A NEW YEAR OF SOCIALIST ILLOGIC.

Pajamas Media contributor A. J. Kaufman identifies the "Leftist Loser of the Year."

Seattle socialist Rep. Pramila Jayapal takes the proverbial cake for losing.

She is the vicious chair of the “Congressional Progressive Caucus,” and the public face behind a radical mission to use the bipartisan infrastructure bill to force Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and other potentially reluctant Democrats into passing the “Build Back Better” social welfare extravaganza.

During the summer and fall, Speaker Nancy Pelosi delayed numerous infrastructure votes because of Jayapal, who once ranted, “We will agree to the bipartisan bill if, and only if, we also pass the reconciliation bill first.”

Try not to think of a jack o'lantern in the first week of November.  Or the spectacle of an even larger omnibus bill in Congress, which would have enabled the Gimme Caucus to avoid having to stake out that position.

Now for the pedantic point: in logic, "if and only if" is synonymous with "necessary and sufficient" or "implies and is implied by."  We can talk about passage of the "reconciliation bill" (the latest porkulus) preceding the Gimme Caucus agreeing to the "bipartisan bill" (that saddles municipalities with yet more roads and sewer mains they can't maintain).  Porkulus thus implies infrastructure, meaning porkulus is sufficient for the Gimme Caucus allowing a vote on infrastructure.  I can envision a House of Representatives in which porkulus passed without any consideration of infrastructure, thus infrastructure could be necessary for porkulus, but not the only way to get porkulus.

The converse proposition, the way the representative worded it, cannot be true.  The whole point of the Gimme Caucus blocking a vote on infrastructure all summer was to pass porkulus first, meaning infrastructure was not sufficient for porkulus in the House.  It's a logical error commonly made.  "As you may imagine, with the logic of conditions being so entwined, it is very easy to get tangled in a mess of necessary and sufficient conditions. This is especially the case when attempting to state whether one thing will cause another to happen."  But logic is to socialists as crucifixes are to vampires.