Opinion

The way I see it, our elected officials should wake up every morning and ask not what they can do to sate their political ambitions, but what they can accomplish that most improves the lives of the people they chose to serve.

The trouble with Sinema these days is that she's confused her determination to get reelected with doing what's best for her constituency and our country as a whole.

Late Thursday, the House's progressive caucus did what the long-received wisdom in D.C. believed they would never do: They stood their ground in the face of centrist sabotage.

Months ago, conservative Democrats demanded that President Joe Biden's ambitious infrastructure and jobs agenda be divided into two separate bills. They promised that doing so was just a way to get bipartisan support for some of it. But progressives feared that it was actually a way to destroy the parts of Biden's agenda that are popular with voters but not so popular with right-wing lobbyists.

JD Vance is a bestselling author, Wall Street trader and senate candidate in Ohio. He was a recently on Tucker Carlson's white-power hour, where he railed against people he doesn't like. He said: "The basic way this works is that the Ford Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Harvard University endowment — these are fundamentally cancers on American society, but they pretend to be charities, and so they benefit from preferential tax treatment."

Why don't we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation, tax their assets, and give it to the people who've had their lives destroyed by their radical open borders agenda?

Jay Nordlinger was shocked. Or at least demonstrated shock on Twitter when he quoted Vance before adding: "If this is conservatism — conservatism is going to need a new name, at least in America."

Sen. Joe Manchin said Thursday that securing sweeping climate legislation to safeguard the planet for future generations requires electing more progressives—unlike him—in 2022.

The corporate Democrat's assertion came as he announced to a crowd of reporters that his topline number for the broad reconciliation bill is $1.5 trillion—a fraction of the $3.5 trillion demanded by progressive lawmakers for the 10-year Build Back Better plan that includes investments to strengthen the safety net and tackle the climate emergency.

A reader asked the other day why the Republicans are voting against the full faith and credit of the United States when the GOP comprises so many millionaires and billionaires invested in financial markets. In other words, why would the very obscenely rich support a party that's clearly threatening the very obscene power of the very obscenely rich?

One theory, which I think is the right theory, is they don't want the Republicans to prevail. They think the Democrats will do the right thing for the sake of their country, not their party. The gamble is almost certainly the right one. Bringing the economy to the brink of panic is dangerous, but the actual risk is minimal given the Democrats are the party of governance. They would not call the Republicans' bluff.

It is tough to resist the opportunity to go for the cute, simple sentence when pointing out that "The Problem with Jon Stewart" has, shall we say, issues to overcome.

This article originally appeared at Salon.

Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., paid next to nothing in 2017 state income taxes compared to previous years, despite reporting an individual income of at least $450,000.

According a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel report released Thursday, the Republican lawmaker paid exactly $2,105 in state income taxes — a staggeringly small amount compared to the $60,000 average he paid over the past decade.

During the 2020 Democratic primary, Sen. Elizabeth Warren made fighting corruption her number one priority. It may not have seemed that way in the press, which tended to characterize the senior senator from Massachusetts as a female Sen. Bernie Sanders. Most coverage focused heavily on her bold economic ideas, such as a wealth tax. But when she was actually asked what her major focus in politics was, Warren never hesitated to say that fighting corruption should come first — because of her commitment to passing progressive economic policies.

"The rich and the powerful have been calling the shots in Washington forever and ever," Warren told Vox's Ezra Klein in 2019, explaining why she was intent on passing a massive anti-corruption bill meant to curtail the influence of lobbyists and influence of moneyed interests on Capitol Hill.

Joe Biden has told us several times he's an eternal optimist.

Whether he's trying to salvage an infrastructure package, work on the debt ceiling, dealing with China, Afghanistan, or the pandemic that's killed more than 700,000 Americans, during his first nine months in the Oval Office Biden and his press secretary Jen Psaki have smiled at reporters and reiterated just how upbeat the president really is.

Far-right extremism, or white supremacy, is the fastest growing ideology in the United States. The impact of white supremacists terrorizing Black communities has led to calls for serious action, even an anti-lynching bill. This alone reflects how dangerous they are.

Add to that the January 6 insurrection and the evidenced involvement of the Proud Boys, and other groups, leading to the FBI describing the attack on the United States Capitol as an act of domestic terror.

Monday was the deadline here in Connecticut for state employees to get vaccinated, per order of the governor, Ned Lamont. The state press corps spent last week speculating about the number of workers who'd walk off the job before being forced to get the shot. Attention settled on school bus drivers. Around 500,000 children depend on them. Reporters asked the Lamont administration what it would do if thousands of kids were left stranded. But by Monday, it was clear that the vast majority of drivers complied with the law.

A similar pattern played out across the country. Deadlines were imposed. Blood oaths were taken. Anxieties grew. Americans of seemingly sound mind swore they'd never get vaccinated against their will. Then — obedience. The people who said they'd never do what they were told did what they were told. The people with so many "reasons" for being against vaccines forgot all about those "reasons." The people whose identities were built on "beliefs" decided those "beliefs" weren't as important as the consequences of keeping them.

When the two-track plan to pass President Joe Biden's ambitious jobs and infrastructure program first emerged, many progressives understandably thought it was a trap. To summarize an impossibly complex situation: Earlier this year, Biden proposed a giant bill that would contain huge chunks of the progressive agenda. Some of it was GOP-friendly, such as building roads and bridges. Some of it — childcare funding, policies to reduce climate change, and health care expansions — was not. But centrist Democrats refused to vote for the entire bill through budget reconciliation, which only requires a party-line vote, because they wanted to say they were "bipartisan." So a scheme was concocted: Put the GOP-friendly items in one bill that could pass on a bipartisan basis, and put the rest in a bill to pass on a party-line vote.

So Democrats concocted an intra-party deal: Progressives vote for the moderate-pleasing bill, and, in exchange, moderates vote for the progressive bill.

It's way past political cliche, but that old “Popeye" comic strip where J. Wellington Wimpy promises to pay a short-order cook tomorrow for a hamburger he plans to eat today, is still the best way to describe Republican intransigence this week over a vote to extend the nation's debt ceiling that's soared past cartoonish farce.

In case you missed it, on Monday, Republicans in the narrowly divided U.S. Senate voted to block the approval of new borrowing intended to pay for old debt that they're complicit in racking up.