The incoherence and attempted demagoguery of the beseiged Republican Party are becoming impossible to overstate. Witness the latest Big Idea on dealing with gas prices, unveiled last week by Senate GOP Leader Bill Frist: mailing $100 checks to 100 million Americans to help them fill up at the pump this summer. Check in with your favorite economist and ask him or her about the genius of this “plan.” It basically involves borrowing 10 billion smackers–yes, 10 billion–and tossing it into the marketplace to subsidize higher gas prices. The Frist “plan,” of course, isn’t intended to do anything serious about rising gas prices. Its rationale is purely political: buying votes just before the midterm elections. There are plenty of bad ideas bouncing around Washington right now about gas prices. As the Progressive Policy Institute’s Jan Mazurek explained last week, all the frantic casting-about for a short term response to higher gas prices ignores, and in some cases cuts directly against, the long-term solutions that the Bush administration and Congress have been rejecting over the last five-and-a-half years, especially a serious effort to build fuel-efficient and cleaner cars. The world’s insatiable lust for oil isn’t going to go away any time soon, and the only sure way to keep petroleum prices from wrecking our economy and wrecking family budgets is to reduce our dependence on this perilous energy source. Throwing money at every gas pump in America is a worse than unserious proposal.
This year’s big media narrative has been the confirmation saga of Neera Tanden, Biden’s nominee for director of the Office of Management and Budget. At New York I wrote about how over-heated the talk surrounding Tanden has become.
Okay, folks, this is getting ridiculous. When a vote in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on the nomination of Neera Tanden was postponed earlier this week, you would have thought it presented an existential threat to the Biden presidency. “Scrutiny over Tanden’s selection has continued to build as the story over her uneven reception on Capitol Hill stretched through the week,” said one Washington Post story. Politico Playbook suggested that if Tanden didn’t recover, the brouhaha “has the potential to be what Biden might call a BFD.” There’sbeen all sorts of unintentionally funny speculation about whether the White House is playing some sort of “three-dimensional chess” in its handling of the confirmation, disguising a nefarious plan B or C.
Perhaps it reflects the law of supply and demand, which requires the inflation of any bit of trouble for Biden into a crisis. After all, his Cabinet nominees have been approved by the Senate with a minimum of 56 votes; the second-lowest level of support was 64 votes. One nominee who was the subject of all sorts of initial shrieking, Tom Vilsack, was confirmed with 92 Senate votes. Meanwhile, Congress is on track to approve the largest package of legislation moved by any president since at least the Reagan budget of 1981, with a lot of the work on it being conducted quietly in both chambers. Maybe if the bill hits some sort of roadblock, or if Republican fury at HHS nominee Xavier Becerra (whose confirmation has predictably become the big fundraising and mobilization vehicle for the GOP’s very loud anti-abortion constituency) reaches a certain decibel level, Tanden can get out of the spotlight for a bit.
But what’s really unfair — and beyond that, surreal — is the extent to which this confirmation is being treated as more important than all the others combined, or indeed, as a make-or-break moment for a presidency that has barely begun. It’s not. If Tanden cannot get confirmed, the Biden administration won’t miss a beat, and I am reasonably sure she will still have a distinguished future in public affairs (though perhaps one without much of a social-media presence). And if she is confirmed, we’ll all forget about the brouhaha and begin focusing on how she does the job, which she is, by all accounts, qualified to perform.
