Give credit to far left for one right thing

Last week was momentous for President Joe Biden’s party, and perhaps for the Republican Party. Without apparent qualms, Biden sided with progressives who demand that the $1 trillion actual infrastructure bill (roads and similar stuff ) should not be voted on in the House until the Senate passes the “soft infrastructure” bill. According to progressives’ Rumpelstiltskin spin-straw-into-gold economics, this bill will cost only $3.5 trillion. Or plausible calculations say perhaps $5 trillion. The bill includes tax credits for purchasers of electric bicycles, and almost everything else imaginable, except actual infrastructure.

By siding with progressives, Biden — an open book who has been reading himself to the nation since he arrived in the Senate 48 years ago — showed, again, that he is not (as Otto von Bismarck said of Louis-Napoleon) “a sphinx without a riddle.” Neither is Biden a progressive. He is a party man who goes where it goes.

Progressives today have intensity because they have two ideas: “equity,” meaning the elimination of disparate outcomes produced, progressives say, by sacrificing “social justice” on the altar of equality of opportunity, a chimera; and “proper equality,” understood as ever-more-equal dependency of ever-more people on government.

Biden chose to align with progressives because, preferring their agenda to any presidential preference for splitting differences, they gave him no choice. The Great American Songbook teaches that when an immovable object meets an irresistible force, something’s gotta give.

The nearly 100-member caucus is wrong about all matters of public policy, but its obduracy is constitutionally wholesome. It is evidence that the sainted James Madison’s expectation has not been entirely nullified by party allegiances.

Immediately after the Constitution was ratified, something occurred that the Framers neither desired nor anticipated: the emergence in the 1790s of a party system.

In Federalist 51, Madison anticipated constant constructive tension between the two political branches: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

Although Madison quickly became a creator of what is now the world’s oldest political party, he could not have anticipated what would now appall him: the common attitude in Congress that members are mere spear carriers in a presidential opera.

Such thinking is the principal reason modern presidents are so rampant, and the one reason the Congressional Progressive Caucus is, despite its ideological intoxication, somewhat wholesome.

If the caucus accepts this compliment, it should send a similar salute across the barricades to the two Democratic senators the caucus currently despises. There is an adjective to describe West Virginia’s Joe Manchin III and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema as they resist pressures to buckle. The adjective is: senatorial.

Ideally, there should always be a few senators irritating their party.

Congressional Republicans, quaking in terror of possible disapproval from a pouting former president, should profit from the Congressional Progressive Caucus’ example of sturdy independence. And from the caucus’ demonstration of what is indispensable to independence: ideas that pull a party up from subservience to a president.