In mid-December, US Senate Democrats cried “uncle,” at least temporarily, pulling President Biden’s $2 trillion “Build Back Better” agenda out from under the Christmas Tree. If the bill  makes it to the Senate floor for an up or down vote, it won’t be this year.

I’m a big fan of gridlock, and not a fan at all of Biden’s Big Basket of Boondoggles, so I can’t say I’m terribly unhappy about this. Thanks, Joe Manchin!

On the other hand, it seems to me that Democrats are missing a chance to save themselves a savage beating in next November’s midterms. Which, as much as I dislike the Republicans too, might not be a bad thing from the “gridlock is good” standpoint, but let’s look at it as a nuts-and-bolts problem.

Build Back Better is what’s commonly called an “omnibus” bill. Put simply, Democrats threw in the kitchen sink and plunked down 2,000+ pages of everything any Democrat might want.

The point of an omnibus bill is that it lets the members of the majority party bring pressure on each other to get unanimity.

Congresswoman X wants, say, a child tax credit, but doesn’t want to expand Medicare to cover hearing aids (both of these are in Build Back Better).

Congressman Y wants the hearing aids but not the child tax credit.

If both things go in the omnibus bill, Congresswoman X and Congressman Y  must both support what they don’t want to get what they do.

But that pressure can run in both directions. If Congresswoman X hates the hearing aid provision so much that she’ll give up the child tax credit to avoid supporting it (and Congressman Y vice versa), the bill dies.

Democrats are looking at two plausible plays for support next year.

One is to get Build Back Better passed so that they can brag on how much they got done, and ask voters to expand their mandate.

The other is to blame those darn Republican obstructionists (or Joe Manchin) for the fact that they got nothing done, and ask voters to give them more seats. That approach frankly doesn’t work too often or well.

There is, however, a third option.

There are probably a few reasonably popular — even “bipartisan” — things in Build Back Better. Why not break these popular items out into single-issue bills that can actually pass? I don’t support the child tax credit, but I bet some Republican votes could be found for some version of it.

There’s a good argument to be made that this is how Congress should handle EVERYTHING. “One subject per bill” would substantially reduce gridlock.

It would also give congressional Democrats a third, better campaign pitch for midterm voters: “We got some stuff you like DONE — reward us!”

If Democrats step off the omnibus and walk those individual bills up Capitol Hill, they might staunch their bleeding campaign wounds and do reasonably well next November.  That might or might not be good for the country, but it would be good for them.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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When Joe Biden took office as the 46th President of the United States, those of us who desired a more peaceful foreign policy had reasons for both hope and doubt.

The  biggest issue for both was the 20-year US war in Afghanistan, for which Biden’s predecessor, Donald Trump, had negotiated a long-overdue US surrender.

Would Biden fulfill the US end of the Afghanistan peace agreement by completing the withdrawal of US troops? We hoped, but doubted, as he hemmed, hawed, and violated the agreed deadline despite ample time to meet it.

Credit where credit is due: Biden did finally bring the troops home from Afghanistan. He showed incredible backbone,  refusing to extend deadlines and surge new forces into the conflict despite loud calls from the foreign policy establishment to remain knee deep in that Big Muddy forever.

If foreign policy was a game of golf, the Afghanistan withdrawal would sound like the driver making solid contact with the ball for a likely long drive off the tee.

But in foreign policy, as in golf, the initial swing is likely to go bad if the golfer doesn’t “follow through.” Unfortunately, Biden isn’t.

There was room for hope that he’d bring the US back into compliance with United Nations Security Council 2231, the “Iran nuclear deal,” which Trump had violated (he didn’t “withdraw from” it; UN Security Council resolutions are binding on all UN member states).

Instead,  Biden gave in to the temptation (or perhaps the pressure) to  insist on adding conditions he has no standing to add rather than taking “yes” for an answer (the Iranians were willing to reboot the deal as negotiated and agreed, but not to accept new terms).

Similarly, Biden is continuing Trump’s trade and technology war with China, even upping the tempo and timbre of US saber-rattling over Taiwan.

He’s continuing the Obama- and Trump-era policy of constant brinksmanship with Russia over Crimea and the Donbass region republics that used to be part of Ukraine until they seceded in the wake of a US-sponsored coup in 2014. The intent seems to be to creep NATO right up to Russia’s borders. What could possibly go wrong?

If Biden had followed through on the impulse that ended the war in Afghanistan, we could have had a “peace dividend.” Instead, on December 27, he signed a $768 billion  National “Defense” Authorization Act. He ended a war — then ADDED $30 billion to military spending.

In the game of foreign policy golf, the hole is Thomas Jefferson’s “Peace, commerce and honest friendship with all nations; entangling alliances with none.”

Instead of following through for a solid drive onto the green and an easy putt, Biden let his ambitious swing become a slice into the rough.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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In 2020, the world’s political and economic elites gathered in Switzerland to discuss ways of restructuring society after the COVID-19 pandemic. The occasion: The 50th annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, themed “The Great Reset.”

That meeting and its theme give rise to a number of novel theories — we’re all going to be micro-chipped for constant tracking in  a “social credit system” operated by a single world government, etc. — and in our 21st century authoritarian age, it’s hard to blame anyone for fearing moves in that direction.

In my view, the World Economic Forum isn’t just thinking in the wrong direction, it isn’t thinking big enough. It’s far too constrained in its goals, which revolve around bringing the world’s regimes into closer conformity with each other and with the United Nations on issues like taxes, regulations, and the bugbear du jour, climate change.

To put it a different way, The Great Reset is about finding ways to make it easier for the same people who’ve been running things for the last 400 years — since the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, when the modern “nation-state” model we live under came into existence — to remain in charge, doing the same things they’ve been doing, with even less inconvenient dissent from uppity serfs, forever and ever, amen.

In my opinion, we need a far Greater Reset than that. It’s time to tear the whole Westphalian Model down to its component parts — from its shearing of the public as sheep with taxation, to its periodic large-scale military and political holocausts, to its technocratic mismanagement and “sovereignty” disputes — and demand that those parts justify themselves or be discarded.

As a panarchist, one of the most amusing demands I run into is that I prove how, without monopoly government in the form it exists now, we wouldn’t run into the problem of  … well, insert any major problem we already have.

They’ve had 400 years to solve Problem X, and haven’t. Where Problem X is concerned, the burden of proof should be on them to prove how their solution is going to suddenly, magically start working when it never has before, not on me to prove that an untried alternative will solve what they haven’t.

I don’t expect to see a free society in my lifetime, but four centuries seems like a more than generous trial period for the Davos Crowd’s alternative. It’s time to get moving toward A Greater Reset.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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