This Is ‘Normal’

Julia Ioffe: “What you’ve been watching for the past two weeks is Washington’s full return to its own version of normalcy. After four years of Donald Trump, and eighteen months of a pandemic that forced the Hill to pass giant, bipartisan rescue packages, Washington is back to what it has looked like since at least the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency: two political parties with radically different aims and visions of good governance, haggling over legislation till the last possible minute.”

“Normal is not necessarily a compliment. Normal for Washington for a long time now has been about the impossibility of passing big, ambitious legislation on a bipartisan basis. The parties are now so far apart in how they view the role of government, and their own priorities, that finding a middle ground is pretty much non-existent.”