"Oddly, after dedicating his inauguration to national unity, Biden has abandoned the pursuit entirely. ...

It's not clear what changed so drastically for Biden since his inauguration. Reporters say he now envisions himself as the next FDR -- changing our country through massive government intervention. In a nation as divided as ours, this sort of aggressive left-wing movement is sure to increase the already gaping political fault lines. It's also likely to boomerang. People did not vote for change of this nature. Just because it may be possible to squeeze through these changes doesn't mean it's smart. The political backlash could be severe.

The saddest part is Biden never even gave a unity agenda a chance. Our country needs the healing he promised. Biden delivers the opposite."

"House Speaker Nancy Pelosi remains confident that she can pass major items through her chamber even though she leads the Democrats' most fragile majority in the House of Representatives since the 1940s.

"'It's not going to be a problem,' Pelosi, D-Calif., told reporters a month ago when asked about advancing her party's agenda through the House without the help of the minority Republicans.

"But the task facing Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., isn't getting any easier.

"The death Tuesday of 84-year-old Democratic Rep. Alcee Hastings of Florida further reduces the Democrats' already perilous majority. What started out at the beginning of the year as a slim 222-213 margin is now temporarily down to 218-212. That means the Democrats can currently lose just two votes and still be able to pass legislation along party lines."

"The first dishonest aspect of President Joe Biden's latest massive multitrillion spending proposal was its claim to be an 'infrastructure' plan. In reality, less than half of the spending goes to transportation infrastructure. Much of the rest goes to waste and unrelated partisan spending.

"But the misleading narrative didn't stop there: Top Biden officials repeatedly pushed an objectively false statistic about the number of jobs their plan will create. 'The American Jobs Plan is about a generational investment [and is] going to create 19 million jobs,' Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said on Meet the Press. 'It would create 19 million jobs,' White House National Economic Council Director Brian Deese claimed on Fox News Sunday. The liberal Center for American Progress similarly asserted that the Biden plan would 'help create 19 million jobs.'

"Wow! A whopping 19 million jobs created! Who could oppose that!?

"There's just one problem: This 19 million figure is based on a gross distortion of an economic report. The claim that Biden's spending bonanza would create 19 million jobs has no basis in reality. The figure comes from Moody's Analytics, a respected economic analysis firm, albeit one often very generous and favorable to big government spending plans. However, what the Moody's report does is map out projections for several different scenarios.

"In the scenario where Biden's infrastructure proposal is passed, Moody's projects that the economy will create 18.96 million jobs over a decade. Yet as Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler aptly explained, that's compared to a baseline projection of 16.3 million jobs being created without the infrastructure proposal. (But with the already-passed stimulus legislation). So the real number of jobs Biden's plan would create, according to this Moody's report, is 2.7 million. That's a far cry from the '19 million jobs created' in Biden's initial telling. Indeed, the White House and Buttigieg have had to retract their objectively false claim publicly.

"Oops."

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"Major League Baseball is reportedly planning to move the All-Star game from Atlanta, Georgia to Denver, Colorado, over Georgia's recent election bill, meaning they will be moving the game from a city with mostly black citizens to a city with mostly white citizens.

"Atlanta, Georgia, is 51% black and 40.9% white, U.S. Census data from 2019 showed. Denver was 80.9% white and 9.8% black in 2019, according to U.S. Census data. ESPN reported Monday that the All-Star Game would take place at Coors Field.

"Numerous sources reported that the MLB's decision to move the 2021 All-Star game could cost black-owned businesses. Nearly 30% of businesses in Atlanta are black-owned, and Georgia will face an estimated lost economic impact of more than $100 million due to the MLB's boycott of Atlanta, according to the president and CEO of Cobb Travel and Tourism Holly Quinlan."

"She's the queen of Twitter -- but less successful at lawmaking.

"Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was among the least effective members of the last Congress according to a new survey from the nonpartisan Center for Effective Lawmaking -- a joint project of Vanderbilt University and the University of Virginia.

"AOC introduced a total of 21 bills which the center defined as 'substantive' -- but that is where the story ends. Her legislation received no action in committees, no floor votes, and none ever became law, according to the center, which takes its data from Congress.gov.

"'She introduced a lot of bills, but she was not successful at having them receive any sort of action in committee or beyond committee and if they can't get through committee they cannot pass the House,' Alan Wiseman, a Vanderbilt political scientist and co-director of the center, told The Post."

"After President Biden outlined his proposal for a massive $2 trillion spending bill on Wednesday, a bevy of Senate Republicans are speaking out against the plan in harsh terms.

"The opposition is coming even from moderates who attempted to work with Biden on the coronavirus stimulus bill. This makes it even more likely that Democrats will be forced to invoke budget reconciliation yet again if they want to pass what Biden called 'the largest American jobs investment since World War II.'

"'I support improving America's aging roads, bridges, ports, and other infrastructure. And we can do so in a bipartisan way,' Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said Wednesday. But, he said, Biden's plan is far too expensive and does not focus on infrastructure, as the White House is framing it.

"'At its core, the president's plan calls for a $620 billion investment in transportation infrastructure. However, the total soars to $3 trillion with its inclusion of these broad policy priorities that are a far cry away from what we've ever defined as infrastructure,' Portman said."

"The problem is not federal infrastructure spending per se: The problem is 'infrastructure' bills that are in fact political slush-funds. We go about infrastructure in a way that is precisely backward: Instead of figuring out, one project at a time, what needs doing and how to prioritize those demands -- repaving this section of interstate highway, replacing that bridge -- and then seeing what that all adds up to and making informed decisions about timing and tradeoffs, we come up with some silly round number -- say, $2,000,000,000,000.00 -- and then see if we can find a politically attractive way to shovel all that cash out the door. That is how you end up spending a lot of money on infrastructure without actually getting much infrastructure. It's the national version of the paradox in which the roads of so many American cities are always being repaired but are never repaired.

"And there are public-trust issues surrounding big infrastructure plans. The best Democratic infrastructure thinking is how you get plans for a kinda-sorta high-speed train connecting Bakersfield with Merced, so that the giant kangaroo rats in Famoso can take early-morning meetings with their clients in Chowchilla.

"Any dummy can spend $2 trillion: Put the cash on the table, and somebody is going to figure out a way to pick it up. Some of those people will be government contractors, some of them will be farmers who are keen on a subsidy, some of them will be rich guys in the Hamptons who don't want to be on the hook for the entire sum of their local taxes, and so on -- there's no shortage of constituencies eager for federal largesse. But we should not kid ourselves that moving money from one pocket to the other makes the nation as a whole wealthier. At some point, all of us -- rural and urban, employer and employee, buyer and seller -- will have to pay our own way.

"Somebody is going to pay for Joe Biden's $2 trillion bonanza, and my money is on you."

"$200 billion, $2.2 trillion, $900 billion, $1.9 trillion. Over a year, Congress has passed $5.2 trillion in extraordinary spending -- and President Biden wants another $3-4 trillion, split between infrastructure and social spending.

"When a 'normal' federal budget, pre-COVID, was $4.4 trillion, and with borrowing, not taxes, funding nearly half of federal spending, it's not crazy to ask how much is too much, before we risk huge inflation. ...

"People who lost jobs need relief. But relief is different from hosing the economy with cash."

"President Biden has come out this week against the Senate filibuster as a 'relic' of the Jim Crow era. In these times, it is a virtual mantra on Capitol Hill that the filibuster is synonymous with racism and people supporting it are presumptively racist. That very point was noted by cable news host Al Sharpton, who threatened to denounce members as racist if they support the rule. The only thing more dramatic than such historical revisionism is the political revisionism underlying this new national campaign.

"The filibuster is more a 'relic' of the Julius Caesar era than the Jim Crow era. In ancient Rome, the filibuster was used to force the Senate to hear dissenting voices, including an opposition of Cato the Younger to Julius Caesar returning to Rome. The foundation for the filibuster today can be traced to an argument by former Vice President Aaron Burr that led to a change in the early 1800s. The minority has used versions of the rule to block or force consensus on controversial legislation, ranging from war actions to oil mandates. It was not created in the Jim Crow era. ...

"The filibuster was designed as a protection for the minority in what is often called 'greatest deliberative body.' ...

"A few years back, Democrats cried foul over the notion of eliminating the filibuster. They did not argue the rule was the embodiment of racism but rather the heart of the Senate. Biden spoke in the Senate in 2005 against ending the filibuster. So did Charles Schumer, who said it put the Senate 'on the precipice' of a constitutional crisis, as 'the checks and balances which have been at the core of this republic are about to be evaporated by the nuclear option.' Now as Senate majority leader, Schumer decries the same filibuster as the racist rule forged by segregationists."

"The Biden administration is reportedly contemplating major cuts in Medicare payments for prescription drugs to fund another enormous omnibus spending bill. Yet drug prices paid by Medicare have risen less than the general rate of inflation over the past decade and represent some of the best value for money in American health care. Seniors' anxiety over drug expenses reflects rising consumption levels and high out-of-pocket-cost requirements. Congress should fix the structure of Medicare's prescription-drug benefit rather than raid the program in a way that would truncate the rewards for future drug development.

"A year ago, the Congressional Budget Office projected a federal deficit of just over $1 trillion for 2020. Legislation intended to get Americans through COVID-19 has cost $5 trillion more, and the Biden administration is now considering an additional $3 trillion bill -- pushing the year's total spending spree above $25,000 per household.

"To finance the new bill, the administration is contemplating rolling back much of the 2017 tax cuts and slashing payments for prescription drugs purchased by Medicare. House Democrats argue that Medicare is currently overpaying pharmaceutical manufacturers, whose prices have allegedly soared, and claim that existing payment rates serve only to facilitate stock buybacks by drug-makers.

"As a newly released Manhattan Institute report demonstrates, these claims are off base. While list prices for some select drugs may have increased substantially, overall prices paid for drugs by Medicare increased by only 14 percent from 2006 to 2018, after accounting for the growing availability of generics -- less than the 27 percent increase in the general Consumer Price Index over that period, and much less than the 51 percent increase in the price index for hospital services. Prescription drugs account for only 12 percent of U.S. health-care spending, a lower share than in most other developed countries."

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