Quote:The Roadrunner never pretended to have any goals other than his (her?) true aspirations, but the coyote never seemed to understand that pursuing the same objective in the same way was not going to lead to a different outcome.

The same case could be made by Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who have been remarkably consistent in telling Schumer and President Joe Biden what types of legislation they will not support. But time after time, Schumer has spent the last several months somehow expecting Manchin and Sinema to do something other than drop the political equivalent of an anvil on his head.

Wile E. Schumer is likely to meet a similar end this week, when barring an unlikely and unprecedented turn of events, his efforts to pass Biden’s voting reform legislation will disappear in a cloud of dust at the bottom of the congressional canyon. The difference between the senator and the coyote, though, is that Schumer has a superior to whom he answers. And every time Schumer ends up lying on the ground with stars circling over his head, the president of the United States ends up lying there with him.

After Biden and Schumer learned that they would not be able to convince Manchin to support the president’s Build Back Better climate change and social spending legislation, they then shifted their focus to two voting reform bills to which Manchin had also announced his opposition. Unlike Build Back Better, Sinema does support Biden’s voting package. Yet she is just as intractable in her opposition to suspending the Senate filibuster on this issue as any other, and Schumer’s expectation that she might change her mind are leading him – and Biden – down yet another blind alley.

Schumer’s defenders might argue that he is merely implementing the wishes of a politically maladroit White House. Yet more effective legislative leaders like Nancy Pelosi, Tom Daschle, and Mitch McConnell have possessed both the knowledge of their own caucuses and the self-confidence to pass on realistic guidance to their president to help him steer clear of unnecessary disaster and embarrassment. Schumer seems to lack at least one of those qualities.

What makes the strategy to pursue an unwinnable fight on voting reform even more puzzling is that just the type of bipartisan victory that Biden adores is sitting within Schumer’s reach – in the same policy area. For weeks, Senators of both parties have been talking about reforming the Electoral Count Act, an opaque artifact from the late 19th century that was designed to provide guidance on how election results should be certified. A legislative fix that clarified the ECA could prevent a repeat of the horrors the nation experienced in the weeks after the 2020 election, when Donald Trump and his allies attempted to take advantage of loopholes and ambiguities in the Act to overturn Biden’s victory.

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Once they have been defeated again this week, Schumer and Biden will turn to the Electoral Count compromise that has been sitting there for them for quite some time. The question is why Schumer decided to run head-first into one more wall before taking a win that was there for him all along.

(01-17-2022 12:38 PM)MileHighBronco Wrote:  Schumer is afraid of getting primaried by AOC for his seat. So he does dumb stuff, dumber than usual, if that is possible.