The American voters could not have been clearer in 2020.
They gave 7.1 million more votes to Joe Biden than Donald Trump while they were trimming Nancy Pelosi's Democratic majority in the House of Representatives from 35 seats to nine.
Thus they wrote three simple and powerful declarative sentences. They were these: "We do not like Trump. We do not like Pelosi. We want our politicians to get between his personal disgrace and her strident liberalism."
So, a dozen or so moderate U.S. senators split between Democrats and Republicans took the voters at their word and fashioned a hard-won compromise on infrastructure spending.
Now they and the American voters must contend with those very two aforementioned rejected figures rising like knife-wielding Glenn Closes from a bathtub after boiling the rabbit.
Trump, all about himself, but I repeat myself, issued a statement promising primary opposition for any Republicans supporting the infrastructure compromise. He had four years to lead on infrastructure, but didn't.
His current opposition is based not on anything in the compromise. It's that the compromise would be something Joe Biden and the Democrats would brag on themselves about in re-election campaigns, making it harder for him to return to office to do nothing on infrastructure.
That's the very kind of thing a 7.1-million-vote majority of Americans rejected.
Pelosi, brandishing her declining and narrow Democratic majority in the House, which she could very well lose altogether in a few months, declared that the infrastructure bill--regardless of stand-alone merit--will not be approved in her chamber ... unless. She demands that the Senate also send over a $3.5 billion social spending bill.
She presumes to hold hostage agreed-to safe bridges, better broadband, improved water pipes and electric-car charging stations unless the progressive social agenda is fully imposed.
That's the very kind of thing voters found arrogant and unreasonable when they trimmed her Democratic majority.
Neither Trump nor Pelosi opposes the infrastructure bill. Each opposes a narrow compartment of harmony.
There is a genuine debate to be had over the infrastructure compromise. It's whether its patchwork of so-called pay-for provisions is credible.
Soon the Congressional Budget Office will score them as somewhere between lip service and real mathematics. My position is that something between lip service and arithmetic is an improvement, which is all I'm seeking.
The real election reform that America needs is for the politicians to pay attention to the elections.
It's for three dozen Republican senators, at least, to leave the Trump orbit.
It's for Democratic House members to tell their leader they can walk and chew gum at the same time, meaning pass infrastructure for infrastructure's sake while separately making their best case to take their best shot at broader social spending.
I do not quarrel with all or even most of the progressive spending. I quarrel with the unwillingness of Pelosi to make that case separately on its own merit.
Pelosi's position is "give me everything I want or give the nation nothing it needs." Trump's is "give my ego its presidency back."
The solutions-oriented bipartisan group called No Labels has a clever word for this kind of nonsense. It's "Maddity," standing for the quality of dialogue you get when you put Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow on television screens.
There are three substantial political bases in this country. There is the Trump cult, which includes Arkansas. There is the arrogant progressive base that extends to Pelosi's left, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She blasted the infrastructure compromise because no people of color were in on it, which happened because none volunteered for the effort.
Then there is the decisive pragmatic center, which decides elections but doesn't contribute enough money to matter as much in Washington as the cultists and the arrogant progressives.
The one thing that might weaken the fringes and strengthen the center is for the infrastructure compromise to pass and for a president who went to the mat for it--Biden--to reap good will from it.
That's precisely what Trump fears.
Trump's best hope for returning the presidency to his ego lies not with his cult, which is substantial but insufficient to win elections. It rests with Pelosi and whether she will continue to overplay progressivism's stridency and arrogance, thus securing less of what we need by insisting on all of what she wants.
Trump and Pelosi are each other's best friend.
I'll close in an extraordinary exercise in tolerance and compromise. I will praise and agree with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell.
He joined 16 other GOP senators in favoring a procedural vote on the infrastructure compromise and said he didn't care what Pelosi thought.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
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