MEET THE NEW POLITBURO, SAME AS THE OLD POLTIBURO.

When these people say "Our Democracy," try hard not to think of "Our Gerontocracy."

Want a little malaise to go with your devalued currency and your cabbage, comrade?

That puts me in mind of another series of Jeff MacNelly cartoons, in which he lampooned the Brezhnev-era Politburo with a cast of Star Wars cantina characters including Lenin in his box, only standing rather than recumbent.

But the communist on corporatist fratricide is taking precisely the form I anticipated.  In the following, "BBB" is the reprise of the Great Society and "BIF" saddles state and local governments with the maintenance of the new bridges and transit equipment they're getting.

Due to the intransigence of a few right-wing House Democrats who made last-minute demands for additional fiscal information that could take weeks to obtain, and the acquiescence of Pelosi and Biden, a planned floor vote on BBB was shelved and reduced to a "rule for consideration," which was approved in a party-line vote of 221-213. Prior to that, BIF passed by a tally of 228-206, with 13 House Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the measure.

Because it wasn't accompanied by a real vote on BBB, six progressives—Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.)—voted against BIF.

"Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first," Omar said in a statement, "risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship."

Those annoying bourgeois politicians, insisting on regular order. It's more important to pretend that there are free benefits to be had now, and to run out of other people's money later.

Mary Small, national advocacy director at the Indivisible Project, said in a statement that Bowman, Bush, Ocasio-Cortez, Omar, Pressley, and Tlaib "demonstrated enormous political courage in their continued fight to hold the line for passage of the Build Back Better Act."

"They understand better than anyone what's at stake with this game-changing package of investments in children and families and our climate," Small added. "Their votes showed that, unlike the corporate Democrats dead-set on derailing the heart of President Biden's agenda on behalf of their corporate donors, they know what it means to serve the people they represent."

The so-called build back better bill simply builds back more welfare dependency and renewable energy boondoggles. My head hurts. I'll give Reason's Steven Greenhut the final word. "Politics Is Rotting Brains and Making Everyone Mad." Indeed.