Biden’s infrastructure win is a reminder of how things actually work – and what winning really looks like
The House passed the bipartisan portion of President Biden’s infrastructure package late last night, ensuring it’ll become law. Later this month the Senate will pass some version of the reconciliation portion of Biden’s infrastructure package, ensuring it’ll also become law. Spoiler alert: this was always going to happen. Yet because it took so long and faced so many hurdles – as these kinds of things by nature always do – the victory took a lot of people by surprise.
And who can blame anyone for mistakenly thinking infrastructure wouldn’t happen? Each time it got closer to happening, the doomsday pundits insisted even more loudly that the Democrats were naive to believe they could get it done. After all, most liberal pundits base their brand on trying to paint themselves as being smarter and savvier than the Democrats, which often requires falsely painting the Democrats as hapless.
And when the mainstream media periodically chimed in on the infrastructure process, it was only to declare that it was “doomed.” After all, the media makes its editorial decisions on what’s going to drive ratings, and stories about crucial incremental progress toward victory don’t get ratings, but declarations of failure and disaster always do.
Of course if you’ve been reading Palmer Report all year, you’ve known all along that infrastructure was eventually going to happen; it was only a question of when and how big. Nancy Pelosi is a legislative genius, something that people too often forget. Chuck Schumer knows what he’s doing, no matter how many pundits falsely claim otherwise. Manchin and Sinema never had a magic wand and were never going to be able to just magically keep infrastructure from happening; the pressure that many of us placed on them all year ensured that they’d eventually have to cave and vote for the thing in some form.
So yeah, Biden’s infrastructure effort happened, because it was always going to happen. Any other outcome was always exceedingly unlikely. Yes it took all year – but so what? This is how the sausage gets made – and it got made. Biden and the Democrats have delivered a massive series of benefits to working class Americans with this legislation, and now they get to campaign on having done so. It’s a win across the board. This is what winning looks like.
Of course now we have to move on to the long and complex process of securing the next win, this time on voting rights. But as Palmer Report has said all along, that was always going to be a 2022 thing. Voting rights is still a long game, ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. Skeptics are already lining up to insist it’ll never get done – but these are the same people who insisted infrastructure would never get done. At some point you learn to tune out these types, roll up your sleeves, fight like you’re going to win, put in the work required to win, and eventually you win.
