The Morning Dispatch: Did ‘Republican Traitors’ Save the Filibuster?

Happy Friday! Let’s jump right in.

Quick Hits: Today’s Top Stories

• A federal appeals court consisting of three Democratic appointees on Thursday temporarily blocked the release of former President Donald Trump’s records pertaining to this year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol, which had been slated to begin being delivered to the January 6 select committee later today. 

• The number of daily new COVID-19 cases in the U.S. has increased 7 percent over the past two weeks while hospitalizations and deaths attributed to the virus are down 12 and 13 percent over the same timeframe, respectively. The Mountain West region is currently facing the most strain on its hospital systems.

• Initial jobless claims decreased by 4,000 week-over-week to a pandemic-low 267,000 last week, the Labor Department reported Wednesday.

• In an interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl for his new book Betrayal, former President Trump defended those at the Capitol on January 6 who chanted “Hang Mike Pence.” 

• F.W. de Klerk—the president of South Africa from 1989 to 1994 who, alongside Nelson Mandela, oversaw the dismantling of the country’s apartheid system—died on Thursday at the age of 85.

Did ‘Republican Traitors’ Save the Filibuster?

At around 11 p.m. last Friday night, 13 House Republicans joined 215 House Democrats in approving about $550 billion in new infrastructure spending over five years that had already received the support of 19 Senate Republicans. But judging by the reaction over the weekend, they may as well have been voting to establish the Gulag.

Conservative commentators lambasted the Republicans who voted for the package, with some calling them sellouts and insisting that they be primaried and others suggesting that they be shamed for their apostasy. Punchbowl reported that some of their Republican colleagues were looking into removing them from committees and stripping much of their legislative power. The House GOP conference Twitter account vowed “Americans won’t forget” who supported the bill (and later deleted the tweet).

There was more. Rep. Matt Gaetz has spent the past week calling for the 13 “sellouts” to be stripped of their committee leadership positions, while Rep. Madison Cawthorn pledged to “primary the hell” out of them. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted out the 13 representatives’ office phone numbers and urged Americans to “politely say how they feel about these traitor Republicans voting to pass Joe Biden’s Communist agenda.”

They did. “You’re a f—ing piece of s— traitor,” one voter said in a voicemail left for GOP Rep. Fred Upton, vice chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus. “I hope you f—ing die. I hope your f—ing family dies. I hope everybody in your f—ing staff dies, you f—ing piece of f—ing s—. Traitor!”

Billy Fuerst, Upton’s communications director, told The Dispatch yesterday that his office has received more than 2,000 similar calls in the past week. “Ninety percent and above of our calls have come from out of the district,” he added.

If all this outrage over an infrastructure bill seems slightly over the top to you, you’re far from alone. There are very good policy reasons to oppose legislation boosting government spending at a time of heightened inflation and adding a $250 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years. And in an era when Republicans and Democrats have often fought to outspend one another, seemingly without regard to the inexorably growing national debt, there are many reasons for principled opposition to yet another spending push from Washington. But most of the histrionics are much more about what the bill signifies than what it contains. “Very sad that the RINOs in the House and Senate gave Biden and Democrats a victory,” former President Trump said in a statement. “They just don’t get it!” Yes, this is the same Donald Trump who proposed spending $2 trillion on infrastructure—and proposed that new spending just four days after he’d signed a $2 trillion coronavirus relief bill. And, yes, many of these same Republicans now outraged by the Democrats’ spending proposals, led the cheers for more spending when Republicans were in charge. 

When the House voted on the infrastructure package last Friday, Joe Biden’s presidency was, save maybe the Afghanistan withdrawal, at its lowest point. Voters had just sent Biden a resounding message about the direction of the country in Virginia and elsewhere, his approval rating had fallen to—besides Trump—the lowest level at that point in a presidential term in 75 years, and the remainder of his domestic agenda appeared to be crumbling as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi couldn’t wrangle the requisite votes in her caucus to advance anything. Then 13 House Republicans bailed him out.

But they may have done a lot more than that.

“By passing this bill, we have weakened the position of progressives in negotiating their wasteful spending bill,” GOP Rep. Andrew Garbarino of New York told Fox News, referring to the multitrillion dollar climate change and social safety net legislation Democrats have been trying to advance for months. “They can no longer hold physical infrastructure hostage to get their way.” A 64-year-old man was arrested yesterday for allegedly making a death threat against Garbarino for his vote.

The GOP members who supported the package did so on the merits as well—Rep. David McKinley, for example, touted the $3 billion it allocates for West Virginia’s roads and bridges and $350 million for modernizing the state’s sewer systems—but this broader strategic angle has been in the back of many a Republican mind as negotiations have played out over the past several months.

Let’s back up to March. President Biden had just signed into law the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan—which passed both houses of Congress with only Democratic votes—and was beginning to roll out his $2 trillion American Jobs Plan (“physical infrastructure”) and his $1.8 trillion American Families Plan (“human infrastructure”). Sen. Bernie Sanders was talking about packaging it all up into a $6 trillion reconciliation package that could be passed entirely along party lines.

The COVID-19 situation was improving at that point, and Biden still had the political winds at his back. “After early February, where Republicans were barely a speed bump on the American Rescue Plan, it was very clear that you had to make a good faith effort to get something done, if only to give yourself time and room to maneuver,” Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former Republican Senate campaign operative, told The Dispatch.

With the Senate evenly divided and Democrats reliant on Vice President Kamala Harris to break ties, the party’s most conservative member—Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia—held veto power over the entire Democratic agenda. He was interested in doing something on physical infrastructure, but wary of broader social spending. He desperately wanted to preserve the legislative filibuster, but worried that total obstruction from Republicans would force his hand amid deafening public pressure on the left. 

Within weeks, there were two different efforts seeking a bipartisan solution on physical infrastructure: One led by GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, and another steered by Manchin and Republican Sens. Mitt Romney, Susan Collins, and Rob Portman, among a handful of others. The former eventually collapsed, but the latter didn’t. To the Republicans involved, their efforts meant two things: Manchin (and Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema) could—assured that bipartisanship wasn’t dead—hold strong on the filibuster, and the Democrats’ up-to-$6 trillion physical and human infrastructure package would be split into two parts.

That split has made life miserable for Democrats over the past few months, just as Republicans involved in the bipartisan negotiations—who also lived through their party’s failed Affordable Care Act repeal effort in 2017—anticipated it would. “They desperately, desperately did not want to delink these two,” a senior Republican aide told The Dispatch. “They knew just as well as we did that it was far easier to pass physical infrastructure than human infrastructure.”

Ostensibly, Biden attempted to relink them in a June press conference, telling reporters he expected the bipartisan deal and social spending package to advance “in tandem” and pledging not to sign one without the other. Although he gingerly walked it back two days later, progressives in the House didn’t, with dozens vowing as late as last week that they wouldn’t vote for the bipartisan deal until they had assurances the bigger package would become law.

After five months, it’s clear that both Biden and the progressives were bluffing: The reconciliation package is, in many ways, still facing the same obstacles as over the summer, yet all but six progressives voted for the infrastructure bill last Friday. A signing ceremony for the latter is scheduled for three days from now. “The fact that the bipartisan infrastructure plan now stands to be enacted here with no firm resolution of the Build Back Better plan,” Donovan said. “That just tells you that progressives have no leverage.”

The senior GOP aide told The Dispatch that Republican negotiators feel vindicated by how the past five months have played out, pointing out that even Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—the ultimate political tactician—voted for the bipartisan deal. (A source familiar with McConnell’s thinking told The Dispatch yesterday that the minority leader in part viewed the bill—which he’s praised as a “godsend” for Kentucky—as a means of showing the Senate can still function with the legislative filibuster in place.)

“Whether or not anybody sees it right now, we actually achieved a great deal towards our goal of preserving the filibuster,” the GOP aide said. “And I think that we still have a lot of ability to just kick the crap out of the reconciliation bill over the next few months and give ourselves a fighting chance that maybe it never passes at all, or passes in a very, very, very weakened state so they can say that they did something.”

Donovan concurred. “You can’t put a price on the five months plus of futility and what that did to the momentum of the Biden administration, what it did to his numbers, what it meant when Afghanistan happened, and what that turned into heading into November,” he said. “I think the strategy has been vindicated in every respect.”

Axios reported yesterday that—because of this week’s inflation figures, according to people familiar with the matter—Manchin may decide he wants to punt the entire reconciliation bill until next year.

The CCP’s ‘Historical Resolution’

The year was 1981. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, passed a resolution detailing the People’s Republic of China’s 32-year history in what, at the time, struck outside observers as a remarkable moment of self-reflection.

Though the party imposes its political will on China through strict ideological adherence, Deng’s account of modern Chinese history was, at times, critical of his predecessors. “Before the ‘cultural revolution’ there were mistakes of enlarging the scope of class struggle and of impetuosity and rashness in economic construction,” the document stated. “Later, there was the comprehensive, long-drawn-out and grave blunder of the ‘cultural revolution.’ All these errors prevented us from scoring the greater achievements of which we should have been capable. It is impermissible to overlook or whitewash mistakes, which in itself would be a mistake and would give rise to more and worse mistakes.”

But this week, leaders of the CCP convened once again to do just that: author a sweeping history of the party and country wholly detached from the reality of the suffering inflicted by its leadership. The official communique, released only in summarized form, presents a rosy picture of the party’s 100-year reign and articulates its future ambitions. The “historical resolution” also serves to lay the groundwork for Xi Jinping to further consolidate his grip on the party and, by extension, China.

“There’s only been two other resolutions on party history,” Ian Johnson, a senior fellow on China studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, told The Dispatch. “And now in the year 2021 we have another effort at rewriting the past. So this is significant. … It’s clearly an effort to raise Xi Jinping to a level of a kind of founding father of China.”

The move aligns with what Xi has been working up to for years. In 2018, the Chinese government scrapped the two-term limit on the presidency. And in next year’s pivotal 20th National Congress, Xi seems likely to seek a third term, effectively solidifying his indefinite rule.

The two previous resolutions were adopted in 1945 under the revolutionary and early Communist Party leader Mao Zedong, and in 1981 under Deng, the reformer. Both men have reached near-mythic status among the Chinese populace—albeit for different reasons—and Xi’s decision to release another such document speaks to his ambition to be held in a similar regard. Its adoption by the sixth plenum of the CCP’s central committee—the body responsible for choosing party leaders—signals that Xi maintains strong support among the party’s elites.

Thursday’s resolution breaks modern Chinese history into three phases, detailing the party’s struggle against forces of “imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratic capitalism.” 

The first phase, led by Mao, launched the Marxist-Leninist transformation of China, the communique writes. Unlike Deng’s resolution, which criticized Mao’s failed Great Leap Forward, Xi’s resolution praises the project for providing the “institutional foundation for the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.”

“The party led people to become self-reliant and vigorous, to create great achievements in the socialist revolution and construction, to realize the most extensive and profound social changes in the history of the Chinese nation,” it states. “Only socialism can save China and only socialism can develop China.”

Revisionist history, Johnson explained, has long served as a cornerstone of the party’s leadership.“You can’t have too many criticisms of the party or else it calls into question the party,” he told The Dispatch. “So things like the cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976, the great famine, these things are whitewashed. Controlling history means controlling the legitimacy of the party and controlling destiny.”

But despite Xi’s many breaks from Deng in both policy and ideology, the party’s recent statement praises the former leader for infusing the country’s socialist vision with “Chinese characteristics.” Deng’s emphasis on economic development and diplomacy, it writes, would eventually lead the country into the 21st century. 

But some fear the party’s latest resolution might, in conjunction with other recent moves by Xi, end up reversing many of Deng’s landmark reforms. Xi’s recent crackdown on big businesses in an effort to solidify party power and aggressive foreign posturing to assert regional dominance are indicative of an autocratic state desperate to reassert its authority. The document’s summary “resolutely” opposes the “separatist acts of ‘Taiwan independence’” and interference by “external forces,” before charting a path forward based in socialist ideology and strict adherence to hierarchy. 

“The party’s legitimacy is based on history. It’s obviously not based on a vote,” Johnson said. “Americans seem to be all fixated right now on the midterm elections next autumn. China’s political calendar is all about next autumn as well, but it’s about the Communist Party Congress next autumn when Xi Jinping will be given a third term. … Barring illness or some unforeseen accident or something like that, Xi Jinping will get a third term. It’s been getting more and more clear, but this really makes it pretty clear. This is what’s going to happen.”

Worth Your Time

• In his weekly column on happiness, Arthur Brooks argues that, while it’s human nature to worry about what other people think of us, we ought to spend much less time and energy doing so. “Just because our overconcern for other people’s opinions of us is natural doesn’t mean that it’s inevitable,” he writes. “In the tao te ching, Lao Tzu wrote, ‘Care about people’s approval / and you will be their prisoner.’ He no doubt intended it as a dire warning. But as the years have passed, I have come to interpret it as more of a promise and an opportunity. I have learned that the prison of others’ approval is actually one built by me, maintained by me, and guarded by me. This has led me to my own complementary verse to Lao Tzu’s original: ‘Disregard what others think and the prison door will swing open.’ If you are stuck in the prison of shame and judgment, remember that you hold the key to your own freedom.”

• The murder trial for Kyle Rittenhouse—the teenager who killed two rioters in Kenosha, Wisconsin last summer—is underway, and Freddie deBoer believes that, in a “just world,” Rittenhouse would be convicted for both a weapons possession charge and for reckless endangerment. But in his latest Substack post, he also argues that such a tragic outcome was entirely predictable. “At the time of the [Kenosha] riots, many many people along the left-of-center, including otherwise reformist liberals, endorsed riots to some degree or another,” he writes. “Bad shit happens when people riot. When you create environments where anything can happen… anything can happen. Some people are going to take advantage of that opportunity to do things that you don’t like. You can’t endorse spasms of directionless violence and then complain when some of it plays out in a way that you hadn’t intended. This seems totally obvious to me, and yet so many out there want to both condone riots and condemn their chaotic outcomes. It’s like putting on music and getting mad when people dance.”

Presented Without Comment

Toeing the Company Line

• Political historian Jay Cost joined Jonah on Thursday’s Remnant for a conversation about his new biography of James Madison. What are the greatest misconceptions about Madison and the founding? How should the Declaration of Independence be understood? And could American politics use more smoke-filled rooms?

• Nearly 100 former policy officials, Cabinet secretaries, and military officers signed onto an open letter calling on Congress to combat persistent threats to the American electoral system ahead of the 2022 elections. Charlotte writes about the letter and how election integrity is a national security issue.

• Katherine Zimmerman of the American Enterprise Institute argues that the Biden administration’s “diplomacy first” efforts have effectively handed Yemen to the Iranian-backed Houthis.

Let Us Know

If their overarching goal was to limit spending and preserve the filibuster, do you think the Republicans that voted for the bipartisan infrastructure bill made the right decision?

Reporting by Declan Garvey (@declanpgarvey), Andrew Egger (@EggerDC), Charlotte Lawson (@lawsonreports), Audrey Fahlberg (@AudreyFahlberg), Ryan Brown (@RyanP_Brown), Harvest Prude (@HarvestPrude), and Steve Hayes (@stephenfhayes).