As ever, no one says it better than Shakespeare; “Man, proud man / Dress’d in a little brief authority / Most ignorant of what he’s most assured … plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As makes the angels weep.”
The words, from Measure For Measure, come to mind as one contemplates the Democrats, temporarily the party in power in Washington, misrepresenting, contorting, and scrambling to pass the most expensive and perhaps also the messiest piece of legislation in history.
Various price tags are stuck to President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” program, as though it were some repeatedly reduced shopworn item a store cannot sell. They range from the ridiculous (“free,” according to the president) to the sobering ($4 trillion-$6 trillion, according to independent analyses). The latter is close to the mark while the former is an obvious lie.
The massive cost is due, as Byron York has noted, to the fact that the bill contains everything from universal pre-K and Medicare expansion to subsidized family and medical leave and a slew of faddish climate measures to save the planet.
They’re all dumped into one piece of legislation because Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and the gang know that only a kitchen-sink bill offers them a slim chance to pass any of its provisions. If they were separated into discrete bills, as they should be, none could command a majority. Even together, they probably can’t.
OK, you might ask, but why now, why the rush? That’s where Shakespeare comes in. Democrats are playing such fantastic tricks — with transparently dishonest accounting gimmicks — because they know they are dressed only in “brief” authority. They are likely to lose control of one or both chambers of Congress in November 2022, so this is their only chance to foist their gruesome vision for the future on our suffering country.
An analysis by the psephological website fivethirtyeight.com concluded recently that although the number of House Democrats (10) and GOP members (nine) retiring this cycle are roughly even, “no Republicans are retiring primarily out of fear of losing their general election next year.”
That’s not the case with the Democrats, who can see the doom-laden writing on the wall as Biden’s public approval tanks. Precedent is also on the Republicans’ side, for the president’s party historically loses about 25 seats in his first midterm elections. Speaker Kevin McCarthy seems likely to take the gavel in January 2023.
That’s fine and well, but it’s also a long 15 months away, and Nancy will not go gentle into the dark night of retirement. Democrats will, as the poem goes, burn and rave at close of day. They already are, and it ain’t pretty.
Speaking of Democrats burning and raving, our cover story this week examines the Virginia governor’s race, in which former Clinton hack Terry McAuliffe is flinging the charge of racism and other extremism at his mild-mannered Republican rival, Glenn Youngkin, who has the gall to question the teaching of critical race theory. Corey DeAngelis writes that in what has been a solidly blue state recently, the Democrat is getting schooled on parents’ insistence on deciding what their children are taught.
