[guest post by JVW]

ITEM 1
The Biden Administration seeks to spend all appropriated funds before the Trump Administration can claw them back:

Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo is on an urgent mission: get as much high-tech spending out the door before Donald Trump takes office.

The Biden administration is aiming to commit nearly every unspent dollar in its $50 billion microchip-subsidy program before President-elect Donald Trump takes over in January, an effort that would effectively cement a massive industrial legacy before the GOP can reverse course.

[. . .]

The effort to spend her department’s full CHIPS Act budget would put a capstone on a signature Biden economic policy.

It also speaks to the urgency facing a host of Biden’s historic raft of spending programs, many of which could be vulnerable to a Republican White House and Congress eager to pare back the most ambitious Democratic spending packages.

The Chips money alone is a massive undertaking. Congress allocated $50 billion in subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing and R&D. So far only two companies have received binding awards from the Department of Commerce’s manufacturing program. To hit her target, Raimondo still needs to nail down contracts with Intel, Micron, Samsung and SK hynix — multi-billion-dollar deals that have, at times, been rocky and required renegotiations.

What a great idea: go on a mad dash to spend tens of billions of dollars over the next sixty days. What could possibly go wrong?

ITEM 2
Rank partisan Chuck Schumer now wants to reinvent himself as an advocate of bipartisanship:

When the Democratic convention took place in August, with new nominee Kamala Harris rising in the polls, Democrats were giddy with a sense of impending victory. In Chicago for the convention, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-NY) visited with party officials and reporters to outline his plans for a glorious new age in Washington with Democrats in control of the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives.

Schumer’s top priority in the new Harris administration would have been to eliminate the legislative filibuster that has long protected minority rights in the Senate. That way, even if the Senate were tied between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans, those 50 Democrats, with the tiebreaking vote of Vice President Tim Walz, could enact far-reaching legislation without any input at all from Republicans. Washington would have true one-party rule, and the minority party would have no say in things whatsoever.

The story relates how in 2022 Senate Democrats tried to kill the filibuster, but the principled votes of Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin prevented them from doing so. With Ruben Gallego expected to replace Sen. Sinema, the Majority Leader had hoped that Democrats would lose nothing more than the Manchin seat in West Virginia, ending up with 50 seats and Vice-President Walz as the tie-breaking vote. But of course the Dem losses in Ohio, Montana, and Pennsylvania (the latter subject to defending against Democrat vote fraud) have scotched that strategy, and now the incoming Minority Leader wants to make nice:

So this week, Schumer went to the well of the Senate and addressed some remarks to his Republican colleagues. “Another closely contested election now comes to an end,” he said. “To my Republican colleagues, I offer a word of caution in good faith: Take care not to misread the will of the people, and do not abandon the need for bipartisanship. After winning an election, the temptation may be to go to the extreme. We’ve seen that happen over the decades, and it has consistently backfired on the party in power. So, instead of going to the extremes, I remind my colleagues that this body is most effective when it’s bipartisan. If we want the next four years in the Senate to be as productive as the last four, the only way that will happen is through bipartisan cooperation.”

The short version of that is: Please don’t do to us what we were going to do to you.

It is probably a helpful trait for Senator Chuck Schumer to be so blissfully free of principles. Fortunately for him, in this one aspect of politics the GOP has held fast to tradition. In the immediate aftermath of the election, outgoing Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell announced that his party would not eliminate the filibuster. It is clear of course that eventually a Democrat Senate majority might end the practice, but I can appreciate that our country’s ostensibly conservative party refuses to engage in this naked power play and I salute them for this.

– JVW