Hostage taking

Senator's Manchin and Sinema are holding hostage the Democrats reconciliation bill, the central plank of Biden's "Build Back Better" agenda, that would address a range of important problems and is widely popular nationally to boot.  Yet both Manchin and Sinema have been completely unforthcoming as to what they want to see.  While they might claim that showing your hand is a poor negotiating tactic, they are not haggling over the prices of a used car. They are ironing out a policy agenda in which all Americans have a stake. So that's not going to wash. 

I'm speculating that there's another reason. For Manchin it's his base and his donors; he's from coal country and doesn't want to upset workers (and owners) in the coal industry by supporting a move away from fossil fuels.  

For Sinema, it doesn't seem to be her electors' interests that she's defending (Biden won Arizona while Trump won West Virginia, Manchin's state). It has been suggested, and this seems eminently plausible, that it's her donors, in particular the pharmaceutical industry, whose interests she is looking after. Admitting that would be electoral suicide, but she hasn't got a fall back explanation for her reluctance to sign on to "Build Back Better".   

"It’s simply not who we are"

Referring to the incident in which a Border Patrol agent was seen whipping Haitian asylum-seekers President. Biden said, “It’s simply not who we are”.  The sad truth is, it's exactly who "we" or at least some of us are.  

I suspect, anecdotally, that this behavior reflects attitudes held by a significant proportion of law enforcement and those in red states.  We are a deeply divided nation and anti-immigrant sentiment combined with the "othering" of those who are deemed to have broken the law paves the way for this kind of behavior. 

Combine the Stanford Prison Experiment and the Milgram experiment, with declining trust in institutions including in the rule of law, particularity acute among rural conservative leaning folk, and you have a recipe for violence (they'd call it "self-reliance") against those they see as outsiders. This incident and January 6th insurrection, not to mention the killing of unarmed mainly black men by self-appointed vigilantes, are where this leads. 

Vaccine mandates

 

Biden announced a sweeping and quite draconian executive order yesterday requiring employers of over 100 people to in turn require their employees to be vaccinated. While the intent is clearly in the public interest that order is a mistake. 

Those who are not not yet vaccinated are likely to see this as over-reach which will hurt Democrats in next year's mid-terms. And firms in red states where vaccination resistance is highest may well not enforce the order, setting up an ugly legal fight; that will delay the order's implementation, negating it's effectiveness (and that's assuming it withstands the challenge).  

A better approach might be to acknowledge that vaccination is a personal choice, albeit one with implications for the health of others, but internalize the externalities, for example by allowing hospitals to change more for the treatment of unvaccinated patients who contract covid, or allowing them to triage covid patients on the basis of vaccination status without liability.  The higher cost of a decision to forego vaccination would be borne by those making that personal choice while protecting their freedom to make bad choices. That increased cost might well be more effective than a mandate.