In her note to TPM over the weekend, Theda Skocpol made a long list of good observations and suggestions about Democrats’ path forward. One of them was deceptively simple: “Stop passing huge kitchen sink bills no one understands and instead pass one at a time popular measures and force Trump to veto them.” This is one of the great lessons of the first two years of the Biden presidency. The lesson stretches back into the Obama years. His administration and congressional Democrats actually went to some lengths to hide Great Recession public relief/stimulus checks in the innards of tax refunds. This should be obvious to everyone by now. One of the perverse side effects of Democrats being the party that is serious about governing is that they tend to think of legislation purely in policy terms. But legislation isn’t just a technocratic fiddling under the hood of the engine of government. It’s a public conversation with voters.
But there’s a catch. There’s another reason they do those huge omnibus bills where no one knows what’s in them. The filibuster. There’s simply no way to do them with the filibuster in place. The only way around the filibuster is the reconciliation process. And you can only do a couple of those a year. Even then, only certain kinds of legislation are allowed. So if the plan for the next two years is to pass a bunch of popular bills and force Republicans to vote against them and Trump to veto them you actually can’t do that because none of that will even get to a vote in the Senate.
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The Journal report (paywall) came out just before 6 p.m. The lede says the board is “preparing to oust CEO Jensen Huang, its founder and chief executive after he had two extramarital affairs, including one with a suspected Chinese spy. The board is preparing to meet as soon as today to determine his future, people familiar with the matter said.”
Put a fork in ‘er. Cindy Hyde-Smith is done and Scott Colom is the next senator from Mississippi, according to CNN.
I’ve been watching the results all day and I was going to do a post saying essentialy the same thing. Half a percentage point, approaching 5,000 votes. Simply too big a lead to overcome. They didn’t want to pick another protein.
There’s a para-news topic I’d like to discuss with you. It has to do with how scandals do or don’t develop, what catches fire and what peters out. We know that one of the constant themes of the last two years was that anti-bromide “nothing matters.” A mammoth scandal is uncovered. A few pieces are written about it. And then … nothing. It just falls under the waves. There is a key structural reason for this that gets far too little attention. It turns on the incentives reporters, publications and readers have to pay attention.
The standard scandal reporting progression goes something like this:
Reporters unearth scandal details. Attention shakes free more information and the momentum builds. Eventually public officials announce hearings or law enforcement agencies begin investigations. Sometimes it’s both. Those actions both validate the reality of wrongdoing and create new stories to cover. It’s both the existence and progress of these investigations and the new information they generate. There are things that criminal or legislative investigators — with warrants and subpoenas — can pry loose that reporters almost never can. Eventually you might have resignations or indictments, perhaps reforms.
