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Now they’re going after Social Security and Medicare, after pledging earlier this year that they wouldn’t.

Jessica Corbett at Common Dreams writes that “As the U.S. House of Representatives prepared to vote on President Joe Biden’s debt limit deal with GOP negotiators Wednesday evening, the youth-led Sunrise Movement warned Democrats that the so-called Fiscal Responsibility Act could have a major impact on the 2024 elections.”

It’s incredible: Democratic neoliberals never understand the cost to their popularity of selling out to the extreme right wing.

Biden degrades himself, ridiculing legitimate claims about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who will be kicked off food assistance as a result of him caving to the deathmongers of the GOP.

And he agrees to shovel more money down the grotesquely overstuffed money pit that is the Pentagon–a government institution that cannot pass an audit.

“There is a really weird kind of identity politics going on in American publishing,'” she said when addressing the Hay festival.

Lucy Knight at The Guardian reports.

FRIENDS OF HE EARTH Government and Political Affairs Director Ariel Moger continues:

“After initially proclaiming he wouldn’t negotiate on the debt ceiling, he gifted MAGA extremists legislation filled with polluter giveaways and devastating spending limitations. Even Senator Manchin, who has done as much as Republicans to sabotage the Democratic agenda, has been rewarded with the forced approval of his pet project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline.  

This agreement is far from a compromise. It’s a surrender to Big Oil and Republican hostage-takers in Congress. Democrats should vote NO on this disgraceful deal and force a vote on a clean debt limit increase.” 

The White House is now shamelessly hawking the debt-ceiling shakedown bill by saying “it could have been a lot worse.”

Had Biden done his job, it could have been avoided altogether.

It’s uncanny: Biden seems to be channeling Obama, rather than forging a new path.

Soon we’ll hear the White House bleating: “Biden is helpless. He’s only the president.”

The hard truth that a lot of liberals are going to have to finally accept is that Obama’s capitulations to right-wing extremists led the country into the catastrophic clutches of Trump.

God only knows where Biden’s capitulations are taking us.

We knew he would. The reason we knew he would is because he wanted to. The Chamber of Commerce said no 14th Amendment and so he didn’t invoke it. These are the people he listens to. A neoliberal cannot change his spots–not in the clinches.

This is at least the second time that Biden has betrayed Pramilla Jayapal and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Rep. Jayapal needs to tell the president that the CPC will not support him for reelection unless this bill is changed.

Remember: Biden did everything he could to shut the Democrats out of the sausage-making. Then he made sure that the Republicans received legislative text an entire day before the Democrats. In order to survive as a political party, the Dems must now expel a turncoat.

We can look forward now to the awful spectacle of Biden telling us that a spending freeze is not a spending cut.

The cuts will land most ruinously on people of color and the young–the two constituencies that put him over the finish line in 2020.

Way to go, bud.

Biden s is trying to throw away his presidency and is sacrificing a second term.  We need a president who will stand firm against Republican extremism. Gavin Newscom? Josh Shapiro? The debt-ceiling fiasco makes it official: the Dems have to cut Biden loose. Perhaps, after all, this is really his subconscious attempt to let everyone know he really doesn’t want a second term.

And when Hakkim Jeffries tries to sell this steaming pile of offal to his caucus, they should  boo him out of the room. Biden’s refusal to allow Democratic Congressional leaders any direct participation in the shakedown “negotiations” was a giant Fuck You to the party, anyway.

Progressive Dems did everything they could to save Biden from himself. Sen. Merkey said that they would have his back if he invoked the 14th Amendment. Still, Biden chose this path instead.

Didn’t Nancy Peloisi reportedly say that about the Obama team, before saying she never said what she said?

To the point: Who allowed Biden to walk into this trap?

Robert Reich identifies the missteps:

“I admire Joe Biden but he should not have allowed the media to so badly mischaracterize what’s happening. He never should have begun negotiating with McCarthy. Biden has the bully pulpit; he should have addressed the nation by now, pointing out that this fight is manufactured entirely by House Republicans.”

Establishment Dems are still living in a dream world where the Republicans have patriotism and ethics and Mitch McConnell is “a man of honor.”

Progressive Dems know better.