What’s up with Chuck?
The first six weeks of 2022 haven’t gone especially well for senior Democrats in Washington. But has anyone had a worse start to the year than Chuck Schumer?
First, there was the doomed election legislation push. Neither the White House nor Schumer got remotely close to persuading Democratic holdouts of the need to amend the filibuster, while the Senate majority leader’s strategy, in which he insisted on a vote on the bill without debate or amendments, only made things worse.
Then there’s the awkward silence on Build Back Better — or whatever is going to take its place. At the end of last year, a frustrated Schumer promised an up-or-down vote on the bill’s provisions “earlier in the new year.” We are still awaiting that reckless move — or anything more constructive on what was supposed to be Biden’s defining legislative achievement.
Whether it’s on voting rules or Biden’s spending package, Schumer can’t seem to resist a scorched earth strategy that exacerbates his party’s internal divisions and makes the prospect of securing fifty votes in the future even more remote.
This approach is particularly damaging when it comes to Joe Manchin, without whom Schumer cannot do anything. As one anonymous Democratic staffer put it in a recent LA Times story on the miscalculations of both the White House and Schumer: “So Manchin walked away [from Build Back Better] because the White House was putting too much of a spotlight on him — and your response to that is to lean in further on voting rights so that he, once again, is seen as the problem?”
A social spending package to take BBB’s place is clearly the Democrats’ top legislative priority. Here Schumer has evidently opted for a cooling off strategy rather than the inflammatory approach promised late last year. That may be the better of the two options, but the majority leader’s respite from frustrations over the deadlock will only be brief. The midterms are getting closer. The White House and colleagues up for re-election in November are getting impatient. And there’s little to suggest that Schumer’s relationship with Manchin has miraculously improved in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, Senate progress has stalled on a number of fronts. Weeks after talks began, we are still waiting for some sort of bipartisan deal on Russia sanctions. There’s also a notable lack of progress on a bipartisan Electoral Count Act reform package. Schumer’s postal reform bill has hit a procedural snag that will delay its passage. Oh, and the federal government runs out of money on Friday. No one said managing a 50-50 Senate was going to be easy, but Schumer seems uniquely ill suited to the unenviable position he finds himself in.
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Cautious optimism in Eastern Europe
Washington awoke to good news this morning. Russia’s defense ministry announced that some of the troops deployed on the Russia-Ukraine border were returning to their garrisons, while Moscow signaled there was still scope for a diplomatic solution to the crisis.
NATO general secretary Jens Stoltenberg called these developments grounds for “cautious optimism” but added that members of the alliance had “not seen any signs of de-escalation.” Meanwhile, German chancellor Olaf Scholz has flown to Moscow for further negotiations with Vladimir Putin. “It is our damned duty to prevent a war in Europe,” said Scholz after the talks.
Mask off, DC
The masks are coming off in the nation’s capital. Washington mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that masks will no longer be required in most indoor settings as of March 1 and that the city’s vaccine mandate will be scrapped as of today.
As Cockburn points out, this is a partial victory for Washingtonians eager to move past the emergency phase of the pandemic. Masks will still be required in the classroom and businesses will still be free to enforce vaccination and mask rules of their own. Given that Washington is a town not just of rule-followers but rule-makers and rule-enforcers, I suspect an awful lot of establishments will choose to do so.
What you should be reading today
Dominic Green: Is this Biden’s Munich moment?
Matt Purple: The left’s Nicene Creed
Chadwick Moore: Big Tech covers up Biden’s crack pipe giveaway
Michael Brendan Dougherty, National Review: Maskless Super Bowl marks our return to normalcy
Walter Russell Mead, The Wall Street Journal: ‘Asia first’ misses the point
Dalibor Rohac, the Bulwark: How I got stung by Viktor Orbán
Poll watch
President Biden Job Approval
Approve: 40.6 percent
Disapprove: 53.8 percent
Net approval: -13.2 (RCP Average)
Florida governor Ron DeSantis Job Approval
Approve: 53 percent
Disapprove: 43 percent
Net approval: +10 (Mason-Dixon Polling)
