The reason Biden can’t get either through speaks to his lack of leadership — lack of determination to exercise the power of his office to enforce party discipline and punish senators who won’t get with the program. Republican senate leaders don’t hesitate to exercise power and enforce discipline, even when they’re in a minority. Biden came into office as an “institutionalist” offering collegiality as a solution to the nation’s problems. The Republicans are laughing in is face and defeating him time after time after time.

We’re done for unless Biden picks up his presidential stick and uses it along with (pretty, soft, or whatever other kind of) words to whip his party into shape. He only had two years, realistically, to get anything major accomplished. He wasted the first year not even endorsing filibuster reform let alone fighting his ass off for it.

After the Republicans demonstrated they would do whatever they liked whenever they liked with the filibuster to get their agenda passed, that kind of weakness astonishes and angers me at the same time.

It doesn’t have to be like this.