Senator Joe Manchin at NETL. July 7, 201. Photo Simon Edelman, Energy Department.
If you vote for any Democrat for public office, Francis Menton wonders, do you inevitably get someone who will go along with every single element of the most radical agenda of the Left?
Billions of $$$ to Crazy Energy Ideas
Well, “yes,” explains our Manhattan Contrarian.
At the federal level, the approval of last year’s badly mis-named “Inflation Reduction Act” is instructive. With respect to the items of the radical Left agenda, the IRA mainly dealt with “climate”-related matters, containing some hundreds of billions of dollars of subsidies and tax benefits to promote things like wind and solar electricity generation, batteries and other grid-scale energy storage, hydrogen, and many more even crazier and untested energy ideas.
An Absurd Loyalty
None of this has any chance of making a new energy system that can eliminate the use of fossil fuels, let alone of reducing world temperatures by even the infinitesimal tenth or two of a degree that could actually be measured. And thus none of it makes sense other than as an expression of complete loyalty and devotion to the radical climate cult at the core of the Democratic Party.
From ABC News, August 12, 2022:
Every House Democrat on Friday voted to pass the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) over uniform Republican opposition. . . .
From CBS News, August 2022
The plan, called the Inflation Reduction Act, cleared the upper chamber by a vote of 51 to 50 along party lines, with Vice President Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaking vote in the evenly divided Senate.
How can it be that every Democrat was on board in both houses, without a single dissent?
… even including the supposedly independent-minded Senators Manchin of West Virginia and Sinema of Arizona.
Yes, Manchin was said to have achieved some changes to enable faster permitting of certain projects. The Biden Administration has since ignored those changes and made Manchin look like a fool.
Simple or Complex Answers
There are plenty more issues, like gun rights, voting rights, and abortion (up to the moment of birth). Why would every Democrat vote radical Left?
Undoubtedly, there are various forms of “party discipline” in play, like plum committee assignments or premium pay perks in the legislature. Also, if you don’t play along you are likely to get primaried by a radical leftist in the next election cycle, and the primary electorate is dominated by the most radical elements of the party.
But whatever the reasons, be they simple or complex, the lesson is clear, argues Mr. Menton:
(E)very single Democrat in a legislature will vote for whatever the radical Left wants.
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