Today, I'm recording the promo for this premium episode of Bad Faith, David Day shows up, explains what's going on in Congress with those clowns in Congress about the fourteen hundred dollar stimulus bill. If you want to know if you're getting that fourteen hundred dollars, you got to listen to the episode. That's what you need to do. And you can listen. That episode at Patrón dot com, such bad faith podcast episode and a whole bunch of other episodes just by signing up to our Patreon.

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Is it possible that Joe mentioned there are other senators, but, you know, he's the main guy.

Is it possible that Joe Manchin calls their bluff it and says, well, you know what, let's just not pass any?

It is possible, but he's going to get a lot of pushback from Joe Biden if he says that. Right. And then the onus is then on Joe Biden on what he wants to do. And, of course, what are we talking about here?

We're talking about extremely popular positions and raising the minimum wage is extremely popular with these stimulus checks are extremely popular, the most popular thing in the entire bill.

So Biden by weighing in on Manchin. So I would have to say we want to make this less popular if we want we want to actually reduce the popularity of this bill. So, you know, he'd have to read the tea leaves on that. But the difference between the ACA debate and the two thousand nine stimulus debate now is that the margin in in the House is small enough that a few House members can really affect the debate in a way that they actually couldn't in some of these other context.

Although, I mean I mean, you could say because so many right wing Democrats voted against the ACA, the margins were sufficiently low enough that if Dennis Kucinich and several other people said, no, we have to have this X, Y, Z, they could have stopped the whole the whole thing. But there was a balancing act to play there. The point is, they never really took that step. Right. I believe I remember that Kucinich got on a plane with Obama and he got off the plane and he said, OK, I'm going to vote for the bill.

The point is that let's have the debate. Let's have the discussion. And if you have this discussion in public, you're forcing Manchin and you're forcing the Biden and the leadership to choose between a popular and an unpopular option. So make them choose the unpopular option and then we'll see what happens to them.

Perhaps maybe the process has to be opened up. I mean, these these I mean, this is also very simple to understand, I think. I mean, it's not like the ACA, this gargantuan thing about a whole sector of the economy that nobody really understands. Not even the experts can understand the totality of it. This is simple. It's a dollar amount.

It's it's freaking prices. Right. We should be talking about the dollar amount in public so that your average person could vote. Everyone loves following numbers. Look at the look at the stock crap. And we're just looking at a number because everyone's at home and they're bored and they just were just obsessed over numbers on Wall Street, bets for.

Well, OK, that's this is I don't want to get to I don't think it's a very strong familiarity with my portfolios.

My portfolio is doing great to invest more in podcasts than in things like cryptocurrency or in retail retail stores from the nineteen nineties. But everyone has a different track.

You're right. You're right. People know the minimum wage. They understand it twenty three times the last twenty three times that the minimum wage has been on state ballots. Whether or not to hike it. It has passed twenty three times in a row and that's going back to the 90s.

And most recently it's Florida doing better than Joe Biden. Exactly. So go ahead. If you want to have a fight about the minimum wage in here, if Joe Biden and Joe Manchin want to take that heat, let them. But let's have let's have that conversation in public.

Do you suppose that, you know, let's say this this is a public fight. This is this is a fight between the left wing of the right wing, the caucus. Who do you think Joe Biden is more likely to lean on?

That's a really, really good question. Now, you know, Biden has said in these meetings that we've heard that he's had with House Democrats, Senate Democrats, he said, go big like I want you to go big. So, I mean, so far, he's taking the language of taking the side of the left pole. However, he has also said we might want to think about making these stimulus checks more targeted.

So I think he's committed to the minimum wage. I mean, he signed an executive order to raise the minimum wage for federal employees and contractors to fifteen dollars an hour, you know, it was part of his campaign. I think it depends on when it comes down to is my point. If it comes down to the minimum wage and it's like the whole Democratic caucus versus Joe Manchin. Yeah, he might he might lean on Joe Manchin. They did it in a ham handed way when they sent out Kamala Harris to speak to West Virginia Media, to local media.

I don't know if you've heard about this yet. I did not I did not see that Manchin got really pissed off. And because they they sent her out to say, let's go big.

And then she made some bizarre comment where she was trying to talk about abandoned mine lands and she instead said abandoned land mines, which was not appealing to greed. I mean, I'm against them, too, and I'm sure West Virginians are, but I don't think there are that many there there.

So, you know, it depends on what it's it's on that. I think that, yeah, maybe maybe Manchin gets knuckled under if it's about these checks. Biden is certainly giving signals that he's willing to bend on that.

Couldn't Biden also be thinking, well, I one, I'm the president, it's my package. You just got to vote for it? You know, I want this I want this dollar amount. I'm I'm laying down the law. We're not going bigger. We're not going smaller. Here's the amount.

Right. And Manchin has said we want Biden to be successful or something like that. So there's certainly a way this plays out where Biden holds firm and everybody reluctantly agrees.

I mean, Manchin did vote for reconciliation. He voted to to pass forward a budget resolution that starts this process. So he certainly hasn't hasn't cut off.

Yeah, I've only got a handful of stories about this. But what's what's the deal with this idea of getting Republicans on board for this package? And how is that impacting the negotiations?

I don't think it's impacting it very much. And I actually think that. What did what did George W. Bush say? Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning? This is a case of is our Democrats learning?

In 2009, they waited around for a bunch of Republicans to weaken the stimulus. They waited around to try to get bipartisan support when they had 60 votes on the ACA and they waited months and months and months until finally passing it at the last minute. And then Ted Kennedy died and they lost all our you know, they lost the Massachusetts seat. And then they had to sort of cherry red actually used reconciliation to finish passing the ACA. So that was the lesson of two thousand nine.

They went small with the stimulus. They never got any much more of it. They waited forever for bipartisanship and they didn't get it. So in twenty twenty, in twenty, twenty one, instead of doing that, they moved forward immediately to start the reconciliation process. Now Biden had a meeting for two hours with Senate Republicans who put forward their own version of the bill. That was like a third of the size of Biden's bill. He did have the meeting, but it doesn't seem that anything came of that, that that he just sort of listened to them and said, OK, thanks, now we're going to do it our way.

So there is definitely a world in which that meeting takes on this totemic significance. And Biden says, look, they're willing to come meet us halfway. We got to do something about that, Nancy. Chuck, figure out a way to to bargain something and make it work. They didn't do that. We do have to admit that they did not do that. And they are moving toward a pretty expansive bill, although some things on the margins might not make it in there.

I don't think that the old game that Republicans were trying to play of, like, just wait, we'll we'll we'll be bipartisan. Just wait for us. Just just talk to us.

I don't think that's workable if you'd like to hear more. Remember, you can subscribe at Patrón Dotcom Bad Faith podcast for five dollars a month to get our full back catalogue of episodes with some sweet, sweet stuff, including this one, including including and especially this one, if you like it. If you didn't like this. Well, better to keep the faith. Keep the.