James' World 2

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The Senate early Friday approved a budget resolution that’s a key step toward fast-track passage of President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan without support from Republicans. Vice President Kamala Harris was in the chair to cast the tie-breaking vote, her first.

Democrats in the chamber applauded after Harris announced the 51-50 vote at around 5:30 a.m. The action came after a grueling all-night session, where senators voted on amendments that could define the contours of the eventual COVID-19 aid bill.

The budget now returns to the House, where it will have to be approved again due to the changes made by the Senate. The final passage will unlock the next phase in the drafting of the virus relief bill, with the work divided among several congressional committees.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer D-N.Y. called the passage of the resolution the “first big step to putting our country back on the road to recovery.”

By moving on a fast track, the goal for Democrats is to have COVID relief approved by March, when extra unemployment assistance and other pandemic aid expires. It’s an aggressive timeline that will test the ability of the new administration and Congress to deliver.

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US President Joe Biden, with US Vice President Kamala Harris (L), speaks about foreign policy at the State Department in Washington, DC, on February 4, 2021. – Biden said the US will confront the ‘authoritarianism’ of China and Russia. (Photo by SAUL LOEB / AFP) (Photo by SAUL LOEB/AFP via Getty Images)

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A group of ten Republican senators has made a $600 billion counteroffer to President Biden’s $1.9 trillion economic-rescue plan. The media has treated this negotiation as a mere formality, the prelude Biden will briefly entertain before getting down to the business of passing a real bill through budget reconciliation.

That may be so. But there is a chance the two sides can actually make a deal. And the best way to do that is to enhance its flexibility so that the Democratic fear of spending too little and the Republican fear of spending too much can both be resolved.

Democrats are haunted by the experience of 2009 and are determined not to repeat its errors. Congressional leadership bound itself to a 60-vote threshold that required getting support from at least two Republican senators, who in turn bargained down the size of the bill out of an arbitrary belief that a trillion dollars was too much to spend. The economic contraction wound up considerably deeper than economists realized at the time, and the administration had trouble getting votes for more stimulus later, and the slow growth that resulted punished Democratic members of Congress.

The lesson many Democrats have drawn is that they have to ensure that Biden doesn’t get saddled with a stimulus that’s underpowered. “The only thing we cannot accept” is a bill that is “too small or too narrow,” says Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who cites the lessons of 2009. “Democrats can’t assume we will have bite after bite at the apple, particularly with Republican state legislatures working overtime to entrench minority rule through redistricting,” Oregon Senator Ron Wyden tells Greg Sargent. “The only surefire way to prevent economic sabotage is to pass the bold economic relief that’s needed now.”

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Photo: ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

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For all of GOP representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s protestations (repeated Friday in a defiant statement) that she’s a victim of “cancel culture” and the “radical, left-wing mob” and the “Fake News media,” the controversy surrounding the freshman congresswoman is entirely of her own making. Before (but not long before) she ran for Congress in 2020 — after switching districts to find somewhere her heavy bankroll could gain her instant viability — Greene unburdened herself at extraordinary length on social media, particularly Facebook, on various fringe topics. At first, observers mostly noticed her utterances explaining and embracing the QAnon conspiracy theory. Additional digging has since uncovered statements that make a mere stipulation that her and Trump’s enemies are Satan-worshiping pedophiles seem tame. They include, per Intelligencer’s Jonathan Chait:

• Muslims don’t belong in government.

• 9/11 was an inside job.

• Shootings at Parkland, Sandy Hook, and Las Vegas were staged.

• “Zionist supremacists” are secretly masterminding Muslim immigration to Europe in a scheme to outbreed white people.

• Leading Democratic officials should be executed.

The most recent Greene view to be unearthed comes via Eric Hananoki. Just over two years ago, Greene suggested in a Facebook post that wildfires in California were not natural. Forests don’t just catch fire, you know. Rather, the blazes had been started by PG&E, in conjunction with the Rothschilds, using a space laser, in order to clear room for a high-speed rail project.

The now-congresswoman from the 14th district of Georgia has continued to burnish her reputation for insanely irresponsible extremism, most recently by becoming the wildest of wild supporters of Trump’s election-coup scheme and his underlying (and lying) claims the 2020 election was stolen.

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Right now she is unbloodied and unbowed. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Imag

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