Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

...but the spending bill did a lot for every entrenched Washington interest and did nothing for average American voters concerned about vitally important issues such as border security and fiscal discipline.

They want to get back to fiscal discipline, a former bedrock Republican principle that has been lost in recent years.

Kelli Korducki: Why did Nancy Pelosi’s leadership handoff get you thinking about the merits of age in political office?

Frank Foer: As a politician who I’ve watched over an extended period of time, she’s the person that best knew how to wield power; I haven’t, in my lifetime, known a politician who’s better at getting stuff done than Nancy Pelosi. And I think that she kept getting better at it as she went. A lot of the time, when people seem to be hanging on to a job—and for a good chunk, I also thought that she was hanging on to her job—she just kept becoming effective in new and different ways.

Kelli: Do you think that’s a function of time and experience more than Nancy Pelosi being a really sharp and gifted politician?

Frank: She’s gifted, no doubt. But, you know, we had this brief moment in time that has just ended where there were three senior-citizen politicians [Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden], all of whom had or are having the best moments of their career at their very end. And I think that they did much better than anybody expected or than they had any right to do, given the circumstances that they were in. And I started thinking about patience as a leadership virtue but also, in the corollary to that, how to play a long legislative game. I felt like the lesson of the past two years is that the Democrats could have easily crumbled into despair and ruin, but that trio figured out how to pull off major wins, kind of at the last minute.

Kelli: And then, on the flip side, you have this week’s spectacle with Kevin McCarthy, who’s now lost nine consecutive votes to take over as House speaker.

Frank: McCarthy has been in leadership a long time. He has plenty of experience. But even a leader with the skills of Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t be able to manage a caucus filled with so many vile figures and ill-intentioned mischief makers.

Kelli: You write that aging politicians either become NIMBYs beholden to lobbyists or shrewd in getting stuff done. In your view, what informs the direction they’ll take?

Frank: Politicians can be greedy in different ways. Some are greedy for their careers as they experience it. And those are the people who become power-mad or venal. And then there are politicians who become greedy for their legacies, who I think worry more about how they’ll be perceived when it’s all said and done.

This may be a simplistic bifurcation, but I think that there’s almost a divide in the way that people ponder the meaning of their own lives and what they hope to extract from it. And I think it’s something that probably translates into the world outside of politics.

Kelli: You note in your essay that the last Congress passed a lot of forward-thinking legislation, and that this contradicts the idea that older legislators might not be so interested in risking political capital to secure a future they won’t be around to experience.

Frank: Yeah. And to me, the measure of that is what they did on climate. Our recently departed [from The Atlantic] colleague Robinson Meyer wrote a great piece about how the Inflation Reduction Act is one of the more underrated pieces of recent policy, that it’s this sweeping set of measures that are meant to bring the American economy into the age of sustainability. That’s the thing that I judged this Congress on most; I was worried that if they didn't act on climate now, that nothing would happen for a decade, and the planet would’ve lost this huge opportunity. But by seizing the moment on climate with this bill, they created the chance for the United States to be an incredibly active leader in climate diplomacy, so we now have the moral authority to lead on climate.

Kelli: You close your essay on Pelosi’s Democratic heir apparent, Hakeem Jeffries, who signals “the thrilling possibility of the nation’s first Black speaker.” What do you anticipate for Jeffries and the new generation of leaders?

Frank: I think Congress is a very specific institution. What’s interesting about Pelosi and Schumer is that I don’t think anybody would regard them as especially good public communicators—and that’s really, I think, the fundamental way in which politicians are conventionally judged. It’s like, how do they do on television, or how do they do when delivering big speeches? And they would both get very bad marks on that score. But what they were good at, or what they are good at, is understanding the interests and careers and psychology of all of the members in their caucuses. And I think that that’s a power structure that doesn’t really ever change. There are always new complexities that enter into that sort of people management, because you always have fresh sets of people coming into the Congress.

But, you know, my guess is also that Hakeem Jeffries has been part of Pelosi’s leadership crew for a bit now, and I think that he’s probably studied her as he’s prepared to take on this job, which people knew for a while that he was going to assume. So it’s my hope that he gets good at all the things that she was good at, and that it’ll just take a bit of hard-won experience for him to get there.

The change would remove power from leadership and return more of it to rank and file members. These changes could make passing laws more difficult.

Our government wasn’t designed or conceived as a business...

It's almost as if the Republican Party decided to do a production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for America's viewing pleasure.

Quote:

Right-wing media lash out at Fox News over its coverage of the House speaker vote

Ah. I was wondering why Google's news feed had gone from what felt like a surprising amount of articles from FN on the story Wednesday, to nearly nothing since.

Lash wrote:

The change would remove power from leadership and return more of it to rank and file members. These changes could make passing laws more difficult.

Show me ONE business model that disregards Management and allows for a free-for-all of workers.

Sheer chaos.

Nothing will ever get done. And I'm kinda thinking you're not only happy about that, you'll welcome any and all efforts to prolong movement of any type of legislation.

Frank: She’s gifted, no doubt. But, you know, we had this brief moment in time that has just ended where there were three senior-citizen politicians [Pelosi, Schumer, and Biden], all of whom had or are having the best moments of their career at their very end. And I think that they did much better than anybody expected or than they had any right to do, given the circumstances that they were in. And I started thinking about patience as a leadership virtue but also, in the corollary to that, how to play a long legislative game. I felt like the lesson of the past two years is that the Democrats could have easily crumbled into despair and ruin, but that trio figured out how to pull off major wins, kind of at the last minute.

Frank: McCarthy has been in leadership a long time. He has plenty of experience. But even a leader with the skills of Nancy Pelosi wouldn’t be able to manage a caucus filled with so many vile figures and ill-intentioned mischief makers.

Ah. I was wondering why Google's news feed had gone from what felt like a surprising amount of articles from FN on the story Wednesday, to nearly nothing since.

McCarthy has insured that a minority of his party (a minority that is Loony-tunes) will pretty much be running the House show for the next two years. Almost nothing will get done...and what gets done will be the stuff that should not have gotten done.

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McCarthy has insured that a minority of his party (a minority that is Loony-tunes) will pretty much be running the House show for the next two years. Almost nothing will get done...and what gets done will be the stuff that should not have gotten done.

As has been the case for a long while now, every goal and decision will be geared entirely towards either 1) dismantling existing regulations and programs that bring benefits for citizens or 2) performative screeching outrage at issues such as the cabal of witches and warlocks who control the aluminum siding trades.

The farcical scenes among US Republicans have echoes in our Tory party. Both promise disruption, then deliver exactly that

The US right has this week been staging a clown show that has had liberals in that country and beyond pulling up a chair and breaking out the popcorn. There has been a karmic pleasure in watching the Republicans who won control of the House of Representatives struggle to complete the most basic piece of business – the election of a speaker – but it’s also been instructive, and not only to Americans. For it has confirmed the dirty little secret of that strain of rightwing populist politics that revels in what it calls disruption: it always ends in bitter factional fighting, chaos and paralysis. We in Britain should know, because Brexit has gone the exact same way.

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McCarthy has insured that a minority of his party (a minority that is Loony-tunes) will pretty much be running the House show for the next two years. Almost nothing will get done...and what gets done will be the stuff that should not have gotten done.

As has been the case for a long while now, every goal and decision will be geared entirely towards either 1) dismantling existing regulations and programs that bring benefits for citizens or 2) performative screeching outrage at issues such as the cabal of witches and warlocks who control the aluminum siding trades.