About that border crisis bill

While the Democratic Party's presidential candidates were teeing it up here, the Democratic Party in Congress was falling apart. This has caused, in no particular order, splits between the Senate Democrats and the House Democrats, between progressive Democrats and Blue Dog Democrats, between Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the progressive members of her caucus, and between Pelosi and members of her own leadership team. The immediate casus belli was a bill designed to deal with the humanitarian crisis at the southern border and its victims, some of whom are very young. The House passed a bill. The Senate passed its own bill. The differences in the bills respective priorities can be fairly summed up by the phrase, "Goddamn Mitch McConnell."

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in Congress, said shortly before the vote that her colleagues were giving up their fight for now over changes to the measure, which had already passed the Senate. “At the end of the day, we have to make sure that the resources needed to protect the children are available,” she said in a statement. “In order to get resources to the children fastest, we will reluctantly pass the Senate bill.” The House vote was 305 to 102, with 71 out of 235 House Democrats voting against the Senate bill.

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The uproar was loud and immediate. A lot of the animosity probably was anger at McConnell's apparent willingness to use sick and hungry children sleeping in their own filth as political hostages in service of the president* whose policies created this situation in the first place. In point of fact, the Senate Democrats under Minority Leader Chuck Schumer cut the legs out from under their House colleagues and thereby made McConnell's revolting threat a reality for people voting in the lower House. And while it's true that the Blue Dogs, as well as the remarkably constituent-free members of the Problem Solvers caucus, threatened to tank the bill if it included the proposed cuts to ICE that were in the original House bill, the progressive rage at Pelosi is more properly aimed at Schumer, whose failure as a Senate Minority Leader is now complete. It's time for him to go.

  Charles P Pierce

I'm willing to let Chuck and Nancy share the blame equally, and it's time for her to go, too.