It’s too bad that the coalition that elected Biden – including the left – didn’t take Bernie’s lead and throw its full support behind the passage of Biden’s Build Back Better plan in general and the Reconciliation Bill in particular. If we had, the passage of the bill might not be in such doubt. This distancing for whatever reasons finds no good explanation in my view. Let’s hope that the raising of the alarm now isn’t an example of too little too late!

Mara Gay rightly challenges NYC unions on the city’s vaccine mandate, but she isn’t anti-union. A big circle mentality and social solidarity should be at the core of trade unionism.

I hope a victory, even a partial one, which shouldn’t be sneezed at, can be squeezed out of the current negotiations over the Reconciliation bill. Frankly though, it didn’t have to be this way. If the broader coalition that elected Biden had engaged the struggle early on, or even late in the day, the path to victory would have been less uphill.

But it didn’t. It was more observer than active agent. And while there are many reasons for its inaction, as far as the left is concerned one has to include the persistence of sectarianism across much of it, the absence of any unifying center, and a failure to understand that this bill is the (or a) key link in the chain of struggle.

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 melt away. Too much is at stake now and in the midterm elections to allow that to happen.

* 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.