From Daily Poster
It's time for Democratic leaders to make Manchin, Sinena and every other senator vote - and not on some gutted half measure, but on a real $3.5 trillion bill.
As millions of Americans are being cut off from jobless benefits, pulverized by health care costs, bankrupted by the COVID economy, and battered by the intensifying climate apocalypse, the country has spent weeks watching Sen. Joe Manchin issue royal edicts from the deck of his luxury yacht, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema toggling between spa fundraisers and a European vacation. The Senate apparently has so little to do, it has time this week for a confirmation hearing to deliver disgraced Chicago mayor-turned-Wall-Street-mogul Rahm Emanuel a cushy ambassadorship an insulting spectacle scheduled on the 7-year anniversary of Emanuel's police force murdering teenager Laquan McDonald.
The interminable delay of an up-or-down Senate vote on President Joe Biden's agenda serves no one other than Sinema, Manchin, and their corporate donors who want the bill gutted or killed. Every day Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer stalls a vote on an already-scaled-back $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, Senate Democrats become more complicit in the betrayal of their party's campaign promises, the evisceration of the working class, and the destruction of the climate.
They can make a different choice and hold a vote right now.
As Sunrise Movement co-founder Will Lawrence said: "Put the bill on the floor, load it up with extra investment for West Virginia and Arizona, and dare them to vote it down."
That's not what Manchin and Sinema want -- they and their corporate paymasters love the current slow-walk. As the process drags out, the pair get to keep making ever-changing, mercurial declarations about parts of the legislation they and their donors dislike, and then they get to continue raking in campaign cash from industries that would benefit from hollowing out the bill. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats and the White House keep responding to the jeremiads by promising to whittle down the legislation all in the name of to appease the Wolf of West Virginia and the Arizona Attention Freak.