It’s been a while since I’ve quoted Charles Pierce.

So, in Wednesday’s installment of How Nothing Gets Done, the starring role appears to be going to Senator Kyrsten Sinema, International Pest of Mystery. She seems to be enjoying her new position as a pointless partisan roadblock jamming up the agenda of a president. It admittedly takes a lot of work, if not much of a conscience. She met a few times with the president on Tuesday and, at the end of the day, she was still sabotaging the entire agenda without giving the slightest indication of why she’s doing it.

Joe Manchin has been opaque about his reasons for clogging the process, but him I can almost understand. He’s in pharma’s pocket because of family considerations, and he’s opposed to the climate provisions of the reconciliation bill because coal. And his devotion to the filibuster probably has a lot to do with both of those. At least he budged, a little, on voting rights. (We all remember voting rights? It was a big deal a while back?) Sinema, however, baffles me. Not only is she throwing sand in the gears of policies the country desperately needs, she seems utterly heedless of how bad she looks doing it.

Last night, Rachel Maddow said that the Arizona Democratic Party is so fed up with Sinema that they threatened her with censure.

In Senator Kyrsten Sinema`s home state of Arizona, the state`s Democratic party is so fed up with her not being on board with the bill that they passed a resolution this weekend part of which reads, quote, if Senator Sinema votes against the reconciliation bill supported by President Biden and the vast majority of Democrats in both the House and the Senate and if she continues to delay, disrupt votes to gut the reconciliation package of its necessary find funding, then the Arizona Democratic Party state committee will go officially on record and will give Senator Sinema a vote of no confidence.

See also Jonathan Weisman in the New York Times, As Sinema resists the budget bill, she is set to raise money from business groups that oppose it. Basically, she’s getting money from business lobbying groups like the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors who are opposed to tax hikes on big business. At the rate she’s pissing off Democrats and left-leaning independent voters in her state, I’m not sure what good a big campaign war chest will do for her. Maybe her ultimate goal is to be a big-shot corporate lobbyist, after all.

Here’s where we are: House progressives say they insist on passage of the bigger reconciliation bill as a condition of their support for the bipartisan infrastructure bill. It may be that if Sinema and Joe Manchin would both publicly commit to some framework of a reconciliation bill that they will vote for, most progressives would go ahead and vote for the bipartisan bill and not wait for passage. That’s speculation, but possible.

But the latest I’m hearing is that Sinema won’t even talk about the reconciliation bill until after the bipartisan bill passes. That means nothing passes. And it’s making people crazy that she won’t even clearly articulate what she wants, or what she doesn’t want, or what she’ll settle for. She’s just saying no.

Of course, Joe Manchin is a problem also. There appears to be less frustration with Manchin, in some quarters at least, because he is from a state that voted to re-elect Donald Trump by more than 30 points. But Sinema doesn’t have that excuse. And Manchin seems a bit more willing to actually negotiate. Sinema is not negotiating. She’s putting on a one-person my way or the highway act.

Greg Sargent writes with frustration that too much of news media is reporting this issue as if it’s the progressives who are the problem. But it’s the progressives who are actually standing up for President Biden’s agenda. And House centrists don’t seem to understand they are just hurting themselves by not doing the same thing.

Sargent also says that progressives are right to worry that “if Democrats pass the infrastructure bill first, there’s no telling whether Sinema (or Manchin and other centrists) will be there to support something substantial in reconciliation.” History tells us that once the infrastructure bill passes, more conservative Dems will quit negotiating and go home. If there is a reconciliation bill, it will be chopped down to nothing first.

Josh Marshall writes,

I had a conversation yesterday similar to a number I’ve heard over recent days: a business lobbyist explaining that yes, they want the infrastructure bill real bad and that their optimal scenario is that the infrastructure bill passes and the reconciliation bill goes down to defeat entirely. A separate irony is that most of those people – the ones who appear to have Sinema’s ear – seem entirely unable to grasp the implications for the Democratic party if that is indeed the final outcome. It will rip the Democratic coalition apart. Of course, in general, that’s not their concern or their problem. But it certainly means all the self-styled “moderates” they’re working with now will go down to defeat – both because of primaries but also just as the natural consequence of a Democratic rout. More business friendly Democrats in blue seats will also get replaced by more progressive members. I am consistently surprised how people whose whole job is politics, supposedly, seem to have so little grasp of its basic functions.

In other words, it’s the Dem House moderates in swing districts who have the most to lose if the reconciliation bill is blocked. Most of the progressives — although not all — are in safe Dem districts. The moderates more than the progressives need to have some big thing they can show voters they have accomplished. The infrastructure bill, by itself, is not likely to be it. As Rachel Maddow said last night, “You know, the bipartisan infrastructure bill by itself doesn`t really do much. It`s mostly a series of giveaways to the fossil fuel industry.” I understand it’s also the case that even if it passes this week, most of the projects the infrastructure bill would fund won’t be underway by this time next year. To midterm voters, that will sound like one more empty promise.

Rep. Katie Porter, a progressive in a swing district, was on Chris Hayes’s show last night making it clear where she stands.

I plan to vote no on the Infrastructure Bill until we have an assurance to the American people that the Build Back Better plan will pass. Like I said, we can`t leave anybody behind. The American people work in lots of different industries and lots of different kinds of occupations, they face lots of different challenges not just roads and bridges and airport and transit, but they face challenges regarding child care, challenges regarding the greening of our — the need to green our economy, challenges regarding college costs.

So, we need to see an assurance from the Senate that we`re going to be able to pass President Biden`s agenda. And that means all of the different pieces that the American people elected him and us to do.

The infrastructure bill pretty much became Kysten Sinema’s vanity project only to get her support on the reconciliation bill. Progressives don’t like it (see above about giveaways to the fossil fuel industry) and are only promising to vote for it for the sake of the larger bill. I don’t think there’s any chance of it passing the House this week, or ever, until Sinema (and Manchin) get a clue.

Update: Some excellent commentary by Sarah Jones at New York magazine.

Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona appear to relish the power they wield over the rest of the party. They are, in effect, holding the president’s priorities hostage to their personal whims. That’s not a new story in politics. But their stubbornness in the face of contemporary challenges reveals the bottomless emptiness of their brand of centrist politics. …

… News that she is about to raise money from business interests that oppose the budget bill has invited speculation that she is doing her donors’ bidding. Meanwhile, the budget’s climate provisions disturb Manchin, who makes a sizable profit from the coal industry. Perhaps plain old corruption is at work here.

But there is more to it than that. Everyone involved in this saga, from President Biden down, is making a moral choice. The president’s budget is, like all presidential budgets, a public expression of the administration’s values. Sinema and Manchin have also expressed their values in public, even though these are cloaked in boilerplate rhetoric about inflation and taxes. Sinema’s donors are a reflection of her personal priorities. The same is true for Manchin when it comes to the profit motive. They’ve chosen their benefactors, not their voters, as their real constituency.

Jones goes on to point out that the provisions in the Build Back Better bill are widely popular across much of the political spectrum, and that “As countless wonks have pointed out, however, the bill is largely paid for and should have minimal effect on inflation and the national debt.” I doubt there is any political risk for a Democrat, even Joe Manchin, to support it. Jones concludes,

Some version of the bill may well pass, but these tortured negotiations have exposed the barrenness of their position. Sinema and Manchin have a way of doing politics that redounds to no one else’s benefit, and sometimes not even themselves. They are risking Biden’s legacy, the prospects of their party, and the well-being of the American public for reasons they can’t even articulate. If only they were capable of shame.

Today was supposed to be the day that the bipartisan infrastructure bill would be put up for a vote in the House. Instead, Nancy Pelosi has moved the vote to Thursday, because the progressives said so.

Jayapal told us in a Sunday night interview, before Pelosi’s announcement, that the number of Democrats willing to kill the infrastructure bill is growing.

“It’s actually increasing, and it’s increasing from members who aren’t just within the Progressive Caucus,” she said.

The CPC chair estimated last week that more than half of the 95 House Democrats in the caucus were prepared to vote “no.” “I think it’s now probably somewhere around 60,” she said.

I don’t know that the final “official” Cyber Ninja fraudit report has been released yet — it’s due any minute now — but a draft report that got leaked is all over the news has caused much amusement. As you must have heard, the fraudit “recount” that took so very long found that Joe Biden won the state by a few more votes than the original results said he did.

Of course, this will not stop the Big Lie. The MAGA-universe has already gone into overdrive manufacturing reasons for why the Cyber Ninjas report didn’t say what it said. In brief, even though the actual numbers reported say Biden won, the report issues enough questions about irregularities that certainly seem to leave room for shenanigans that stole the election from Trump.

We might ask what they were doing all that time if they couldn’t find the answers to those questions. Fortunately Philip Bump at WaPo has gone through these questions left unanswered and explains why they don’t add up to anything. Not that facts will cause the MAGA-heads to shut up.

Greg Sargent:

It probably took them so long to release the thing because they had to manufacture reasons why their own conclusions are wrong. Do read Philip Bump. The excuses add up to pretty tepid stuff, really.

Yesterday I ran into an article that claimed Kyrsten Sinema had benefited recently from a big email and digital campaign on her behalf bankrolled by Big Pharma, and it was after that she announced that she doesn’t support allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices. I didn’t link to it right away because I was waiting for some corroboration. Well, today I am seeing the same claim in a lot of places, so I assume there’s some corroboration somewhere. This is from Salon:

Sinema got major backing from the industry before her threat to derail the Democrats’ drug bill. Center Forward, a Washington nonprofit that has received at least $4.5 million from PhRMA, has run TV and digital ads praising Sinema for the past two weeks, according to The Daily Poster, and sent out pro-Sinema mailers urging recipients to thank the senator for “fighting as an independent voice.” The group’s board includes at least two PhRMA lobbyists who work on drug pricing issues and represent numerous pharmaceutical companies.

So, to the question of why she is taking such an unpopular position, the answer is, she’s being paid to take it.

There’s been a discussion going on at Talking Points Memo this week about why the senator from Arizona behaves as she does. The emerging consensus is that she really has no core convictions or values other than fancying herself to be “independent” and a “maverick,” as some called the late Arizona Sen. John McCain. McCain did have moments of personal integrity, but he was still a creature of the Republican Party and went along with his party’s positions and talking points most of the time.  Sinema seems to be in a party by herself.

One correspondent from Arizona wrote at TPM,

Like you, I think she believes that passing the Sinema-Romney infrastructure bill will prove that she can get things done in bipartisan fashion. Now apparently she’s got Big Pharma and the Chamber telling her she’s gotta put the brakes on reconciliation because it threatens too many of their interests. And her Dem colleagues are saying she can’t have one without the other.

She’s in a DC bubble of her own making. She has virtually no in-state presence, no public schedule, no press conferences, no interaction with regular voters, and other than industry-funded SuperPACs, no support system. She’s in a tough spot, and she put herself there.

Poll numbers show that Arizona voters are not happy with Sinema. She got a tepid 54 percent approval from Democrats based overwhelmingly on “somewhat approve” rather than “strongly approve,” which doesn’t look good campared to the 85 percent approval of Mark Kelly, the other Democratic senator from Arizona. Independent voters, the group she is allegedly trying to impress, gave her only a 40 percent approval. Both Mark Kelly and Joe Biden did better with independents.

Josh Marshall wrote that Sinema is “cratering” in Arizona.

When Arizona Democratic primary voters (who can be Dems or independents) were given the options of “I would vote to reelect Kyrsten Sinema” or “I would vote for a different candidate who would get rid of the filibuster” the numbers were basically catastrophic. Sinema got 22% and the unnamed filibuster-buster got 66%.

Yeah, she’s cratering.

When I talk to people who’ve known Sinema for a long time they talk about her ambition and mutability (not rare in politicians) but also her rigidity. There’s no deftness or nuance. It really seems like she got the idea she’s the next John McCain and that Arizona wants another independent maverick and that playing to DC “moderate” worship is her ticket to power and possibly a future presidential run. But it turns out she’s just too rigid and clumsy to pull it off and she appears to be on course to a one term career in the Senate as a result.

A presidential run? As a Democrat? By pissing off the party and Democratic voters everywhere? At this point I’m not sure she’ll be able to get work as a pharmaceutical lobbyist. Nobody likes her.

Dylan Scott writes at Vox that cutting prescription drug prices is critical to just about everything else Democrats want to do regarding health care.

Democrats had big dreams for health care reform this year. In the forthcoming budget reconciliation bill, they planned to cover millions of uninsured people and offer dental and vision benefits to people on Medicare, while also cutting prescription drug costs. …

… Right now, it all depends on the fate of the prescription drug proposals.

Democrats need to come up with a plan to pay for the health care provisions because centrists are demanding it. From an accounting perspective, the drug plan — which gives Medicare more power to set prices for medications — is projected to save the government hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming decades. Democrats are using those savings to expand coverage in Medicaid and Medicare.

Sinema is not the only Democrat who has apparently been bought by the pharmaceutical industry. For example, three Dem House members — Scott Peters (CA), Kurt Schrader (OR), and Kathleen Rice (NY) — also are fighting it. And the only apparent reason for their opposition is that they don’t want to give up the generous donations of the pharmaceutical industry.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Back in July, Salon reported on Peters’ apparent flip-flop on H.R. 3, a Democratic-backed House bill aimed at radically reducing the price of high-cost drugs. Peters supported the measure in 2019. But in the years following, he received hundreds of thousands in campaign contributions from Big Pharma. Later he told Roll Call that the bill was a bad idea, saying that it would “dry up all the private investment that does that research.”

Do see this Atlantic article from 2019, Big Pharma’s Go-To Defense of Soaring Drug Prices Doesn’t Add Up. In brief, research and development costs have little to do with how drugs are priced in the U.S.

This is sad, not just because it’s likely to torpedo an important reform. Most voters have no idea what’s going on in Congress. They only know that, once again, Democrats failed to do much that was of any use to anyone. Might as well not bother to vote.

One side effect of the California recall election is that it appears to be inspiring Democrats to do something bold and unusual: run against Republicans.

People noticed that many 2020 election campaigns amounted to asymmetrical warfare. Democrats often ran on “reaching across the aisle” and bragging about how well they work with everybody to “get things done.” Their Republican opponents, meanwhile, were running ads saying that Democrats will take away your guns and Bibles and eat your babies. Guess who won most of the time?

David Atkins writes that Dems are eager to blast the opposition on covid mitigation.

As of this writing, the United States is once again suffering more than 2,000 deaths per day—the most since over 200 days ago. It is uncomfortable but necessary to point out that it is a primarily Republican plague at this point: The infection rate is twice as high in red counties as in blue ones. Seventy percent of new cases are emerging in red states, and the red-blue divide in vaccination rates is stark.

So it scarcely matters if Republicans are doing this out of ideological fervor or Machiavellian conspiracy. Regardless, the real results of laissez-faire public health policy are a clear abysmal failure. Insofar as it’s an intentional ploy to drag down Biden’s approval rating and the broader economy, the slight dip in public confidence well over a year out from the midterms is hardly worth the anger Republicans are stoking from everyday Americans who have been vaccinated, or are soon to be, and furious over being endangered by conservative anti-vax, anti-mask extremists.

The GOP intransigence is fiercely motivating Democrats to vote even in off-year and special elections, even as Republicans and their conservative infotainment allies are functionally killing and incapacitating literally thousands of their own voters almost every day, including and especially the ones so politically engaged and devoted to the cause that they’re willing to risk death rather than wear a mask or get a shot.

If Roe v. Wade goes down, or if the Texas vigilante law spreads to other states, that’s going to fire up a whole lot of people also. Paul Waldman writes that the pro-choice backlash is already brewing. Noting that polls consistently say that a comfortable majority of Americans want Roe v. Wade to remain in effect, Waldman also says that most American probably still don’t believe it will ever be overturned.

Quinnipiac found that by 54 percent to 35 percent, Americans didn’t think that Roe is likely to be overturned within the next few years. They’re in for a big surprise.

On Dec. 1, the court will hear oral arguments in a case concerning Mississippi’s ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a case that supporters quite clearly hope will be the vehicle for overturning Roe.

If and when it does, you won’t need vigilante laws. Republican-run states will just outlaw abortion entirely, with no need to concoct some kind of legal legerdemain to prevent the courts from striking the laws down. But in the meantime, Republican state legislators are already moving to create their own copycat versions of the Texas law. …

… Most Americans may not be paying much attention to the grim situation now faced by women in Texas who need to terminate a pregnancy. But when it’s happening in as many as 23 states where a total of 42 percent of Americans live — the number of states where Republicans control the legislature and the governorship — it will be impossible to ignore.

This week the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis heard arguments about a Missouri law passed in 2019 that bans abortions after eight weeks’ gestation, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Whether it allows abortions to be terminated to save the life of the mother isn’t clear to me. Judges for this court include four Trump appointees, three Reagan appointees, ten Bush appointees (father and son), and one Obama appointee. Be afraid.

But let us hope that in 2022 Democrats make it clear they are not going to cooperate with any of this. No more nice. No more reaching across the aisle.

Thanks to the new Woodward-Costa book, a memo has emerged detailing a “January 6 scenario” intended to hand the election to Trump. This scenario was proposed to Mike Pence in an oval office meeting with Trump on January 4, it says here. Written by John Eastman, a lawyer on Trump’s legal team, the memo proposed that Mike Pence could toss out the Electoral College votes from the Seven Disputed States (Arizona et al.),, which would have given Trump 232 E.C. votes and Biden 222. If Democrats object, the memo continues, throw out all the E.C. votes and have the election settled by the House. Each state gets one vote, which no doubt would have given the election to Trump. (That’s a very simplified explanation; the memo provides more details.) According to Woodward/Costa, Trump urged Pence to go ahead with what the memo proposed.

I’m not lawyer, but wouldn’t that be sedition, on its face?

A fellow named Ned Foley explains in great detail on the Election Law Blog that this would not have worked, or at least it would not have worked legally and constitutionally. This assumes everyone agrees on what’s “legal” and “constitutional,” which is assuming a lot, IMO.

Among other things, this episode has revealed serious ambiguities in the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which is cited by Eastman copiously in the memo. Eastman points to some of the ambiguities to decide the ECA is unconstitutional, which is a leap according to Ned Foley, but Foley urges that the ECA be tightened up anyway.

Greg Sargent wrote,

In the last election, no GOP legislature appointed rogue electors, a majority of Congress voted to uphold Biden’s electors, and Pence ultimately backed away from the plot. But some GOP legislators did consider this scheme, around 150 congressional Republicans did vote to subvert Biden’s electors, and Pence did explore the outer limits of what he might do for Trump.

And if the GOP controls the House and Senate on Jan. 6, 2025, Congress can simply count rogue electors sent by a given state, or refuse to count the rightful ones. If Republicans control just the House, Congress might deadlock, prompting a contingent election in the House decided by state delegations, and the Republican would win.

Indeed, as Hasen notes, the scheme getting even this far shows we are vulnerable to a future “respectable bloodless coup,” one “dependent upon technical legal arguments overcoming valid election results.” This, plus the fact that some Republican candidates are now campaigning on a vow to subvert future losses, requires cutting off these pathways.

Reforms include putting more conditions on congress critters objecting to electors so that they can’t do it for frivolous reasons. We also need to tighten up definisions of “failed elections.” A hurricane wiping out polling places on election day would qualify, whining by the losing candidate would not.

But of course, any election reform depends on reforming the filibuster rules first. So we’re probably screwed.

Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, January 6, 2021.

I am seriously glad I’m not Joe Biden, or even in Congress. The destruction tag team of Manchine and Sinema are effectively slamming the brakes on everything the Democrats want to accomplish. And the Republicans are determined to force the government into default at the end of this month by stopping a debt ceiling increase. If it were left to me to deal with this I’d probably resort to head smacking.

Today the Democrats announced they would propose a bill that would fund the government through the end of this year and suspend the debt ceiling until the end of 2022. Mitch McConnell immediately announced Republicans would oppose it.

Raising the debt ceiling, of course, is about giving Treasury the ability to pay bills already incurred. “The debt limit is the total amount of money that the United States government is authorized to borrow to meet its existing legal obligations, including Social Security and Medicare benefits, military salaries, interest on the national debt, tax refunds, and other payments,” it says here. Much of the public has been led to believe that raising the debt ceiling allows the government to increase the debt, which is not true. The debt is whatever it is; if the debt ceiling isn’t raised, the government will run short of money and default on loan payments. This would be bad.

As they presented their plan, Democrats on Monday once again sounded dire warnings about consequences of failure, which they said could destabilize global markets, shutter critical federal services during a pandemic and hold back assistance to millions of Americans in the aftermath of storms that battered the Gulf Coast and parts of the Eastern Seaboard. They urged Republicans to join them in adopting the measure, arguing that the debt ceiling helps cover prior spending, including the roughly $900 billion coronavirus relief package approved by both parties last year.

And, of course, if those bad things happen Republicans would be all over Fox News and other rightie outlets blaming Joe Biden. Americans would suffer, but otherwise it’s a win/win for Mitch.

I’m not sure, but I believe the debt ceiling/government funding bill is not subject to the filibuster rule, which in theory means the Democrats could pass it by themselves. We’ll see.

But the Democratic caucus is falling apart, mostly because of the aforementioned Manchin and Sinema and a few other deadheads, mostly in the House. See, for example, Kyrsten Sinema Threatens to Kill Her Own Infrastructure Bill; Democrats in Congress are melting down by Jonathan Chait.

If you recall, the genesis of this drama began over the summer, when a handful of centrist House Democrats decided to blow up the legislative strategy their party had in place for weeks by refusing to support a budget unless the House passed an infrastructure bill first. That gang, led by Josh Gottheimer, ultimately settled for a promise by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to bring up the infrastructure bill by September 27.

However, the hollowness of that victory became evident to the centrists this weekend, when House Progressives threatened to oppose the bipartisan bill when it comes for a vote. The Gottheimer Gang had simply assumed that bringing the bill to a vote, with Pelosi’s promise to try really, really hard to pass it even though its passage was not in her interest, would ensure passage. It doesn’t. They have simply set up a scenario where the bipartisan infrastructure bill fails, and the Democratic Party looks incompetent.

That’s where the new threat comes in. Via Playbook, Sinema and the renegade House Democrats now warn that, if the infrastructure bill does not pass next week, they will oppose any budget reconciliation bill, presumably forever.

Sinema also recently announced she will not permit the Senate to pass a plan to lower prescirption drug prices. We wonder why this would be so.

“@SenatorSinema opposed to White House drug prescription price lowering plan”

RELATED: “Sinema ranks as one of Congress’ leading recipients of pharmaceutical industry donations”

Make them wear their donors logos on their backs like NASCAR drivers. https://t.co/Y5YIyVfCOq pic.twitter.com/W3PQsqGsUz

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) September 20, 2021

Hmm, a mystery. Paul Waldman:

But in this case, Sinema is putting her foot down on one of the most popular elements of the reconciliation bill: the provision allowing Medicare to negotiate prices for prescription drugs, which would save the government hundreds of billions of dollars. She has reportedly told the White House that she will not stand for it to be included in the bill and even opposes a far more modest proposal to allow for negotiation over a small number of medications.

There is absolutely no political advantage in taking this position. Allowing Medicare to negotiate drug prices is absurdly popular, with some polls showing over 8 in 10 Americans supporting it. Given Arizona’s large population of senior citizens — who know more about high prescription drug prices than anyone — supporting price negotiation would be a clear political winner for Sinema.

It’s important to understand how central the Medicare provision is to the entire bill. Because Democrats are determined to pay for every last penny of new spending in this legislation, and because negotiating drug prices would save the government hundreds of billions of dollars, eliminating the provision would mean cutting all kinds of other priorities from the bill.

Maybe she’s being paid under the table to keep drug prices high? Maybe she doesn’t plan to run for a second term? The latter is Josh Marshall’s theory.

Like many people I spent a lot of time trying to figure out Kyrsten Sinema’s motivations this year. I’ve discussed my conclusions in other posts. But what I’ve focused on more recently is that as near as I can see, unless she shifts her stance pretty dramatically the odds of Sinema being elected to a second Senate term in 2024 are pretty poor. And that’s made me consider another question: does she just misread the politics of her situation that badly or is she not planning on running? …

… Let’s say things more or less come together on infrastructure but voting rights and a bunch of other stuff goes down in flames. She and Joe Manchin will be the main reasons for that. How well will Sinema be able to sell that record in a Democratic primary? I wouldn’t want to be in charge of running that campaign. What’s her argument exactly? This is wildly more so if her antics crater this infrastructure package.

So, clueless or corrupt? Or both?

Sen. Simena

Wow, France is so pissed off at us that its ambassador to the U.S. has been recalled. Quelle surprise!

The issue has to do with the sale of submarines to Austrialia, which is feeling a need to beef up its defenses against China. David Sanger at the New York Times explains:

According to interviews with American and British officials, the Australians approached the new administration soon after President Biden’s inauguration and said they had concluded that they had to get out of a $60 billion agreement with France to supply them with a dozen attack submarines.

The conventionally powered French subs, the Australians feared, would be obsolete by the time they were delivered. They expressed interest in seeking a fleet of quieter nuclear-powered submarines based on American and British designs that could patrol areas of the South China Sea with less risk of detection.

But it was unclear how they would terminate the agreement with France, which was already over budget and running behind schedule.

“They told us they would take care of dealing with the French,” one senior U.S. official said.

Neither Australia nor the U.S. provided any hints to France about the deal until a few hours before it was made public, and the secrecy appears to have particularly infuriated French President Emmanuel Macron.

Even more interesting — according to the Canberra Times, this deal was being planned in Australia for about eighteen months before it was announced this week.

Australia has nuclear experts, but not a civil nuclear industry and not enough military nuclear knowledge to undertake that work from scratch. Not safely. The global history of nuclear development is littered with the kind of risks that the political masters of Australia’s boutique military is infamous for avoiding. Submarine nuclear reactors would needed to be acquired, but the United States had refused to share the technology before.

Dealing with the French was inflicting its own wounds on the government. It has offered an amicable separation from Naval Group. The Prime Minister will say nice things about what was submitted in the final review, no matter the private views of the parties, and has offered to pay “all reasonable costs” associated with them packing up and moving out as well as the contracted exit fees.

There was a bigger problem. A problem to Trump them all.

Linda Reynolds, then the defence minister, and Morrison were the only two Australian ministers with knowledge of the early secret work through 2020. Later Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne was read in as informal negotiations developed, but Australia couldn’t turn a ‘no’ to a ‘yes’ as the go-ahead to approach then US president Donald Trump never came.

But once Joe Biden was POTUS, Australia felt more comfortable proposing the deal.

The new deal is part of a new trilateral partnership among the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom, called “AUKUS,” which includes extensive cooperation on cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing among the three countries. A guy writing at Foreign Policy says this is all about China:

… the actions announced on Sept. 15 will complicate Chinese efforts to project power at sea and control critical lines of communication. As such, they will impede future Chinese efforts to overawe nearby countries and gradually persuade them to adopt more compliant postures. In short, it is a move designed to discourage or thwart any future Chinese bid for regional hegemony.

I took a quick survey of some right-wing sites and get the impression that, while they did make an effort to frame the deal as a big Biden fail, their hearts aren’t really in it. If Trump had made this deal, they would have called it the most brilliant in history. I also get the impression that foreign policy experts think this is a good move.

We will have to patch things up with France, though. Josh Marshall writes that neither Australia nor the U.S. anticipated that France would react so badly.

There are obvious and understandable reasons for the French to be upset about it. A big part of that is that it’s a weapons deal worth tens of billions of dollars. But that alone doesn’t explain the intensity of the response which seems in part to lay bare France’s dated pretensions to be a global military power …

… But reading the latest reporting the US and Australia seemed to believe that if they didn’t act in secret the French and China would find out and work to sabotage the deal. So the US made the decision – quite simply – to act behind France’s back. Where we erred, if we did, is not realizing just how angry the French would get.

How did we miss that? Again, if we did? It seems clear the French-Australian deal was on the rocks. The French seem to have been in some denial about that. We seem to have expected they’d be upset but not terribly surprised. But the US and Australia seem to have been equally in denial on that front in the way people often are when they are needing to and avoiding breaking bad news. The US told the Australians it was on them. The Australians seem to have told the US that the French saw the writing on the wall.

We’ll have to do some big, splashy thing to make it up to France, I guess. See also Rana Mitter at The Guardian, The Aukus pact is a sign of a new global order.

In other news:

The rightie rally in Washington DC today appears to have fizzled.

Another debt ceiling crisis is looming. It’s all about Mitch McConnell wanting to destroy America and blame Joe Biden.

Yesterday Trump sent a letter to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger asking him to start “decertifying” the 2020 election. I say again, he did that yesterday.

Worth reading — For one Capitol reporter, Jan. 6 was the final straw — but he had watched a crisis brew for years.

Paris Gargoyles

We’re hearing that Idaho hospitals are officially rationing care, but the same thing is happening in hospitals in many states. There’s a terribly alarming story at ProPublica providing several examples of people who lost their lives from treatable illness because the hospitals were overwhelmed with covid patients.

One boy survived a burst appendix after waiting for hours in an emergency room. Later his father tweeted,

My 12-year-old had appendicitis. The ER was overwhelmed with unvaccinated Covid patients and we had to wait 6+ hours. While waiting, his appendix ruptured and had to spend 5 days in hospital; just got hmo bill of $5000. So yeah, your decision to not vaccinate does affect others.

— nathaniel osborn (@NEOsborn) September 6, 2021

If you want to keep your blood pressure down, don’t read the replies to the tweet. Lots of people either thought the father was lying or that the hospital was just incompetent.

In spring 2020, when covid was new, this was why the public health people wanted to “bend the curve” and slow the spread of covid. They wanted to keep the health care system from being overrun. Well, now it’s happening, in red states.

I just checked; here in St. Francois County we’ve got a 16 percent positivity rate, which is considered extremely bad. So far the hospitals seems to be functioning okay, but we probably have more hospital capacity here than a lot of other counties.

Along with Idaho, Alaska and parts of Montana have also gone “crisis care” mode, meaning you need to reschedule your heart attack there. But the boy with the burst appendix lives in Florida. A man in Texas was diagnosed with gallstone pancreatitis, which is serious but treatable, but it took so many hours to find a hospital that could take him he could not be saved.

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times notes that Sarah Palin’s “death panels” seem to have finally materialized, in Republican states. In Idaho, hospitals are having to “triage” patients, and those less likely to survive simply are not going to get aggressive care. Hiltzik writes,

In recent times, the state has become known as a haven for those celebrating rugged individualism, but its leaders have bowed to that principle obsequiously. Back in March, several Republican officeholders attended mask-burning rallies across the state.

“We’re standing here today to rein back government,” one of the organizers said.

The state’s political leaders have scrambled to outdo each other to “protect” the citizens of Idaho from having to wear masks. The state has also been a slacker at reporting vaccination data, I take it.

People aren’t learning from any of this.

General Mark Milley is getting a lot of criticism for taking steps to ensure that Trump couldn’t unilaterally start a crisis — say, a nuclear war with China — in the closing days of Trump’s administration. Of course, those of us who are not right-wing wackjobs are grateful to him. However, there is an argument to be made that you don’t want the head of the military making decisions like that under most circumstances.

It seems to me that the real deriliction of duty is that Trump wasn’t removed from office long before January 2021, either by the Senate or through the 25th Amendment process. I’m sure it was obvious even to Lindsey Graham that Trump was mentally unfit to be POTUS. He is both intellectually and psychologically unsound, and he obviously did misuse his office in many ways even beyond what he did to get impeached.

The 25th Amendment process is supposed to work this way:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

This assumes that the vice president and the principal officers — cabinet members, I take it — have the moral courage and integrity to do the right thing. Unfortunately, this was the Trump White House we’re talking about. Instead of doing the right thing, they conspired to keep Trump propped up in office. Likewise Senate Republicans would not have removed Trump from office even if he’d been discovered in bed with Vladimir Putin.

And because so many other people wouldn’t do the right thing, wouldn’t do their duty to the United States, it was left to Mark Milley to be sure Trump couldn’t pull some useless stunt that might get countless people killed.

Obviously the 25th Amendment was useless to check Trump. If the Vice President and principal officers of an administration are such a pack of weenies they won’t remove someone as unfit and dangerous as Trump, Congress should perhaps establish some “other body as Congress may by law provide” with the authority to begin the removal process in the future. Congress might also establish criteria for removal, such as neurological and psychological exams by independent physicians, not the one employed by the White House or chosen by the President.

Removing a president should not become routine, but neither should it be left to the Chair of the Joint Chiefs to unilaterally decide that the president can’t be trusted with the nuclear codes. It isn’t General Milley’s fault he was put in that position.