed that message as often as they could.

Biden had to walk a balance. Some Democrats were angry at his outreach to Republicans, who they said long ago abandoned any pretense of bipartisanship and steamrolled Democrats when they could.

The Republicans were also torn between competing forces. The party’s pragmatists hoped that by negotiating with the White House, they could avoid a more liberal infrastructure package. But many in the GOP oppose working with Biden at all, and former president Donald Trump is still trying to sabotage the deal.

But even as an earlier set of talks between Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) was grabbing headlines in May, the White House was in touch with a separate group of 10 senators that had begun its own infrastructure discussions, after Portman and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) started talking and then brought in other senators.

Biden viewed Portman, who is not seeking reelection, as a good-faith negotiator, and the White House has long paid considerable attention to the enigmatic Sinema, a vital swing vote for the president’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the president found himself talking to Cassidy about infrastructure during a presidential trip to his home state of Louisiana and began seeing him as a potential collaborator as well. Through their regular legislative affairs outreach, White House staffers had already alerted Biden to Cassidy’s bipartisan work with Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) to make the nation’s energy system more impervious to natural disasters.

Cassidy is a staunch Republican, not generally viewed as a moderate, but he has been willing to work with Democrats, and “you leave no stone unturned” when it comes to prospective negotiating partners, said one White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Once Biden’s talks with Capito collapsed, the White House turned its attention fully to the group of 10 senators, which until then had kept an intentionally low profile.

Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell began regularly showing up at the Capitol. As the 10 senators sat around a wide table, the three White House officials would intersperse themselves among them, allowing for side conversations on what senators were hearing from constituents back home.

“They wanted to be supportive but not actively engaged in owning all the outcomes,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said of Biden’s team. Over time, however, “it became evident that to make sure we got all the Democrats, they had to own more of the product.”

Red lines were made explicit: The GOP refused to reverse any of the tax cuts enacted under Trump. Biden would not hike taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year, which ruled out raising the gas tax. Spending from Biden’s coronavirus relief package would go untouched.

But both sides took those limitations as a starting point, not an end.

“You can tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative one,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). “In this case, when one side had a problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away from the table.”

While Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell were furiously negotiating details at the Capitol, Biden was briefed multiple times a day at the White House and repeatedly hopping on the telephone, according to a second senior White House official.

Top White House aides also held daily meetings to gauge progress, as did members of the “jobs cabinet” — the secretaries of commerce, transportation, energy, labor, and housing and urban development. On those calls, White House officials and the Cabinet secretaries would swap intel on what lawmakers were thinking and identify stumbling blocks.

Of the five Cabinet members, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was the most closely involved in negotiating with Republicans, striking an agreement with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on a broadband provision, after numerous meetings and lengthy text chains.

The broad infrastructure deal was announced with great fanfare in June outside the White House. But many details remained unresolved, and the push to promote the effort in the Senate only intensified, with Terrell’s 25-member shop holding more than 330 meetings or phone calls with lawmakers and their top staffers. The White House legislative affairs office — in tandem with other White House divisions and administration agencies — held more than 60 congressional briefings on the agreement.

By that point, a working relationship had developed. “If we’re speaking to the White House officials, I always felt as if we were getting straight scoop,” Cassidy said.

But as soon as the agreement came together, it almost fell apart.

Biden, speaking triumphantly to reporters hours after announcing the deal, said he would not sign it unless it was accompanied by a separate package that encompassed only Democratic priorities. It was an effort to placate liberals afraid that the bipartisan deal abandoned their goals.

Collins saw a news alert about Biden’s comments — effectively a veto threat against his own deal — flash across her phone as she waited at Reagan National Airport for a late-night flight to Maine. Before boarding, Collins called Ricchetti, who promptly answered.

“I remember I was so shocked because that was completely contrary to what we had explicitly talked about in the Oval Office and then at the press conference right afterwards,” Collins said.

Early the next day, Ricchetti called Collins back, telling her he was working on getting the agreement with Republicans back on track. Biden was also working the phones, calling Portman and asking what he should say to reassure GOP senators, according to a Republican close to the talks. The president ultimately issued a lengthy statement backtracking on his comments.

Even so, more than a month would pass from the announcement of the initial framework to last week’s finalization of the deal. In that time, several eruptions threatened to unravel the entire effort.

The administration and GOP senators haggled in recent days, for example, over the structure of an “infrastructure bank” designed to generate investment in big projects through public-private partnerships. Ultimately, the administration took the idea off the table, leaving Republicans “baffled,” Collins said. The White House declined to comment on why it did so.

In the final days before announcing last week’s final breakthrough, senators and the White House delegated the last stretch of talks to two seasoned Washington operators: Portman and Ricchetti.

It was a conscious decision, the first senior White House official said, with Biden wanting to avoid too many cooks in the kitchen at a pivotal moment.

So the two men — both Ohioans whose joint history dates to at least the 1990s, when Ricchetti worked for President Bill Clinton and Portman was a House member — camped out for nine hours Tuesday night in Portman’s Senate conference room, where a kayak and several Ohio sports jerseys hang on the walls. Those intensive talks helped resolve one of the final sticking points — how much to spend on public transit.

Even with last week’s successful Senate vote to advance the package, weeks if not months lie ahead before Biden will be able to sign it into law, assuming it survives at all.

If the Senate passes the bill in coming weeks, it will have to pass muster in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she will not allow it to reach a vote until the separate Democratic-only package has cleared. And the process on that latter legislation is likely to be longer and more complicated even than the bipartisan talks, meaning there is no guarantee either bill will pass.

But Biden and others who say the parties can still cooperate in the post-Trump era claim the process so far validates their view. And how the White House nurtured trust with a group of pivotal Republicans offers some instructive clues on how it could lean on those relationships for other efforts.

“The president and his team have to be willing to invest the time and say no to the left — the far left — and Republicans have got to be willing to say no to the far right,” Collins said. “This really was built center-out.”

[cradleandshoot]

Infrastructure:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

"On the day President Biden’s first attempt at a bipartisan infrastructure deal collapsed, he dialed up a Republican senator he saw as a potential negotiating partner for a renewed push.

In that June 8 phone call, Biden told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that he wanted a public works agreement with Republicans in the neighborhood of $600 billion. More notably, Biden showed deep interest in provisions on energy resiliency that Cassidy had been working on for weeks.

That embrace of a favored provision hit home with Cassidy. “The president made it clear that that was essential for him,” the senator said. “Since the president had said it must be there, obviously that was very helpful.”

Cassidy would ultimately become one of five Senate Republicans, who, along with five Democrats and the White House, reached an agreement last week on a sweeping infrastructure package that includes $550 billion in new spending to revitalize the nation’s roads, strengthen public transit, repair water systems and expand broadband networks.

The months of arduous negotiations leading to last week’s agreement make up only the first hurdle. In coming days, the package must clear the Senate — where it garnered 67 votes in a recent test vote — and also survive the House, where many discontented liberals see the agreement as inadequate.

Still, the infrastructure talks have served so far as evidence for Biden’s insistence that bipartisanship can prevail even in a virulently divided political atmosphere and that his Senate roots could help him navigate a Republican Party whose voters often do not even acknowledge his legitimate win in November.

Biden’s phone call with Cassidy was only one example of Biden’s contact with Republicans during the talks. He regularly called GOP senators, White House aides say, while presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti was on virtual speed dial on the Republican negotiators’ phones. After he inadvertently angered Republicans by attaching public conditions to the deal, Biden personally phoned Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to ask how he could quell the uproar.

And as talks reached their critical endgame, he deputized Ricchetti, a longtime friend and adviser, to closet himself with Portman and hammer out the final details.

“I’m working with Democrats and Republicans to get this done, because — while there’s a lot we don’t agree on — I believe that we should be able to work together on the few things we do agree on,” Biden told a crowd of autoworkers in Lower Macungie Township, Pa., last week. “I think it’s important.”

The nearly four months of negotiations with Senate Republicans reflected a markedly different dynamic from Biden’s push for emergency coronavirus relief earlier this year, when the president’s brief negotiations with Republicans were promptly eclipsed by Democrats moving on unilaterally to enact $1.9 trillion in pandemic aid.

On infrastructure, Biden repeatedly made it clear in conversations with Republicans that he was serious about achieving a bipartisan deal, according to interviews with senators, congressional aides and administration officials. His chief emissaries to the Capitol — Ricchetti; Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council; and Louisa Terrell, Biden’s legislative affairs director — echoed that message as often as they could.

Biden had to walk a balance. Some Democrats were angry at his outreach to Republicans, who they said long ago abandoned any pretense of bipartisanship and steamrolled Democrats when they could.

The Republicans were also torn between competing forces. The party’s pragmatists hoped that by negotiating with the White House, they could avoid a more liberal infrastructure package. But many in the GOP oppose working with Biden at all, and former president Donald Trump is still trying to sabotage the deal.

But even as an earlier set of talks between Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) was grabbing headlines in May, the White House was in touch with a separate group of 10 senators that had begun its own infrastructure discussions, after Portman and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) started talking and then brought in other senators.

Biden viewed Portman, who is not seeking reelection, as a good-faith negotiator, and the White House has long paid considerable attention to the enigmatic Sinema, a vital swing vote for the president’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the president found himself talking to Cassidy about infrastructure during a presidential trip to his home state of Louisiana and began seeing him as a potential collaborator as well. Through their regular legislative affairs outreach, White House staffers had already alerted Biden to Cassidy’s bipartisan work with Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) to make the nation’s energy system more impervious to natural disasters.

Cassidy is a staunch Republican, not generally viewed as a moderate, but he has been willing to work with Democrats, and “you leave no stone unturned” when it comes to prospective negotiating partners, said one White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Once Biden’s talks with Capito collapsed, the White House turned its attention fully to the group of 10 senators, which until then had kept an intentionally low profile.

Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell began regularly showing up at the Capitol. As the 10 senators sat around a wide table, the three White House officials would intersperse themselves among them, allowing for side conversations on what senators were hearing from constituents back home.

“They wanted to be supportive but not actively engaged in owning all the outcomes,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said of Biden’s team. Over time, however, “it became evident that to make sure we got all the Democrats, they had to own more of the product.”

Red lines were made explicit: The GOP refused to reverse any of the tax cuts enacted under Trump. Biden would not hike taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year, which ruled out raising the gas tax. Spending from Biden’s coronavirus relief package would go untouched.

But both sides took those limitations as a starting point, not an end.

“You can tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative one,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). “In this case, when one side had a problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away from the table.”

While Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell were furiously negotiating details at the Capitol, Biden was briefed multiple times a day at the White House and repeatedly hopping on the telephone, according to a second senior White House official.

Top White House aides also held daily meetings to gauge progress, as did members of the “jobs cabinet” — the secretaries of commerce, transportation, energy, labor, and housing and urban development. On those calls, White House officials and the Cabinet secretaries would swap intel on what lawmakers were thinking and identify stumbling blocks.

Of the five Cabinet members, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was the most closely involved in negotiating with Republicans, striking an agreement with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on a broadband provision, after numerous meetings and lengthy text chains.

The broad infrastructure deal was announced with great fanfare in June outside the White House. But many details remained unresolved, and the push to promote the effort in the Senate only intensified, with Terrell’s 25-member shop holding more than 330 meetings or phone calls with lawmakers and their top staffers. The White House legislative affairs office — in tandem with other White House divisions and administration agencies — held more than 60 congressional briefings on the agreement.

By that point, a working relationship had developed. “If we’re speaking to the White House officials, I always felt as if we were getting straight scoop,” Cassidy said.

But as soon as the agreement came together, it almost fell apart.

Biden, speaking triumphantly to reporters hours after announcing the deal, said he would not sign it unless it was accompanied by a separate package that encompassed only Democratic priorities. It was an effort to placate liberals afraid that the bipartisan deal abandoned their goals.

Collins saw a news alert about Biden’s comments — effectively a veto threat against his own deal — flash across her phone as she waited at Reagan National Airport for a late-night flight to Maine. Before boarding, Collins called Ricchetti, who promptly answered.

“I remember I was so shocked because that was completely contrary to what we had explicitly talked about in the Oval Office and then at the press conference right afterwards,” Collins said.

Early the next day, Ricchetti called Collins back, telling her he was working on getting the agreement with Republicans back on track. Biden was also working the phones, calling Portman and asking what he should say to reassure GOP senators, according to a Republican close to the talks. The president ultimately issued a lengthy statement backtracking on his comments.

Even so, more than a month would pass from the announcement of the initial framework to last week’s finalization of the deal. In that time, several eruptions threatened to unravel the entire effort.

The administration and GOP senators haggled in recent days, for example, over the structure of an “infrastructure bank” designed to generate investment in big projects through public-private partnerships. Ultimately, the administration took the idea off the table, leaving Republicans “baffled,” Collins said. The White House declined to comment on why it did so.

In the final days before announcing last week’s final breakthrough, senators and the White House delegated the last stretch of talks to two seasoned Washington operators: Portman and Ricchetti.

It was a conscious decision, the first senior White House official said, with Biden wanting to avoid too many cooks in the kitchen at a pivotal moment.

So the two men — both Ohioans whose joint history dates to at least the 1990s, when Ricchetti worked for President Bill Clinton and Portman was a House member — camped out for nine hours Tuesday night in Portman’s Senate conference room, where a kayak and several Ohio sports jerseys hang on the walls. Those intensive talks helped resolve one of the final sticking points — how much to spend on public transit.

Even with last week’s successful Senate vote to advance the package, weeks if not months lie ahead before Biden will be able to sign it into law, assuming it survives at all.

If the Senate passes the bill in coming weeks, it will have to pass muster in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she will not allow it to reach a vote until the separate Democratic-only package has cleared. And the process on that latter legislation is likely to be longer and more complicated even than the bipartisan talks, meaning there is no guarantee either bill will pass.

But Biden and others who say the parties can still cooperate in the post-Trump era claim the process so far validates their view. And how the White House nurtured trust with a group of pivotal Republicans offers some instructive clues on how it could lean on those relationships for other efforts.

“The president and his team have to be willing to invest the time and say no to the left — the far left — and Republicans have got to be willing to say no to the far right,” Collins said. “This really was built center-out.”

I glanced at the breakdown of where the money will go. 40 billion for bridge repair. I believe I read last week that the state of Pennsylvania needs at least 20 billion urgently just for bridge repair. So where are we going with 40 billion for the entire country? Even when these folks in DC finally try to fix something they do it all half assed. 40 billion is not even a drop in the bucket as to what is needed across the country. If the stated objective was to repair our nations infrastructure, then our law makers have failed. They bicker about where they want the money to go as opposed to where it is needed.

[seacoaster]

Infrastructure:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

"On the day President Biden’s first attempt at a bipartisan infrastructure deal collapsed, he dialed up a Republican senator he saw as a potential negotiating partner for a renewed push.

In that June 8 phone call, Biden told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that he wanted a public works agreement with Republicans in the neighborhood of $600 billion. More notably, Biden showed deep interest in provisions on energy resiliency that Cassidy had been working on for weeks.

That embrace of a favored provision hit home with Cassidy. “The president made it clear that that was essential for him,” the senator said. “Since the president had said it must be there, obviously that was very helpful.”

Cassidy would ultimately become one of five Senate Republicans, who, along with five Democrats and the White House, reached an agreement last week on a sweeping infrastructure package that includes $550 billion in new spending to revitalize the nation’s roads, strengthen public transit, repair water systems and expand broadband networks.

The months of arduous negotiations leading to last week’s agreement make up only the first hurdle. In coming days, the package must clear the Senate — where it garnered 67 votes in a recent test vote — and also survive the House, where many discontented liberals see the agreement as inadequate.

Still, the infrastructure talks have served so far as evidence for Biden’s insistence that bipartisanship can prevail even in a virulently divided political atmosphere and that his Senate roots could help him navigate a Republican Party whose voters often do not even acknowledge his legitimate win in November.

Biden’s phone call with Cassidy was only one example of Biden’s contact with Republicans during the talks. He regularly called GOP senators, White House aides say, while presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti was on virtual speed dial on the Republican negotiators’ phones. After he inadvertently angered Republicans by attaching public conditions to the deal, Biden personally phoned Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to ask how he could quell the uproar.

And as talks reached their critical endgame, he deputized Ricchetti, a longtime friend and adviser, to closet himself with Portman and hammer out the final details.

“I’m working with Democrats and Republicans to get this done, because — while there’s a lot we don’t agree on — I believe that we should be able to work together on the few things we do agree on,” Biden told a crowd of autoworkers in Lower Macungie Township, Pa., last week. “I think it’s important.”

The nearly four months of negotiations with Senate Republicans reflected a markedly different dynamic from Biden’s push for emergency coronavirus relief earlier this year, when the president’s brief negotiations with Republicans were promptly eclipsed by Democrats moving on unilaterally to enact $1.9 trillion in pandemic aid.

On infrastructure, Biden repeatedly made it clear in conversations with Republicans that he was serious about achieving a bipartisan deal, according to interviews with senators, congressional aides and administration officials. His chief emissaries to the Capitol — Ricchetti; Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council; and Louisa Terrell, Biden’s legislative affairs director — echoed that message as often as they could.

Biden had to walk a balance. Some Democrats were angry at his outreach to Republicans, who they said long ago abandoned any pretense of bipartisanship and steamrolled Democrats when they could.

The Republicans were also torn between competing forces. The party’s pragmatists hoped that by negotiating with the White House, they could avoid a more liberal infrastructure package. But many in the GOP oppose working with Biden at all, and former president Donald Trump is still trying to sabotage the deal.

But even as an earlier set of talks between Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) was grabbing headlines in May, the White House was in touch with a separate group of 10 senators that had begun its own infrastructure discussions, after Portman and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) started talking and then brought in other senators.

Biden viewed Portman, who is not seeking reelection, as a good-faith negotiator, and the White House has long paid considerable attention to the enigmatic Sinema, a vital swing vote for the president’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the president found himself talking to Cassidy about infrastructure during a presidential trip to his home state of Louisiana and began seeing him as a potential collaborator as well. Through their regular legislative affairs outreach, White House staffers had already alerted Biden to Cassidy’s bipartisan work with Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) to make the nation’s energy system more impervious to natural disasters.

Cassidy is a staunch Republican, not generally viewed as a moderate, but he has been willing to work with Democrats, and “you leave no stone unturned” when it comes to prospective negotiating partners, said one White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Once Biden’s talks with Capito collapsed, the White House turned its attention fully to the group of 10 senators, which until then had kept an intentionally low profile.

Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell began regularly showing up at the Capitol. As the 10 senators sat around a wide table, the three White House officials would intersperse themselves among them, allowing for side conversations on what senators were hearing from constituents back home.

“They wanted to be supportive but not actively engaged in owning all the outcomes,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said of Biden’s team. Over time, however, “it became evident that to make sure we got all the Democrats, they had to own more of the product.”

Red lines were made explicit: The GOP refused to reverse any of the tax cuts enacted under Trump. Biden would not hike taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year, which ruled out raising the gas tax. Spending from Biden’s coronavirus relief package would go untouched.

But both sides took those limitations as a starting point, not an end.

“You can tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative one,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). “In this case, when one side had a problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away from the table.”

While Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell were furiously negotiating details at the Capitol, Biden was briefed multiple times a day at the White House and repeatedly hopping on the telephone, according to a second senior White House official.

Top White House aides also held daily meetings to gauge progress, as did members of the “jobs cabinet” — the secretaries of commerce, transportation, energy, labor, and housing and urban development. On those calls, White House officials and the Cabinet secretaries would swap intel on what lawmakers were thinking and identify stumbling blocks.

Of the five Cabinet members, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was the most closely involved in negotiating with Republicans, striking an agreement with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on a broadband provision, after numerous meetings and lengthy text chains.

The broad infrastructure deal was announced with great fanfare in June outside the White House. But many details remained unresolved, and the push to promote the effort in the Senate only intensified, with Terrell’s 25-member shop holding more than 330 meetings or phone calls with lawmakers and their top staffers. The White House legislative affairs office — in tandem with other White House divisions and administration agencies — held more than 60 congressional briefings on the agreement.

By that point, a working relationship had developed. “If we’re speaking to the White House officials, I always felt as if we were getting straight scoop,” Cassidy said.

But as soon as the agreement came together, it almost fell apart.

Biden, speaking triumphantly to reporters hours after announcing the deal, said he would not sign it unless it was accompanied by a separate package that encompassed only Democratic priorities. It was an effort to placate liberals afraid that the bipartisan deal abandoned their goals.

Collins saw a news alert about Biden’s comments — effectively a veto threat against his own deal — flash across her phone as she waited at Reagan National Airport for a late-night flight to Maine. Before boarding, Collins called Ricchetti, who promptly answered.

“I remember I was so shocked because that was completely contrary to what we had explicitly talked about in the Oval Office and then at the press conference right afterwards,” Collins said.

Early the next day, Ricchetti called Collins back, telling her he was working on getting the agreement with Republicans back on track. Biden was also working the phones, calling Portman and asking what he should say to reassure GOP senators, according to a Republican close to the talks. The president ultimately issued a lengthy statement backtracking on his comments.

Even so, more than a month would pass from the announcement of the initial framework to last week’s finalization of the deal. In that time, several eruptions threatened to unravel the entire effort.

The administration and GOP senators haggled in recent days, for example, over the structure of an “infrastructure bank” designed to generate investment in big projects through public-private partnerships. Ultimately, the administration took the idea off the table, leaving Republicans “baffled,” Collins said. The White House declined to comment on why it did so.

In the final days before announcing last week’s final breakthrough, senators and the White House delegated the last stretch of talks to two seasoned Washington operators: Portman and Ricchetti.

It was a conscious decision, the first senior White House official said, with Biden wanting to avoid too many cooks in the kitchen at a pivotal moment.

So the two men — both Ohioans whose joint history dates to at least the 1990s, when Ricchetti worked for President Bill Clinton and Portman was a House member — camped out for nine hours Tuesday night in Portman’s Senate conference room, where a kayak and several Ohio sports jerseys hang on the walls. Those intensive talks helped resolve one of the final sticking points — how much to spend on public transit.

Even with last week’s successful Senate vote to advance the package, weeks if not months lie ahead before Biden will be able to sign it into law, assuming it survives at all.

If the Senate passes the bill in coming weeks, it will have to pass muster in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she will not allow it to reach a vote until the separate Democratic-only package has cleared. And the process on that latter legislation is likely to be longer and more complicated even than the bipartisan talks, meaning there is no guarantee either bill will pass.

But Biden and others who say the parties can still cooperate in the post-Trump era claim the process so far validates their view. And how the White House nurtured trust with a group of pivotal Republicans offers some instructive clues on how it could lean on those relationships for other efforts.

“The president and his team have to be willing to invest the time and say no to the left — the far left — and Republicans have got to be willing to say no to the far right,” Collins said. “This really was built center-out.”

I glanced at the breakdown of where the money will go. 40 billion for bridge repair. I believe I read last week that the state of Pennsylvania needs at least 20 billion urgently just for bridge repair. So where are we going with 40 billion for the entire country? Even when these folks in DC finally try to fix something they do it all half assed. 40 billion is not even a drop in the bucket as to what is needed across the country. If the stated objective was to repair our nations infrastructure, then our law makers have failed. They bicker about where they want the money to go as opposed to where it is needed.

I agree that stuff like that is disheartening. When I drove from NH down to New Jersey in June, almost every highway needed substantial work, almost every bridge/overpass looked long past its sell-by date, off highway surface roads were beaten to death by frost heave and potholes, etc., etc. The pandemic taught us the crucial need to extend robust and high speed broadband and connectivity to everyone.

But this article actually details how the system works: imperfect deals cut in the name of consensus. The article shows that government with two parties, including one that is dis- or barely functioning as a legislative organization, can work together. Our government's heartbeat sometimes seems faint, but it is still alive and can be a force for things we need.

[cradleandshoot]

Infrastructure:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html

"On the day President Biden’s first attempt at a bipartisan infrastructure deal collapsed, he dialed up a Republican senator he saw as a potential negotiating partner for a renewed push.

In that June 8 phone call, Biden told Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) that he wanted a public works agreement with Republicans in the neighborhood of $600 billion. More notably, Biden showed deep interest in provisions on energy resiliency that Cassidy had been working on for weeks.

That embrace of a favored provision hit home with Cassidy. “The president made it clear that that was essential for him,” the senator said. “Since the president had said it must be there, obviously that was very helpful.”

Cassidy would ultimately become one of five Senate Republicans, who, along with five Democrats and the White House, reached an agreement last week on a sweeping infrastructure package that iincludes $550 billion in new spending to revitalize the nation’s roads, strengthen public transit, repair water systems and expand broadband networks.

The months of arduous negotiations leading to last week’s agreement make up only the first hurdle. In coming days, the package must clear the Senate — where it garnered 67 votes in a recent test vote — and also survive the House, where many discontented liberals see the agreement as inadequate.

Still, the infrastructure talks have served so far as evidence for Biden’s insistence that bipartisanship can prevail even in a virulently divided political atmosphere and that his Senate roots could help him navigate a Republican Party whose voters often do not even acknowledge his legitimate win in November.

Biden’s phone call with Cassidy was only one example of Biden’s contact with Republicans during the talks. He regularly called GOP senators, White House aides say, while presidential counselor Steve Ricchetti was on virtual speed dial on the Republican negotiators’ phones. After he inadvertently angered Republicans by attaching public conditions to the deal, Biden personally phoned Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) to ask how he could quell the uproar.

And as talks reached their critical endgame, he deputized Ricchetti, a longtime friend and adviser, to closet himself with Portman and hammer out the final details.

“I’m working with Democrats and Republicans to get this done, because — while there’s a lot we don’t agree on — I believe that we should be able to work together on the few things we do agree on,” Biden told a crowd of autoworkers in Lower Macungie Township, Pa., last week. “I think it’s important.”

The nearly four months of negotiations with Senate Republicans reflected a markedly different dynamic from Biden’s push for emergency coronavirus relief earlier this year, when the president’s brief negotiations with Republicans were promptly eclipsed by Democrats moving on unilaterally to enact $1.9 trillion in pandemic aid.

On infrastructure, Biden repeatedly made it clear in conversations with Republicans that he was serious about achieving a bipartisan deal, according to interviews with senators, congressional aides and administration officials. His chief emissaries to the Capitol — Ricchetti; Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council; and Louisa Terrell, Biden’s legislative affairs director — echoed that message as often as they could.

Biden had to walk a balance. Some Democrats were angry at his outreach to Republicans, who they said long ago abandoned any pretense of bipartisanship and steamrolled Democrats when they could.

The Republicans were also torn between competing forces. The party’s pragmatists hoped that by negotiating with the White House, they could avoid a more liberal infrastructure package. But many in the GOP oppose working with Biden at all, and former president Donald Trump is still trying to sabotage the deal.

But even as an earlier set of talks between Biden and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) was grabbing headlines in May, the White House was in touch with a separate group of 10 senators that had begun its own infrastructure discussions, after Portman and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) started talking and then brought in other senators.

Biden viewed Portman, who is not seeking reelection, as a good-faith negotiator, and the White House has long paid considerable attention to the enigmatic Sinema, a vital swing vote for the president’s agenda.

Meanwhile, the president found himself talking to Cassidy about infrastructure during a presidential trip to his home state of Louisiana and began seeing him as a potential collaborator as well. Through their regular legislative affairs outreach, White House staffers had already alerted Biden to Cassidy’s bipartisan work with Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) to make the nation’s energy system more impervious to natural disasters.

Cassidy is a staunch Republican, not generally viewed as a moderate, but he has been willing to work with Democrats, and “you leave no stone unturned” when it comes to prospective negotiating partners, said one White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal strategy.

Once Biden’s talks with Capito collapsed, the White House turned its attention fully to the group of 10 senators, which until then had kept an intentionally low profile.

Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell began regularly showing up at the Capitol. As the 10 senators sat around a wide table, the three White House officials would intersperse themselves among them, allowing for side conversations on what senators were hearing from constituents back home.

“They wanted to be supportive but not actively engaged in owning all the outcomes,” Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said of Biden’s team. Over time, however, “it became evident that to make sure we got all the Democrats, they had to own more of the product.”

Red lines were made explicit: The GOP refused to reverse any of the tax cuts enacted under Trump. Biden would not hike taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year, which ruled out raising the gas tax. Spending from Biden’s coronavirus relief package would go untouched.

But both sides took those limitations as a starting point, not an end.

“You can tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative one,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah). “In this case, when one side had a problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away from the table.”

While Ricchetti, Deese and Terrell were furiously negotiating details at the Capitol, Biden was briefed multiple times a day at the White House and repeatedly hopping on the telephone, according to a second senior White House official.

Top White House aides also held daily meetings to gauge progress, as did members of the “jobs cabinet” — the secretaries of commerce, transportation, energy, labor, and housing and urban development. On those calls, White House officials and the Cabinet secretaries would swap intel on what lawmakers were thinking and identify stumbling blocks.

Of the five Cabinet members, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo was the most closely involved in negotiating with Republicans, striking an agreement with Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) on a broadband provision, after numerous meetings and lengthy text chains.

The broad infrastructure deal was announced with great fanfare in June outside the White House. But many details remained unresolved, and the push to promote the effort in the Senate only intensified, with Terrell’s 25-member shop holding more than 330 meetings or phone calls with lawmakers and their top staffers. The White House legislative affairs office — in tandem with other White House divisions and administration agencies — held more than 60 congressional briefings on the agreement.

By that point, a working relationship had developed. “If we’re speaking to the White House officials, I always felt as if we were getting straight scoop,” Cassidy said.

But as soon as the agreement came together, it almost fell apart.

Biden, speaking triumphantly to reporters hours after announcing the deal, said he would not sign it unless it was accompanied by a separate package that encompassed only Democratic priorities. It was an effort to placate liberals afraid that the bipartisan deal abandoned their goals.

Collins saw a news alert about Biden’s comments — effectively a veto threat against his own deal — flash across her phone as she waited at Reagan National Airport for a late-night flight to Maine. Before boarding, Collins called Ricchetti, who promptly answered.

“I remember I was so shocked because that was completely contrary to what we had explicitly talked about in the Oval Office and then at the press conference right afterwards,” Collins said.

Early the next day, Ricchetti called Collins back, telling her he was working on getting the agreement with Republicans back on track. Biden was also working the phones, calling Portman and asking what he should say to reassure GOP senators, according to a Republican close to the talks. The president ultimately issued a lengthy statement backtracking on his comments.

Even so, more than a month would pass from the announcement of the initial framework to last week’s finalization of the deal. In that time, several eruptions threatened to unravel the entire effort.

The administration and GOP senators haggled in recent days, for example, over the structure of an “infrastructure bank” designed to generate investment in big projects through public-private partnerships. Ultimately, the administration took the idea off the table, leaving Republicans “baffled,” Collins said. The White House declined to comment on why it did so.

In the final days before announcing last week’s final breakthrough, senators and the White House delegated the last stretch of talks to two seasoned Washington operators: Portman and Ricchetti.

It was a conscious decision, the first senior White House official said, with Biden wanting to avoid too many cooks in the kitchen at a pivotal moment.

So the two men — both Ohioans whose joint history dates to at least the 1990s, when Ricchetti worked for President Bill Clinton and Portman was a House member — camped out for nine hours Tuesday night in Portman’s Senate conference room, where a kayak and several Ohio sports jerseys hang on the walls. Those intensive talks helped resolve one of the final sticking points — how much to spend on public transit.

Even with last week’s successful Senate vote to advance the package, weeks if not months lie ahead before Biden will be able to sign it into law, assuming it survives at all.

If the Senate passes the bill in coming weeks, it will have to pass muster in the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has said she will not allow it to reach a vote until the separate Democratic-only package has cleared. And the process on that latter legislation is likely to be longer and more complicated even than the bipartisan talks, meaning there is no guarantee either bill will pass.

But Biden and others who say the parties can still cooperate in the post-Trump era claim the process so far validates their view. And how the White House nurtured trust with a group of pivotal Republicans offers some instructive clues on how it could lean on those relationships for other efforts.

“The president and his team have to be willing to invest the time and say no to the left — the far left — and Republicans have got to be willing to say no to the far right,” Collins said. “This really was built center-out.”

I glanced at the breakdown of where the money will go. 40 billion for bridge repair. I believe I read last week that the state of Pennsylvania needs at least 20 billion urgently just for bridge repair. So where are we going with 40 billion for the entire country? Even when these folks in DC finally try to fix something they do it all half assed. 40 billion is not even a drop in the bucket as to what is needed across the country. If the stated objective was to repair our nations infrastructure, then our law makers have failed. They bicker about where they want the money to go as opposed to where it is needed.

I agree that stuff like that is disheartening. When I drove from NH down to New Jersey in June, almost every highway needed substantial work, almost every bridge/overpass looked long past its sell-by date, off highway surface roads were beaten to death by frost heave and potholes, etc., etc. The pandemic taught us the crucial need to extend robust and high speed broadband and connectivity to everyone.

But this article actually details how the system works: imperfect deals cut in the name of consensus. The article shows that government with two parties, including one that is dis- or barely functioning as a legislative organization, can work together. Our government's heartbeat sometimes seems faint, but it is still alive and can be a force for things we need.

The problems can be seen everywhere by anybody that drives a car. I'm reluctant to pin the blame on any one party. What this process has proven to me is that even when both parties are willing to work together, their political agendas muddy up the process. While the folks in DC fiddle, Rome is crumbling to pieces.

[seacoaster]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/05/opin ... gress.html

"If Joe Biden stands for one idea, it is that our system can work. We live in a big, diverse country, but good leaders can bring people together across difference to do big things. In essence Biden is defending liberal democracy and the notion that you can’t govern a nation based on the premise that the other half of the country is irredeemably awful.

The progressive wing of the Democratic Party is skeptical: The Republican Party has gone authoritarian. Mitch McConnell is obstructionist. Big money pulls the strings. The system is broken. The only way to bring change is to mobilize the Democratic base and push partisan transformation.

If all you knew about politics was what goes on in the media circus, you’d have to say the progressives have the better argument. Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene — healthy bipartisan compromise seems completely hopeless with this crew.

But underneath that circus, there has always been another layer of politics — led by people who are not as ratings-driven, but are more governance-driven. So over the past 20 years or so, while the circus has been at full roar, Congress has continued to pass bipartisan legislation: the Every Student Succeeds rewrite of federal K-12 education policy, the Obama budget compromise of 2013, the Trump criminal justice reform law of 2018, the FAST infrastructure act, the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020, the Trump-era ban on surprise billing in health care. In June the Senate passed, 68 to 32, the United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021, which would devote roughly $250 billion to scientific projects.

Matthew Yglesias and Simon Bazelon call this the “Secret Congress” — the everyday business of governing that works precisely because it isn’t on cable TV.

When Covid hit, the same two-track pattern prevailed. The circus gave us the mask and vaccination wars. But Congress was productive and bipartisan. The Senate passed a Covid relief measure 96 to 1 in early March 2020, another 90 to 8 in mid-March, another 96 to 0 in late March and another 92 to 6 in December. The House votes were also landslides. If you had told me two years ago that Congress would respond to a pandemic in some ways better than the C.D.C., I would have been surprised, but that’s what happened.

After Biden was elected, the two-track pattern was still going strong. The circus realm gave us the horror of Jan. 6. But the dull, governing part of America carried on. For example, the Senate confirmed Biden’s cabinet picks in largely bipartisan fashion.

Biden’s legislative strategy owes something to each side of the Democratic Party. He wants to ram through a lot on party-line votes using reconciliation. But he also insists on a bipartisan approach whenever possible. Over the past few months the bipartisan track has, somewhat surprisingly, been moving faster than the partisan track.

Republicans and Democrats have been involved in a complex set of negotiations about infrastructure spending. It’s been messy and complicated, the way politics always is, but the two sides have worked together productively.

“You can tell the difference between an adversarial negotiation and a collaborative one,” Mitt Romney told The Washington Post. “In this case, when one side had a problem, the other side tried to solve the problem, rather than to walk away from the table.” When the Senate advanced the roughly $1 trillion measure by a vote of 67 to 32, that was a sign that experienced politicians can, as Biden suggested, make the system work.

The Biden administration has moved to separate government from the culture wars. It has shifted power away from the Green New Deal and Freedom Caucus show horses and lodged it with the congressional workhorses — people like Republican Rob Portman and Democrat Mark Warner, who are in no danger of becoming social media stars.

The moderates are suddenly in strong shape. The progressives say they won’t support this Biden infrastructure bill unless it is passed simultaneously with a larger spending bill. But if the Democrats can’t agree on that larger bill, will progressives really sink their president’s infrastructure initiative? In the negotiations over the larger bill, the moderates have most of the power because they are the ones whose seats are at risk.

We have come a long way since the A.O.C. glory days of 2019. Biden won the presidential nomination, not Bernie Sanders. Progressive excesses like “defund the police” cost Democrats dearly down-ballot. Over the past months there have been primary contests between regular Democrats and progressives, including House races in Louisiana, New Mexico and Ohio, a governor’s race in Virginia and a mayoral race in New York. The party regulars have won all of them.

As former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel notes, the problem with the progressive base mobilization strategy is that progressives think they’re the base. But a faction that keeps losing primaries can’t be the base. Joe Biden is the base. And Biden, and the 91 percent of Democrats who view him favorably, want to make the system work. American politics is in God-awful shape, but we’re seeing a reasonably successful attempt to build it back better."

[Kismet]

Bill Maher nails the politicians in a hilarious rant in his "New Rule" segment

Didn't realize that Lauren Boebert (R-CO) does not even have a HS equivalency degree but does have four arrests over the past decade, records show.

He also weighed in on King Andy Cuomo

[ggait]

OMG.

Joe breaks out the tan suit at the White House.

So unpresidential!!