Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of August 16

Admittedly from last week but I feel worth talking about:

Senate passes $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, to vote on 3.5 trillion Democratic plan planned to pass via budget resolution to avoid filibuster

The Senate passed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan Tuesday, a huge step for Democrats as they try to push President Joe Biden’s sweeping economic agenda through Congress.

The legislation, which includes $550 billion in new funding for transportation, broadband and utilities, got through in a 69-30 vote, as 19 Republicans joined all 50 Democrats. The chamber in a 50-49 party-line vote then proceeded to a budget resolution that would allow Democrats to approve what they see as a complementary $3.5 trillion spending plan without Republican votes.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has stressed she will not take up the infrastructure bill or Democrats’ separate proposal to expand the social safety net until the Senate passes both of them. The House was set to stay on recess until Sept. 20, but Tuesday evening House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said the chamber would return Aug. 23 to consider the budget resolution.

The GOP senators who supported the bill include those considered most likely to vote with Democrats — Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — and conservatives from red states such as Sens. Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven of North Dakota and Jim Risch of Idaho. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., backed the legislation.

It appears the real event will be next week but in the meantime this has come closer to happening than any of us would expect and it almost gives credibility to the claim that maybe the Democratic leadership plans to do more than repeat the failures of the past.

Still, I wonder what's exactly the idea behind the both or neither approach by Pelosi. My (charitable) guess (and hopefully not terrible analogy) is that she and/or whoever else thought of that idea is playing motte-and-bailey with Congress with the exception that the motte is water and the bailey is decently sweet/soft bread, and the GOP is counting on the latter vote to fail because Sinema or whoever is on a hard bread diet while the Democratic party are counting on it to succeed becuase they need to have water for the day, and they all voted for water.

Latest Polls Of The California Recall Election

Too close to call. It seems kind of crazy because I've yet to read a coherent argument about why the governor should be recalled, and yet here we are.

The leading alternative is a right wing radio host.

It's weird how little people talk about this.

Why the domestic fallout from the Afghanistan War is so hard to assess

One reason the war lasted as long as it has is because most Americans don’t grasp the costs of war. Less than 1 percent of the population serves in the military, meaning most people don’t know someone who serves. The human costs of war have also changed. U.S. military medicine has improved dramatically over time, especially since the start of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. What this means is that most U.S. casualties today are nonfatal casualties, so a lot of the human consequences of war are less visible to Americans.

Also, the way the U.S. pays for war has changed. As political scientist Sarah Kreps has written, we used to finance wars via taxes, but today, we finance wars by adding to the national debt. Put all this together, and you have a very small group paying the most immediate, visible costs of war. The rest of us are also paying those costs, but they’re much harder to see.

As a public opinion scholar, I would also add that ongoing military action — even war — just isn’t something that’s super important to most Americans. We saw this with the Iraq War, and it was true with Afghanistan as well. This kept a lot of things that were happening in Afghanistan off the American public’s radar.

(CNN, Fox or MSNBC) News mentions of "Afghanistan" or "Taliban" since New year 2021

I’m curious, though, if the fact that a plurality of voters still supported withdrawing troops suggests that number will bounce back up after the overwhelming news coverage of Afghanistan fades. 

At the same time, the issue might not fade that quickly if there continue to be new developments and disturbing images coming out of Afghanistan, so perhaps people’s opinions will be more sticky.

In the short term, my bet is that Afghanistan will quickly fade from the headlines and this won’t affect the 2022 midterms or Biden’s reelection campaign.

Think back to the Iran coverage in early 2020 and its possible effect on the 2020 election — and how that never materialized.