The White House threw cold water on the prospect of a sit-down between President Biden and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), arguing Wednesday that there’s nothing to negotiate and the Speaker should bring a bipartisan national security funding bill up for a vote.
“What is there to negotiate? Really, truly, what is the one-on-one negotiation about, when he’s been presented with exactly what he asked for?” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a briefing with reporters.
“He’s negotiating with himself. He’s killing bills on his own,” she continued. “And if he were to put that bill that just came out of the Senate — the national security supplemental that doesn’t have border security in it because he said he didn’t want it, he changed his mind — it would pass. It would pass in a bipartisan way.
There also hasn’t been a test of it on the national level yet. The November election will be that test. Some of the little elections that have been popping up since the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling have gone hard for Democrats when we might not otherwise expect it to. It still remains to be seen if that pans out on a larger scale.
The thing about gerrymandering is that there is a trap built into the math. The way it works is to give your opponent a few very safe districts (like +40 for them), and then give yourself a long list of fairly safe districts (like +15 for you). However, if the vote trends hard for your opponent, those fairly safe districts are no longer safe and you lose everything. This is a real possibility with how badly votes have gone for the GOP in those smaller elections, but we’ll have to see.
If just one of Trump’s criminal trials hands down a guilty verdict before the election, it becomes a likely possibility.
Oh yes of course that all makes sense, but it’s also all just speculation. The Dems have not dominated yet. In more than the 3 decades I’ve been alive, the Dems have only had a filibuster-proof majority of Congress, plus the presidency, for a handful of months.
I’ve seen them win the popular vote and lose the presidency twice.
I hope the Dems do dominate and shift the Overton window left. But I think we also need to be careful about the expectations and narratives carried online. Fascists love to spread the lie that the Dems have been in control for decades and accomplished nothing. So saying Dems have dominated elections when they haven’t (at least not nationally) is dangerous.