The act of coming together to do what the American people want

Hunter of Daily Kos reported a story in two parts. One part is the news. The other part is how the news was reported. The news part: After the insurrection some corporations halted to political donations to GOP lawmakers who participated in the insurrection by voting to nullify a United States presidential election based on hoax claims of fraud. They did this even after the claims were proven to be false (all those losing court cases) and after the Capitol – their place of work – was attacked. In response these GOP lawmakers issued threats of banning the lobbyists of those corporations and PACs from their offices. The reporting part: The Wall Street Journal reported the story without any hint of the underlying problem. Wrote Hunter:

Republican lawmakers are issuing a plain threat to their corporate once-donors: Keep the checks coming or we'll refuse to take meetings with you. Keep paying us and we will keep listening to what you have to say; cut that money off, and we'll hang you all out to dry. … If nothing else it lays the heart of conservatism bare, yet again. You may have been under the impression that Republican lawmakers had earnestly held beliefs about business freedoms and other yada. In actuality, "aides for lawmakers" say, what they fight for depends on who's given them money and who hasn't. It is not bribery, no indeedy. It is just exchanging money for legislation, and it is so institutionalized that the most formidable business-centric newspaper in the country reports it with no particular fanfare. … In the end, nobody seems to be taking these threats very seriously. Institutionalized bribery via political coffers is so ingrained into our system that the system cannot function without it, and the Journal notes that lobbyists themselves believe that corporations will give up their attempts to distance themselves from Republican insurrectionists as new laws and policies are proposed that will affect them. The money faucets will turn back on, even for seditionists.

Hunter isn’t so sure those faucets will resume flowing. Cozying up to seditionists is not a good corporate look. Mark Sumner of Kos noted how quick Moscow Mitch fell in line behind the nasty guy the moment the nasty guy talked about starting a new conservative party. Yet, there are moderate Republicans who have talked about starting a new moderately conservative party. The first members could be the lawmakers who have already been driven from the GOP, such as Justin Amash and Jeff Flake. This effort could threaten the GOP as much as a nasty guy inspired effort. The effort has gotten little attention from leadership, even when that talk appears in various op-ed pieces. After filling in the details Sumner wrote:

So again, why aren’t they doing it? The biggest reason is … they don’t really mean it. Or at least they don’t mean it enough to put in more work that writing a guest column.

David Nir of Kos discussed the difference between unity and bipartisanship. Biden talked about unity a lot in his inauguration address and in speeches since then. He didn’t mention bipartisanship. Nir wrote:

So what exactly does unity mean? Biden and his team have defined it very simply: It’s the act of coming together to do what the American people want. In this way, it lays out a future guided not by whatever the largest number of politicians are able to agree on, but instead by the desires of the people those politicians were elected to represent. It reroots our democracy in the very soil that gives it life in the first place.

Doing what the people want makes a president popular (who’da thought?) and they don’t like popular Democratic presidents.

To prevent such an outcome, Republicans are pretending that unity is indeed an interchangeable synonym for bipartisanship and using it as a bludgeon to cow Democrats. By demanding that Biden only pass legislation acceptable to them, only the most watered-down measures could ever become law. More likely, nothing ever would. If Democrats were so weak-willed as to be fooled by this bullying, it would leave the party with no accomplishments to show to voters in two or four years’ time—precisely what Republicans dream of. But today’s Democrats, Joe Biden included, are far tougher and savvier than their easily intimidated forebears. They know precisely what game Republicans want to play and refuse to participate.

Do Republicans really want bipartisanship? They could vote for Democratic proposals. An Associated Press article posted on NBCNews reported that Sen. Chuck Schumer and Moscow Mitch have finally reached a power sharing agreement. Once it is voted on (soon!) the Senate committee chairs will be turned over to Democrats. This article says Mitch’s refusal to agree has been going on for a week. It’s actually been two – the two new Georgia senators who tied the Senate were sworn in on Inauguration day. And it is important that Dems are in control of committees. Sen. Lindsay Graham, the outgoing chair of the Judiciary Committee, has been refusing to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland, Biden’s pick for Attorney General. You might remember Garland as the guy cheated out of a Supreme Court seat by Moscow Mitch five years ago. Jared Yates Sexton tweeted about a recent incident, though he did not name or link to it.

By saying something stupid, offensive, cruel, and misogynistic, the troll set off an outrage that grew his profile and undoubtedly raised disturbing levels of money from people who love it when people are rightfully outraged. This political economy is broken. … As long as people see a financial incentive to being cruel and racist and misogynistic and fascistic and in destroying shared society they’re going to take it and it’s going to continue to cost us lives and valuable, precious time. … Bad faith actors don’t care if you’re sharing or talking about something because you agree or disagree. In this attention economy it’s all the same. This is why media puts out shockingly bad faith op-eds and articles. Because it captures everybody and just results in more revenue. This system is currently working only to hurt discourse and shared society. Reject it and learn from our time with Trump.

There is a famous photo of four young black men sitting at the lunch counter at the Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina in early February of 1960. They sat there in defiance of the store’s policy to not serve black people. This sit-in was part of an effort to overturn that policy which happened a few months later. There is a fifth young black man in the photo. He’s working behind the counter. His name is Charles Bess, now 82. Sayaka Matsuoka wrote up his story for The Bitter Southerner. Bess is now a regular at the International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, where that lunch counter is on display. Of that day in 1960 Bess watched the protesters but said nothing to them. Though he looks reserved in the photo he was ecstatic on the inside. This is a good read for Black History Month.