I believe it was Jamelle Bouie who made the point on Twitter that Biden’s next move could be federal decriminalization of marijuana. It’s a popular bipartisan position, it doesn’t cause a massive shift on-the-ground (since state laws will still be in effect), but it could really move the needle in places like Florida where it would be important to cut down folks like DeSantis as they are picking up steam.
1619 NHJ “how I learned to be proud of America despite its flaws and view this country as belonging to all of us even those wronged” would be a good choice, but NHJ thin skinned twitter personality I don’t think would get the results you’re looking for.
It would be a get, but Bush and Michelle is who I’d try for.
While reading the college cost section I was thinking “Mitch Daniels would be a good choice, Mitch Daniels...yes! Mitch Daniels!”
The idea is not bad, but the specific example of a public commission to determine today’s official canon of America’s heroes (by way of a garden or otherwise) seems to me precisely the opposite of calm, boring, and reassuring no-partisan exercise. It will be **very** interesting and distracting, precisely the kind of thing that gives all the fuel to the culture warriors and grievance signalers of all sides. Heck, I’m starting to get angry just imagining it, and I’m not even American !
I want a rent-seeking reduction commission. The purpose would be to identify ways that insiders feather their nests at the expense of the common good. This is a bipartisan exercise. Sure there are oil companies, hedge funds and for profit colleges, but there’s also big pharma, the AMA, ag subsidy recipients, defense contractors, auto dealers, shiftless bureaucrats, and Bay Area home owners, the list is truly massive.
There is a non-trivial chance of coming up with a grand bargain where the fattest red, blue and purple oxes all get gored and we scrape the barnacles off the economy. Even if that failed, expressing frustration at the extent to which the economy has become an inside game and exposing the scale of elite privilege would be useful.
I was going to suggest a blue ribbon commission on housing affordability. Might actually do some good! But I doubt Democrats want to remind people at this particular juncture that the rent's too damn high.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these suggestions, but the premise that there is going to be a slow political news cycle as we head towards the midterms seems pretty unlikely.
The Democrats smartly are not running on “Joe Biden’s agenda” and instead are letting impunity for Donald Trump dominate the news (both DoJ and House investigations), focusing on a bipartisan Electoral Count Act fix, enshrining same sex marriage protection in federal law, and potentially pushing for baseline abortion protections, while benefiting from decline in gas prices and robust job market.
Blue ribbon panels on this or that just won’t break through the noise with voters this fall and are a better idea for when we actually get divided government.
I keep wondering about the Civil Service/Conservation Corp/Red Cross/National Guard type optional program to encourage young people of all types to take a gap year or two, a bit like they do in Switzerland.
Make it have all the bipartisan culture war items you need, physical fitness regiments, gun safety training, multi-culti teamwork building exercises, emergency preparedness training, environmental custodianship missions, food kitchen work, and natural disaster response with FEMA. Get people from all over the country to be shipped out to other parts of the country, to meet people from other parts of the country. Give them free room and board for a year, a small spending allowance, and then a 30k/yr stipend paid out over 24 months upon completion. Give them an additional 30k in grants to be spent at public college, or even mandate some sort of situation where public colleges have to give civil service graduates two years of free tuition. Get the kids of blue collar and white collar workers mixing together. Get the kids of red states and blue states and purple states mixing together.
"Hey, Republicans. Yes, I know we've had our disagreements. We passed a partisan $2 trillion spending bill in 2021 which helped fuel inflation, duped some of you into helping pass an Infrastructure Bill with another $1T in spending and then rammed through the largest climate spending bill in history. Immediately after that last one was passed, I went ahead and unilaterally paid off the loans for a bunch of people who go around calling you fascists all day."
"Now that all that is over, I'd like you to sit on a commission with Nikole Hannah-Jones so you can prove you aren't racists and totalitarians. Whatta ya say, guys?"
Nikole Hannah-Jones signing off on a statue of Thomas Jefferson is less plausible than One Billion Americans. That idea would obviously blow up in their faces.
I think your recent proposal to require porn websites to actually verify that the people who use them are over 18 or get shut down could be the V-chip for our time.
If it generated a lot of pro-and con coverage in the media it would make Biden seem normal and the people who opposed him on this issue seem like freaks. Maybe it would even work!
I love Slow Boring, but I'm having trouble believing such an intelligent person could write the sentence "now derided figures like Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus." Setting aside Columbus, who wasn't an American, what does it profit us to performatively dismiss the polymath founding father because of his failings? He is still one of the most consequential Americans and his words held more dearly by the nation than any other American. A brief slip into presentism bias
Looking at other comments this seems to be kind of a minority opinion, but I love this. It's at least possible that boring (almost "secret?!") bipartisanship stands a chance of attracting a reasonable number of sane legislators who understand, at some level, that most normal people hate the "discourse" as it's currently structured.
You had me at "make politics tedious again" - this is my dream!
I'm now imagining much of left Twitter as Grand Moff Tarkin: "Bipartisan commissions? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances."
A good idea for a commission and Secret Congress, that probably wouldn't go anywhere because of egregious rent seeking, would be about the US goods shipping and transport industry. It would cover everything from freight rail to trucks to sea and air shipping. It could tackle issues like the contractor/employee status of truck drivers, the upcoming freight rail workers' strike, the Jones Act, and the country's incredibly inefficient and expensive seaports and shipyards. Improving these things could actually have a substantiative impact on people's daily lives.
I don’t mean to derail but I can’t quite believe the NBA representative in the hero garden was to be Kobe Bryant, a rapist. One hopes that would age poorly as the halo effect from his death wore off.
I believe it was Jamelle Bouie who made the point on Twitter that Biden’s next move could be federal decriminalization of marijuana. It’s a popular bipartisan position, it doesn’t cause a massive shift on-the-ground (since state laws will still be in effect), but it could really move the needle in places like Florida where it would be important to cut down folks like DeSantis as they are picking up steam.
1619 NHJ “how I learned to be proud of America despite its flaws and view this country as belonging to all of us even those wronged” would be a good choice, but NHJ thin skinned twitter personality I don’t think would get the results you’re looking for.
It would be a get, but Bush and Michelle is who I’d try for.
While reading the college cost section I was thinking “Mitch Daniels would be a good choice, Mitch Daniels...yes! Mitch Daniels!”
The idea is not bad, but the specific example of a public commission to determine today’s official canon of America’s heroes (by way of a garden or otherwise) seems to me precisely the opposite of calm, boring, and reassuring no-partisan exercise. It will be **very** interesting and distracting, precisely the kind of thing that gives all the fuel to the culture warriors and grievance signalers of all sides. Heck, I’m starting to get angry just imagining it, and I’m not even American !
I want a rent-seeking reduction commission. The purpose would be to identify ways that insiders feather their nests at the expense of the common good. This is a bipartisan exercise. Sure there are oil companies, hedge funds and for profit colleges, but there’s also big pharma, the AMA, ag subsidy recipients, defense contractors, auto dealers, shiftless bureaucrats, and Bay Area home owners, the list is truly massive.
There is a non-trivial chance of coming up with a grand bargain where the fattest red, blue and purple oxes all get gored and we scrape the barnacles off the economy. Even if that failed, expressing frustration at the extent to which the economy has become an inside game and exposing the scale of elite privilege would be useful.
I was going to suggest a blue ribbon commission on housing affordability. Might actually do some good! But I doubt Democrats want to remind people at this particular juncture that the rent's too damn high.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with these suggestions, but the premise that there is going to be a slow political news cycle as we head towards the midterms seems pretty unlikely.
The Democrats smartly are not running on “Joe Biden’s agenda” and instead are letting impunity for Donald Trump dominate the news (both DoJ and House investigations), focusing on a bipartisan Electoral Count Act fix, enshrining same sex marriage protection in federal law, and potentially pushing for baseline abortion protections, while benefiting from decline in gas prices and robust job market.
Blue ribbon panels on this or that just won’t break through the noise with voters this fall and are a better idea for when we actually get divided government.
I keep wondering about the Civil Service/Conservation Corp/Red Cross/National Guard type optional program to encourage young people of all types to take a gap year or two, a bit like they do in Switzerland.
Make it have all the bipartisan culture war items you need, physical fitness regiments, gun safety training, multi-culti teamwork building exercises, emergency preparedness training, environmental custodianship missions, food kitchen work, and natural disaster response with FEMA. Get people from all over the country to be shipped out to other parts of the country, to meet people from other parts of the country. Give them free room and board for a year, a small spending allowance, and then a 30k/yr stipend paid out over 24 months upon completion. Give them an additional 30k in grants to be spent at public college, or even mandate some sort of situation where public colleges have to give civil service graduates two years of free tuition. Get the kids of blue collar and white collar workers mixing together. Get the kids of red states and blue states and purple states mixing together.
"Hey, Republicans. Yes, I know we've had our disagreements. We passed a partisan $2 trillion spending bill in 2021 which helped fuel inflation, duped some of you into helping pass an Infrastructure Bill with another $1T in spending and then rammed through the largest climate spending bill in history. Immediately after that last one was passed, I went ahead and unilaterally paid off the loans for a bunch of people who go around calling you fascists all day."
"Now that all that is over, I'd like you to sit on a commission with Nikole Hannah-Jones so you can prove you aren't racists and totalitarians. Whatta ya say, guys?"
Uh...no thanks, Joe.
Maybe something on the opioid crisis? I've heard some conservatives mentioning that as a concern.
Nikole Hannah-Jones signing off on a statue of Thomas Jefferson is less plausible than One Billion Americans. That idea would obviously blow up in their faces.
I think your recent proposal to require porn websites to actually verify that the people who use them are over 18 or get shut down could be the V-chip for our time.
If it generated a lot of pro-and con coverage in the media it would make Biden seem normal and the people who opposed him on this issue seem like freaks. Maybe it would even work!
I love Slow Boring, but I'm having trouble believing such an intelligent person could write the sentence "now derided figures like Thomas Jefferson and Christopher Columbus." Setting aside Columbus, who wasn't an American, what does it profit us to performatively dismiss the polymath founding father because of his failings? He is still one of the most consequential Americans and his words held more dearly by the nation than any other American. A brief slip into presentism bias
Looking at other comments this seems to be kind of a minority opinion, but I love this. It's at least possible that boring (almost "secret?!") bipartisanship stands a chance of attracting a reasonable number of sane legislators who understand, at some level, that most normal people hate the "discourse" as it's currently structured.
You had me at "make politics tedious again" - this is my dream!
I'm now imagining much of left Twitter as Grand Moff Tarkin: "Bipartisan commissions? In our moment of triumph? I think you overestimate their chances."
A good idea for a commission and Secret Congress, that probably wouldn't go anywhere because of egregious rent seeking, would be about the US goods shipping and transport industry. It would cover everything from freight rail to trucks to sea and air shipping. It could tackle issues like the contractor/employee status of truck drivers, the upcoming freight rail workers' strike, the Jones Act, and the country's incredibly inefficient and expensive seaports and shipyards. Improving these things could actually have a substantiative impact on people's daily lives.
I don’t mean to derail but I can’t quite believe the NBA representative in the hero garden was to be Kobe Bryant, a rapist. One hopes that would age poorly as the halo effect from his death wore off.