Dear Reader (unless you’re waiting for a subpoena, like Kevin McCarthy),

So I had a long rant in the Wednesday G-File about Biden’s voting right’s speech (actually, in fairness to me, only the end of it was ranty). While I could go on for another couple thousand words, the thing is already a dead letter. Kyrsten Sinema announced she won’t nuke the filibuster to pass the Democrats’ election “reforms,” and Joe Manchin backed her up, so the whole speech was a pointless exercise.

Some think the idea was to pressure Sinema and Manchin into caving on a filibuster “carve out.” If so, that sounds great as a plot device for The West Wing.

I was going to make the—now clichéd—point that the Biden White House lives in the Veep timeline. But then I stopped myself because the truth is that it actually exists in the real world, the meatspace where things don’t unfold according to preconceived storylines.