Fresh from supporting Democrat President Joe Biden’s January 21, 2022 remarks on “Increasing the Supply of Semiconductors and Rebuilding Our Supply Chains”, U.S Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo did a virtual interview released on January 31, 2022, with Politico’s Women Rule in which she discussed the administration’s strategy for a cut-down version of last year’s failed H.R. 5376 Build Back Better (BBB) bill and her role in supporting Biden’s push to get S. 1260 – United States Innovation and Competition Act (USICA) bill into law.
Mainstream media has been reporting how the Democrats have been signaling their desire to lower expectations in 2022 as in this other Politico report, “Democrats slim down ambitions after back-to-back failures”, acknowledging the fact that the party suffered many defeats including the cratering of the 2021 Build Back Better bill because Democrat senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va) and Krysten Simena (D-Az) refused to endorse it. The Democratic leadership was forced to take stock and avoid any more high-profile legislation-making catastrophes in the coming 2022 election year by another crushing defeat on filibusters.
In the interview, Raimondo echoed her party’s consensus that they want to push a cut-down version of last year’s BBB proposal, which was laden with so many progressive agenda items that more moderate Democrats took issue with it.
This year, they want to start with four elements they hope will be enough to, as Raimondo put it, make Manchin “gettable.” These are:
- Public Pre-K provisions create an opportunity to receive government-provided childcare.
- The so-called “CARE Economy” provisions that encourage the creation of a more comprehensive dependent care industry. This applies to both children and seniors.
- Affordable prescription drugs — an agenda that transcends both the right and left in previous administrations.
- And the Climate Change provisions of last year’s BBB proposal. For those who enjoy reading documents over 2,500 pages, this section is packed with discretionary spending that will fund state agencies and create revenue commitments to help states qualify for federal aid.
That statement is correct, and everything else could be dismissed. Or, to put it more elegantly, these are areas in which President Biden is open to compromises to secure some kind of win this season.
Tactically, this cut-back agenda may or may not sit well with the Progressive faction of the political spectrum with people like Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) continuing to advocate for bringing the full Christmas tree bill to a vote even if it’s doomed to fail.
Also, I read correctly the first two points. The Democratic Social Engineering Agenda is to keep pursuing the destruction of the traditional nuclear family with separate caregiver and provider roles. In favor of a total workforce model in which dependents become wards of state,
The emerging message however is very interesting. This tells me that the Democratic Party’s midterm political calculus is clear. Democrats believe that appearing moderate is the best strategy to survive 2022. Even if this means that the Progressive Left is disappointed, the DC establishment must be preserved. Will this strategy turn more activist D’s into disaffected I’s over the summer? I’m most curious to observe the cluster in the coming months.
Lower Hanging Fruit
Meanwhile, the Administration will pursue what it considers to be low-hanging fruit programs. This is where it feels there’s sufficient bipartisan support to win legislative victories.
Raimondo, Biden are now advocating USICA. For RedState readers who haven’t made the 2,700+ page bill part of their light reading list yet, the bill has already passed the Senate and is awaiting passage in the House, where the Democrats have a clear majority.
The USICA Bill is sponsored by Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and is, for all intents and purposes, the Democratic version of former President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” re-shoring of production and infrastructure agenda. In a way, it’s reassuring to know that some aspects of the US national interest are a constant, even if politicians keep changing the makeup on the pig and convolute how it will be implemented, often in macabre ways.
It talks about US industry competitiveness and resilience. The need for our infrastructure to be able to strategically “buy American.”
China is the only thing that it does not differ from Trump’s. Specifically, Division A of the bill which talks about the strategic need to create a domestic source for microchips doesn’t target the People’s Republic of China, it targets the Taiwanese Republic of China; specifically, a company named the Taiwanese Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TMSC), as noted in the Wall Street Journal article, “The World Relies on One Chip Maker in Taiwan, Leaving Everyone Vulnerable”.
This twist in US policy is certain to upset many Americans. It is especially so considering that nearly all of the manufacturing and supply chain for products found in American households is from China. Now that it’s a front-burner agenda item of the administration, RedState readers may want to begin to dive a bit more into what’s inside the wrapping paper about this one.
Russia, Russia.
Another thing that was noted by the media is the Biden administration’s desire to win a bipartisan victory in 2022, which includes economic sanctions being imposed on Russia. This explains part of why the Biden team has basically taken over militarizing the European landscape creating the perception of heightened tension with Russia’s Vladimir Putin over Ukraine, which I’ve covered in other installments on RedState.
A military analyst like me, I still have doubts about Russia’s ability to pose a threat to Europe. Although Russia has currently deployed troops in Crimea, Belarus and other countries, they are more concerned about diplomatic demands to be addressed about their longstanding concerns about NATO’s intrusion into the Tzarist sphere. At the moment, I’m not sure a unilateral rush to sanctions because “Putin Bad” has proven to be much more than George Bush’s “Saddam has Weapons of Mass Destruction” call to assemble a Coalition of the Willing.
If Russia and Europe can find an independent solution to the Ukraine problem without having the United States in charge, it is possible that a Congress united about Russian sanctions might be a good midterm vote feather. We could wind up with another Afghanistan-like “Yankee Go Home” moment if we overplay it. Congress needs to be more specific about these matters.
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