Like the rest of us
You'll have to do it like the rest of us
Won't get no special treatment, call your bluff
You'll have to do it like the rest of us
-- some random song lyrics I found on Google
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Presidents, it is said, are like the rest of us.
Solve one problem, cross it off the list, then look at the to-dos and see that there is still a lot on there.
Team Biden spent more time than it let on publicly getting ready for an outcome in the Chauvin trial that might have led to civic unrest, or worse.
All that prep work was essential.
But as America wakes up to a lot of stock taking from one of the most convulsive fatal acts in modern history, Joe Biden still has a boatload of problems that have no easy or ready solutions.
Even in the realm of law enforcement-involved deaths of Black citizens, the president’s work is never done:
In an unprecedented move, Columbus police showed body camera footage of the shooting of a 16-year-old girl by a Columbus police officer just hours after the incident on the Southeast Side.
The shooting, which happened about 20 minutes before a guilty verdict was announced in the trial of Derek Chauvin, a former Minneapolis police officer who killed George Floyd, prompted hundreds to protest at the shooting site and Downtown.
The video shows an officer approaching a driveway with a group of young people standing there. In the video, it appears that the 16-year-old, identified now as Ma’Khia Bryant, who was moments later shot by police, pushes or swings at a person, who falls to the ground.
Not that the passage of federal policing reform legislation would solve all this, but that process is stuck in a bicameral, partisan morass, with no break in the logjam at hand.
On the macro Biden spending/taxing agenda, there is still no clear path: there aren’t ten Senate Republicans who would vote to agree with Democrats on most anything; Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema haven’t agreed to either abolish the filibuster or use reconciliation; the parliamentarian’s ruling on reconciliation is still oddly shrouded in mystery; and progressives are still touting the Biden proposals’ spending totals as floors, not ceilings.
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For all the latest news all the time, check out our new 24/7 website the Walking Duck.
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Problems are everywhere, and the legislative perils are more numerous than the number of Legos it takes to build this:
Ohio’s can’t-we-all-just-get-along retiree-to-be Republican Senator Rob Portman channels his inner Phil Gramm on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, railing against Mr. Biden’s proposed tax hikes, suggesting how far, far away a bipartisan deal looks now.
Per the same paper, the president is poised to disappoint progressives with just a temporary extension of the expanded child tax credit.
On the pandemic, as American business and families start to think about a return to international travel, the White House grapples with an unforgiving reality, especially on a planet with new virus strains popping up regularly: Team Biden can do a perfect job taking on COVID in the United States but still face extreme peril as other nation’s struggle to bring things under control.
See, for example, the difficulty India is having right now with mass infection.
Then there is this reality: Joe Biden faces many of the challenges that he worked on way back in the Obama-Biden years AND the heightened expectations of progressives in the wake of the Trump administration.
In the former category, there is this unusual leak, leading a New York Times witherer:
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken was in the Oval Office, pleading with President Biden.
In the meeting, on March 3, Mr. Blinken implored the president to end Trump-era restrictions on immigration and to allow tens of thousands of desperate refugees fleeing war, poverty and natural disasters into the United States, according to several people familiar with the exchange.
But Mr. Biden, already under intense political pressure because of the surge of migrant children at the border with Mexico, was unmoved. The attitude of the president during the meeting, according to one person to whom the conversation was later described, was, essentially: Why are you bothering me with this?
What had been an easy promise on the campaign trail — to reverse what Democrats called President Donald J. Trump’s “racist” limits on accepting refugees — has become a test of what is truly important to the new occupant of the White House, according to an account of his decision making from more than a dozen Biden administration officials, refugee resettlement officials and others.
In the latter category, the left is now trying to extract from the president a pledge to find a path to legal status for those who have come to the country illegally by any means necessary.
Other thorny problems that are as enduring as they are vexing, again, especially with liberals wielding unprecedented demands and sky-high expectations:
* The IRS needs more funding – and who wants to give more money to the IRS?
If President Biden is to implement his ambitious economic agenda, he will have to rely on a beleaguered arm of the government: the Internal Revenue Service. (Wall Street Journal)
* What should be done about pot? Chuck “Mary Jane” Schumer wants it to be decriminalized.
* Coming out in favor of DC statehood will not dampen demands for action from its supporters; it will embolden them.
In foreign policy, Mr. Biden faces a long list of staggeringly familiar ponderable intractables.
* Take in this essential reading New York Times story on the omnidirectional, omnipresent Mr. Putin:
Now in his third decade in power, Mr. Putin, 68, appears more convinced than ever of his special, historic role as the father of a reborn Russian nation, fighting at home and abroad against a craven, hypocritical, morally decaying West.
Then read all about Mr. Putin’s big Wednesday address here:
* The South is putting on pressure on the North:
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea has a message for the United States: President Biden needs to engage now with North Korea.
* The administration’s climate agenda is more ambitious than Tracy Flick:
Officials close to the Biden team say the administration is planning to pledge to reduce the nation's heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions by about 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 — a figure that one person with direct knowledge said climate envoy John Kerry's team shared with Chinese officials during the last-minute trip he took to Shanghai last week.
Any lesser target would thwart momentum, according to environmental activists, experts and veterans of global climate diplomacy. Even a range of cuts that includes reductions that are less than 50 percent, as the White House is considering, could spell trouble both domestically and internationally for Biden’s agenda….
The U.S. officials have a lot of ground to make up after years of the federal inaction, and Biden has pushed his team led by Kerry and national climate adviser Gina McCarthy to move quickly by organizing the global summit less than 100 days into his tenure. That scramble has left a lot of questions circulating about exactly what to expect from the speeches from the 40 nations invited to participate in the virtual event Thursday and Friday.
The agenda for the summit was still an "evolving document," Sue Biniaz, a member of Kerry's team, told reporters on Tuesday. The administration has not even fully staffed all its climate positions, and as of last weekend, senior officials were still deciding how to roll out the event's centerpiece: the new U.S. greenhouse gas emission targets. (Politico)
I could go on.
But you have a lot of Chauvin trial aftermath stories to read, so I won’t keep you.
My point is:
The White House now returns to its regularly scheduled mélange of never ending knots, prickles, and giant, seemingly unsolvable Rubik’s Cubes.
Congratulations on Tuesday.
See you back at work.
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