A front-page article in the Washington Post on Thursday began, "Senate Democrats are scrambling."
Aren't they always?
Hasn't this year of Joe Biden's presidency and a narrow Democratic congressional majority been defined by Democrats in mad, self-colliding frenzies?
Haven't Democrats been in perpetual motion to meet deadlines they've artificially assigned themselves to pass once-in-a-generation change they don't have the votes to pass and that the people never indicated they were itching for?
Democrats got to 50 votes in the U.S. Senate solely because Donald Trump so offended Georgia swing voters that, after they spanked him, they voted for good measure a couple of months later against two Republican Senate candidates in unique runoffs.
Lightning striking in the Atlanta suburbs does not a national policy mandate make.
At first, the biggest programmatic advancements in government services since the Great Society supposedly were going to get done by the October recess. Then it was Thanksgiving. Most lately it was Christmas.
But last week Senate Democrats gave up on Christmas. Instead they declared, by golly, that they'd pass, by New Year's Day, something else entirely--sweeping federal voting-rights legislation to put a quietus on all these Republican state restrictions on voting.
I wonder if they'll make that deadline.
Not really. I don't wonder.
They'll need 60 votes to break a filibuster or 50 votes plus Kamala Harris to repeal the filibuster. They don't have the latter and you can forget the former.
They're only going to nibble around on the filibuster. They're going to scramble to nibble. Then they'll talk about the absolute deadline of Valentine's Day.
Then, with hearts broken, they're going to say it's too late because there isn't time to make voting changes in time for the midterm elections, which will re-install Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and, far worse, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Democrats won't have passed anything the Republicans will need to repeal--except the special House committee investigating Trump's insurrection, which will be disbanded so that Steve Bannon and Mark Meadows will get away with contempt of Congress and worse.
Meantime, the second paragraph of that Post article said "several [Democratic] lawmakers said Wednesday they are optimistic the new push [on the voting-rights bill] could succeed where previous efforts have failed."
Aren't they always? Optimistic, I mean.
They were optimistic they were going to pass a $3.5 trillion progressive wish list. They were optimistic they could sit on the popular bipartisan infrastructure bill for leverage. They were really optimistic they were going to pass the reduced version at $2.2 trillion. They were dead certain on the $1.75 trillion that the walking oxymoron--a Democratic senator from West Virginia, named Joe Manchin--drew as a line in the sand.
But Manchin brought up again last week his concern about spending such lofty sums amid troublingly spiking inflation. He pointed out the disingenuousness of calculating the cost of child-care tax-credit checks on a one-year extension when everyone knew Democrats would continue the program after that year. So, he said he'd insist the 10-year cost be placed in the bill.
The White House and Democratic congressional leaders were aghast. The 10-year cost was $1.5 trillion. Manchin's line in the sand was $1.75 trillion. He was leaving only $250 billion in what amounted to loose change for expanded Medicare, more home health care, free kindergarten, green-initiative subsidies and all the rest, each element vital to one Democratic constituency or another.
And both Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat, were saying they would not support repealing the filibuster with its 60-vote threshold. They insist the Senate is supposed to be a hard-to-move deliberative place (one not given, you might say, to enacting generational programs via a fluke 50-50 membership).
One "progressive" cry is to toss Manchin and Sinema out of the party. So, that would give you 48 Democrats when 50 weren't enough.
These Democrats were wanting to toss Manchin and Sinema, actual D's, while embracing a spending spree imposed by a man, Bernie Sanders, who isn't a Democrat, but an independent socialist caucusing with Democrats.
It's hardly the exclusive fault of Manchin and Sinema that Democrats are in a doomed scramble. Because they might succeed on this spending bill only by using budget reconciliation requiring only 51 votes, they've crammed so many play-pretties into the bill that the Senate parliamentarian is way behind on vetting all the provisions to make sure they qualify for budget reconciliation.
Once again, for anyone who asks: I am not against the policies in this bill. I'd have applauded already their passage in the Republic of Utopia.
I'm against being politically incompetent, unable to govern. I'm against not getting done the incrementally imperfect by insisting on more and getting nothing.
I'm really against Majority Leader McConnell and House Speaker McCarthy, never mind the tragedy awaiting in 2024.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.