* Progressive Democrats in the House and Senate are right to resist any decoupling of the infrastructure bill from the Reconciliation bill. Without it their leverage over the centrists in the party would evaporate. Too much is at state now and in the elections next year to allow that to happen.

* McConnell and gang are once again taking the country to the edge of a cliff, and threatening to take us over the cliff if Democrats don’t capitulate and run away from their social infrastructure legislation. McConnell’s gun-to-the head political tactic should be firmly rebuffed by them and the entire democratic movement.

* Democratic Party politics have got complicated. On the one hand, there is the main enemy – the Republican Party – whose only agenda is to sink the Biden administration’s agenda and set the stage for its return to power. On the other hand, there are the internal differences within the party too, as a small handful of Democrats attempt to rollback or sink the $3.5 Reconciliation Bill – not to mention voting rights.

All this would have been much easier to resolve in favorable way if the coalition that elected Biden and Congressional Democrats last year had remained actively and demonstrably engaged in support of Biden’s domestic agenda this year. But that isn’t the case, and we can’t blame Obama this time.

* The Republicans would like to make the country ungovernable and then seize power via a rigged election process next year and then two years later. Biden and most Congressional Democrats are resisting them. But the coalition that elected them are, by and large, observers to the present clash. Not a good idea when the stakes are so high and consequential to the country’s future.

* Why left and progressive organizations aren’t leading the charge to pass the 3.5 trillion reconciliation bill strikes me as a major political misstep that could come back to haunt them.