As our regular readers know, we have been fully supportive of everything that entails the Progressive agenda in Washington, from the Green New Deal to tax increases on the wealthy and everything in between.
If anything, we’d like to see the $3.5 trillion Democratic spending bill be even larger in order to do what truly is needed to bring America into the third decade of the 21st century.
However, we recognize that not everyone agrees with our view, both as to the costs and goals of the legislation put forward by President Joe Biden.
In addition to some Democratic moderates in the House, there are the two U.S. senators, Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, who publicly have stated that they only will support a scaled-down version of the $3.5 trillion package.
Senator Manchin has been fairly specific in his position, whereas Senator Sinema has been silent and erratic — both publicly and privately among her colleagues — suggesting that her psychological fitness to be a U.S. Senator is in question.
But regardless of their motivations, Manchin and Sinema constitute a roadblock to passage of the $3.5 trillion spending bill. So what is a Progressive to do?
We could suggest the usual cliches, such as, “Half a loaf is better than no loaf at all,” or, “Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.”
But we prefer one of our own: Politics is the art of compromise.
If a politician who comes into office expects to be a rigid ideologue, then he or she is in the wrong business. Refusing to compromise is like the little boy or girl who doesn’t like the way the game is being played and takes his or her ball home.
We urge the legislators from our districts in Congress to get their act together and get something done. We didn’t send them to Washington to accomplish nothing. In our view, the longer that this gets dragged out — especially with the Democrats having no room to spare in terms of their majorities — the more that the average voter will think that maybe Donald Trump wasn’t so bad after