The 'Moderate' House Democrats May Soon Find Playing Chicken With Nancy Pelosi Doesn't End Well

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

14 August 21

Josh Gottheimer and the Problem Solvers have found another problem not to solve.

ood morning. And how is everyone on this fine Reinstatement Day? Breaking out the sparklers and the noisemakers? Waiting on the sidewalk for the parade? Greeting it with "solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty...Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more," as John Adams wrote to Abigail about the celebrations surrounding the Declaration of Independence?

(Yeah, I’m on something of a John Adams kick these days, and I don’t know why. I must be channeling that impossible old grump for some unknown reason.)

Of course, the Democratic majorities in Congress are acting like they don’t know what day it is, and they’re pretending to legislate in a fashion of which His Glorious Reinstatement would not approve. And, in the course of this futile activity, some “moderates” in the House of Representatives are doing a little flexing. From the New York Times:

“With the livelihoods of hardworking American families at stake, we simply can’t afford months of unnecessary delays and risk squandering this one-in-a-century, bipartisan infrastructure package,” reads the letter, which has Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey, as the first signer. “It’s time to get shovels in the ground and people to work.”

Josh Gottheimer is, of course, co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus, which I now choose to believe is a particularly deft bit of irony.

Gottheimer, who represents a congressional district in which the median household income is north of $110,000, is explaining right there in his own letter the price of the blackmail that he and his nine—NINE!—henchpeople are demanding of Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic Congress. They want an immediate vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill, probably because that makes it easier for them to torpedo the $3.5 trillion budget resolution which contains a lot of things needed by households where the median income is, say, half of that enjoyed by Josh Gottheimer’s constituents. Anybody who thinks that giving into these nine people means the budget resolution is still safe probably spends their spare time teaching butterflies to talk.

Gottheimer is joined among the signatories by Reps. Carolyn Bourdeaux (Georgia), Filemon Vela (Texas), Jared Golden (Maine), Henry Cuellar (Texas), Vicente Gonzalez (Texas), Ed Case (Hawaii), Jim Costa (California) and Kurt Schrader (Oregon).

Does nobody in the districts represented by these nine people need affordable childcare or less-expensive pre-K education? Even wealthy congressional districts are threatened by the climate crisis; the ocean doesn’t care how much money you spent for that beach house. It seems like the Problem Solvers aren’t interested in solving many problems, at least many of those afflicting citizens who aren’t part of the donor class. Wait, what’s this? From Reuters:

Roughly doubling the tax rate paid by high earners on their investment income to 39.6% from 20% and lifting the highest tax rate on ordinary income to 39.6% from 37%. Increase the corporate tax rate and set a minimum tax on foreign income as part of a global minimum tax. Increased scrutiny of higher-income taxpayers at the Internal Revenue Service.

And the nickel drops.

However, Gottheimer and his folks appear to be winning The Framing War, largely because the elite political media dig so-called Democratic moderates as an easy vehicle for the next Democrats In Disarray aria.

If they stick to their position, Democratic leaders and President Biden face their first major test in the process. More than half of the nearly 100-strong Congressional Progressive Caucus has taken the opposite position, saying they will not vote for the infrastructure bill until they have a social policy measure funding their priorities: climate change, education, health care, family leave, child care and elder care. With the promised defections from the Progressive Caucus, it would appear that Ms. Pelosi faces a stalemate, lacking the votes to either deliver the infrastructure bill to President Biden’s desk or advance the budget resolution needed to protect the final legislation from Republican obstruction.

People who play chicken with Speaker Pelosi generally end up in the ditch. The country needs both of those bills, and she now needs to decide who has more power—nine “moderates” with 100 reporters behind them, or 100 members of her own caucus. All this controversy is not in the spirit of Reinstatement Day, and I am very disappointed in all of them.