Democrats in array?
Listen.
Do you hear that?
You don't hear anything?
Well, isn't that odd.
It seems that the media's favorite narrative, "Democrats in disarray", is finding no purchase with unified Democratic control of the White House and Congress.
The House under Speaker Nancy Pelosi is moving along to pass President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID package. The Democratic Senate is ready to pass its version of the bill via reconciliation, bypassing Republican subterfuge.
The Squad is playing. Conservadems are onside. And Senator Bernie Sanders, faced with real responsibility, seems to be tackling his work seriously.
Yes, in the Senate there's still the trickiness of what to do about the filibuster. For now it survives. But how long it does so is up solely to GOP intransigence. Pres. Biden wants both immigration reform and voting rights legislation passed. And senators from across the big tent are on record that they want to make him successful. The filibuster's long-term prospects are not good.
Meanwhile, yesterday, the exiled Donald Trump let loose on Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. Kyle Griffin distills the gist of his tirade here:
Trump just released a very long statement attacking Mitch McConnell.
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) February 16, 2021
The one line that matters: "Mitch is a dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack, and if Republican Senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again."
This was after the exiled court also stated that Rudy Giuliani is not representing Trump in any legal matters. And this is after the state GOP committees to which the seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump in his impeachment trial censured those senators for not abasing themselves before Trump.
Democrats are arguing and debating, as is healthy. Republicans are having multiple Nights of the Long Knives. Rep. Adam Kinzinger's family wrote him a letter, and made it public, as to how disappointed they were in his decision to vote for impeachment in the House. This is redolent of Communist denunciations.
The insurrection was a watershed. It was driven home to Democrats in no uncertain terms that their "colleagues" across the aisle wanted them dead. And if they didn't personally wish ill on them, neither were they prepared to abjure the party base which did. Since then, Democrats have marched in lockstep to wrangle Pres. Biden's agenda, while the Republican Civil War is in full fury. There's a 50-50 chance that the GOP will split by next year, just in time for the midterms. Meanwhile, in his letter Trump threatened to launch dozens of primary challenges against Republicans deemed insufficiently loyal.
Why the sudden irruption from Trump? Perhaps he now realizes fully the calamity which faces him. Speaker Pelosi will empanel an independent commission to investigate all of what led up to January 6th. A commission with subpoena power, and with a Justice Department behind it willing to enforce subpoenas and prosecute any acts of perjury. Trump is naked and afraid. His acolytes have proven to be cowards, as they didn't swarm Washington on Inauguration Day and take on 20,000 armed soldiers. They're not only not going to sweep him back to power, but they're not even going to protest his impending multiple prosecutions. And unlike in 2009 when we still pretended that the GOP wasn't a fascist organization, the nation's security apparatus will be focused on right-wing terrorism. Parler is back up, and there's probably already a FISA warrant to monitor it.
History is far from over. And this time, the wind is behind us.
Epilogue
Also, too: They're blowing up Trump Plaza in Atlantic City today. If that's not a metaphor for something, then my training in literature has been wasted.