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Progressive Rep. Pramila Jayapal has been all over TV trying to look reasonable with her ingratiating smile and syrupy references to the lefts interest in negotiations. At issue is the Democrats final number on its social spending bill.

Sen. Bernie Sanders was playing the sleazy salesman, inflating his original price to offer a discount. This took the form of noting that his $3.5 trillion figure was a markdown from the $6 trillion he previously wanted.

New York Rep. Mondaire Jones, meanwhile, says he has a problem with people applying the term moderate to Democrats not on board with the lefts social spending goals. He apparently thinks that progressives threatening to torpedo the wildly popular infrastructure bill if their demands arent met should henceforth be called the moderates.

What is it about the left that constantly wants to police language? It would seem part of an unconvincing charm offensive in a party whose majority increasingly resents the lefts serial extortion demands often delivered in words that hurt the very Democrats who have given them the ability to influence anything.

That ability shrunk in the 2020 election, as an electorate that preferred President Joe Biden by over 7 million votes also punished several House Democrats who held hard-won seats in purple districts.

Much of the blame goes to the far lefts incontinent radical talk about defunding the police. Jayapal, for one, said she would redirect law enforcement funding to other community programs. Translation: Take money from police. This was propitiously timed during a spike in crime rates. Public safety had become a concern among Americans of all races, but the left-wing gentry had posturing to do.

All this created a politically stupid diversion from calls to reform law enforcement practices, a response to serious incidents of abusive policing. Democrat Max Rose from Staten Island had voted for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, as did other swing-district Democrats, such as Abby Finkenauer of northeast Iowa and Anthony Brindisi from upstate New York. Rose, Finkenauer and Brindisi all lost in November. (Finkenauer is now running in Iowa for the Senate.)

A few months before the 2020 presidential election, while the Democratic primaries were still going on, 60 Minutes did a feature in which Sanders renewed past praise of Fidel Castro for his literacy program and for expanding health care. The former Cuban dictator also tortured and murdered dissidents, it was pointed out.

Pressed on the matter, Sanders said he didnt approve of the torture part, but that wasnt enough to save Democrat Debbie Mucarsel-Powell. She lost her Miami-area district, home to many Cuban Americans.

The left can complain all it wants about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and his insistence that the price for the social spending come down. But he and (the incomprehensible) Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have so much power, as Biden has noted, because the Senate is evenly divided. Democrats might have held more Senate seats were it not for the lefts habit of scaring moderate voters.

Manchin did offer to accept $1.5 trillion in increased social spending. That is not a small sum, and perhaps hed go higher. The left indicates it may go lower, but its already weakened the Democrats reputation as the party that can govern. It doesnt understand or care that the future of the country is also at stake as leaders of the opposite party work to destabilize democratic institutions.

The left is a minority within the Democratic Party. Its champions lost recent primaries in New York, Virginia, Louisiana and Ohio. The radical fringe seems larger than it is because it gets media attention, especially when it flames other Democrats. Only Democratic voters can exact a price for sabotaging the team.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com.

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Harrop: So-called progressives vs. the Democratic party - Daily Herald

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party seems to be nearing its breaking point with Sen.Kyrsten Sinema.

Over the weekend, members of the nonprofit Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA,followed Sinema, D-Ariz., into abathroom at Arizona State University.

Activists recorded and shouted their grievances at her for not supporting more accommodating immigration reforms.

Progressives' frustration with Sinema goes beyond Arizona voters. A Saturday Night Live skit portrayed her as the senator derailing legislation central to the Biden administration,including the $3.5 trillion human infrastructure package.

Sinema has said that is too expensive for her vote, but hasnt said what she would support.

In this week'sepisode of The Gaggle, an Arizona politics podcast,hosts Yvonne Wingett Sanchez and Ronald J. Hansenspeakwith Emily Kirkland, executive director of Progress Arizona, a progressive community nonprofit.She's breaking down why the left is angry with Sinema and what they're doing about it.

The best way to listen is to subscribe to The Gaggle on your favorite podcast app, but you also can stream the full episode below.

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Why are progressives fed up with Sen. Kyrsten Sinema? The Gaggle finds out - The Arizona Republic

Its now clear that the Biden administration, House and Senate progressives, and the handful of conservative Democratic spoilers are vectoring in on a deal. Build Back Better will be boiled down to something in the $2 to $2.5 trillion range.

Progressives can comfort themselves that once the infighting is behind us, and we can get past the echo-chamber stories of a failed presidency, Biden can get on with the business of governing. His approval ratings can go back up, and we can come back for more money in the FY2023 budget reconciliation next fall.

But hold on, the devil is in the fine print.

More from Robert Kuttner

For starters, the original White House plan also included over a trillion dollars in refundable tax credits, notably an extension of the Child Tax Credit, as well as expanded credits for child care and a more generous EITC. If these tax expenditures are included in a $2 trillion total, then the entire spending part of the package is reduced to not much more than the bipartisan infrastructure bill, which has only about $600 billion in genuine new public investment.

And dont forget, these are ten-year totals. Two hundred billion a year is pretty puny, given the kinds of transformations the economy needs. The $60 billion a year in the bipartisan bill is business as usual.

One ray of hope is in the dynamic economic gains produced by these outlays. The White House has argued, correctly in my view, that many if not most of these social and economic investments will enhance productivity and GDP, thus reducing their net budgetary impact. And that could produce a consensus on a larger bottom line. Joe Manchin has said he is sympathetic to this kind of budgeting.

Seemingly, Manchin is sympathetic to higher taxes on rich people, while his fellow spoiler, Kyrsten Sinema, is not. Here again, using public investments to increase economic output allows offsets to the total budgetary impact, and Sinema could be sympathetic to that. Recognizing these gains is as close as economics gets to the proverbial free lunch.

The package would be even worse without the insistence of House progressives that they will compromise only so much. The Child Tax Credit and the other tax subsidies for working families should not be counted as part of the spending. This is no time for further retreat.

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Are Progressives About to Get Rolled Again? - The American Prospect

First the booze. Thanks to a Prohibition-era law, the Postal Service is barred from shipping alcohol to consumers. Private carriers like U.P.S. and FedEx have this lucrative business all to themselves. With an eye toward leveling the playing field, Representative Jackie Speier, a Democrat from California, introduced the bipartisan United States Postal Service Shipping Equity Act in May. It makes no sense to create a competitive disadvantage for the Postal Service by barring them from these kinds of shipments, especially given the Postal Services dire financial condition, argued Ms. Speier, noting that in 2019 alone the wineries in her state shipped around 275.6 million cases of vino. This most recent version of the bill has 31 co-sponsors from both parties.

Allowing the post office into banking make that back into banking, in which it participated for much of last century is a more involved matter. But thanks to none other than Mr. DeJoy, it is an experiment now in progress. September saw the rollout of a pilot program in which postal outlets in four locations Washington, D.C., Baltimore, the Bronx and Falls Church, Va. are providing bare-bones financial services. For a small fee, customers can deposit payroll or business checks up to $500 onto a single-use gift card that functions like a bank debit card.

A robust postal banking system is a development that progressives, and the American Postal Workers Union, have long favored. Many Americans, especially those in lower income and minority communities, dont trust the financial system or dont have easy access to it. One in four American households is unbanked or underbanked, including half of all Black households, notes the Save the Post Office Coalition. This leads to costly alternatives that function as a lifetime tax on accessing your own money.

The American Postal Workers Union negotiated a banking pilot program in its 2016 contract, but the previous postmaster general declined to act on it. When Mr. DeJoy came in, the union redoubled its efforts and convinced him to give it a shot. Mr. DeJoy deserves at least a sliver of credit for giving this progressive priority a bit of space to prove itself. Postal officials are already exploring ways to expand the program.

Of course, any significant expansion would require legislation. Which means all together now! that Congress needs to make itself useful. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, has been championing postal banking for a few years. As part of its agenda, the Save the Post Office Coalition wanted Congress to include a more expansive test program in the appropriations for the 2022 fiscal year. The groups co-founder, Ms. McConnell, happens to be the daughter of the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, which is kind of funny when you think about it.

Republicans like the senior McConnell are often accused of trying to undermine the Postal Service, in part because of their insistence that it should operate more like a private business not to mention periodic calls by conservatives to fully privatize it. Mr. Trump is a hard-core post office hater, and frequently trashed it during his presidency. But the survival of the service should not be a partisan matter. If anything, Republicans should be itching to keep things running smoothly, since rural areas tend to suffer most when mail services falter. It is in everyones interest to get creative about revitalizing this vital institution to think outside the post office box, if you will.

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Opinion | Louis DeJoy Is Doing Something Progressives Like - The New York Times

I think the temperature is there for somebody to run against him, said Cathy Brienza, founder of Ridgewood JOLT, a local progressive advocacy group in Gottheimers district. I think he should be afraid.

But by all appearances, Gottheimer is not feeling any heat from the left, even as activists hold protests outside his suburban North Jersey district office, about 25 miles from New York City.

No primary opponents have emerged to challenge Gottheimer in 2022, partly because hes a massive fundraiser who, sitting on $11 million in campaign cash, would dominate the airwaves in the nations most expensive media market. At the same time, New Jersey Democrats understand that running a liberal in a district that had been represented by Republicans for decades could imperil a seat Gottheimer has managed to win comfortably.

Also working in Gottheimers favor is New Jerseys unique ballot system, which gives sweeping influence over primaries to party leaders and makes the already tough challenge of ousting an incumbent even more daunting. Though this format has long favored the party establishment, its now having the unintended effect of helping insulate an incumbent whos going against the legislative strategy of his partys president.

The so-called county line, in which primary candidates are listed with other establishment politicians on the ballot, has been the bane of Democrats and Republicans who fail to win their partys backing. But the fight against it has taken on a new intensity over the past year amid the ongoing schism between progressives and more traditional Democrats. A progressive coalition has filed a lawsuit challenging the ballot structure.

While many of those progressive activists have been allied with Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, the governor won his first primary thanks in part to the strength of the line and ran on it again for his reelection primary in June despite facing pressure to eschew it.

On most New Jersey primary ballots, candidates endorsed by their local county party organizations are grouped together on the same row or column, from the top of the ticket to town council races. Off-the-line candidates are sometimes placed in a row or column by themselves, occasionally at the far end of the ballot in whats referred to as ballot Siberia.

The system has helped political bosses some elected, some not wield control over New Jersey politics for decades, from Camden County to Hudson County. And even incumbents who fall out of favor with a single local power broker can find themselves stripped of the line, making their reelections a near impossibility.

Because of the line and the county party system, there is less of a robust culture of primaries in New Jersey, like in New York, where you had a whole wave of Democratic legislators get unseated by primary challenges in 2018 and 2020, said Joe Dinkin, campaign director for the Working Families Party, whose New Jersey affiliate has targeted Gottheimers district office with protests. Its structurally been harder for that culture of primaries to take hold.

Experts say the line is a more effective tool against lesser-known insurgent candidates for offices like state Legislature and county commission than for members of Congress. Gottheimers office, for instance, will be the first one listed on the 2022 primary ballot since neither of New Jerseys U.S. senators are up for reelection and no better-known candidates will draw voters eyeballs.

Still, there are signs Gottheimer has benefited. He didnt even face a primary in 2018, the same year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of the original Squad won their seats in Congress. And last year, when Gottheimer did face a challenge from the left, the line seemed to make a difference, albeit a relatively small one, in his favor.

In that 2020 election, three of the four counties in Gottheimers district didn't use "the line" format for their ballots. But Bergen County, which makes up about 80 percent of the districts Democratic primary electorate, did. Gottheimer defeated progressive Arati Kreibich by a roughly two-to-one margin. He won by 34 points in Bergen County. In the three other counties that did not use the line, his margin was between 23 and 30 points.

This suggests that in a closer race, the line would certainly have made a difference in the outcome, said Julia Sass Rubin, a Rutgers University professor who has studied New Jerseys ballot designs effect on elections and advocates eliminating it.

In a statement to POLITICO, Gottheimer said the House must pass reconciliation bill and the bipartisan infrastructure package, which includes two million labor jobs, climate resiliency, clean drinking water, and resources to fix our roads and bridges. Im committed to doing what it takes to get them both across the finish line.

Im not a fan of those who are obstructing the Presidents agenda, blocking the Gateway Tunnel, and risking the reinstatement of SALT and support for universal pre-k and child care, he said.

For their part, some New Jersey Democrats are beginning to grow impatient with Gottheimer.

State Senate Majority Leader Loretta Weinberg, who for years has been a champion of the left in New Jersey politics, took issue with Gottheimer attacking Pelosi for breaching her firm, public commitment to vote on the infrastructure bill alone.

I dont know if hell have a primary fight next year. Im not concentrated on it. Right now its about getting through the Biden agenda, Weinberg said. And I dont think it was appropriate for him to have attacked Nancy Pelosi, who I and the majority of Democrats I know have enormous respect for.

Democratic State Chair LeRoy Jones, while not mentioning Gottheimer by name, authored an op-ed this week unmistakably aimed at Gottheimer that urged the states House delegation to go with Bidens strategy.

Anything less than full party unity will invite political disaster and mean a failure to meet this critical moment, Jones wrote.

The intensity of the backlash to Gottheimer has given progressives some hope that, should it continue, a competitive primary is a possibility.

If there was ever a time when a Democrat could put themselves in such ignominy and shame to really merit a primary challenge that breaks through and gets people to pay attention ... I think its behavior like this, Dinkin said.

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Josh Gottheimer is taunting the far left. Hes still unlikely to face a serious primary. - POLITICO