Breaking: You're Allowed to Demand More From Your Government

The Inflation Reduction Act isn't good enough. We have the right to say that!

We feel ya Bernie. (Photo: Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

On Sunday, the Democratic Party did something way out of character: it passed a bill.

Yes, ring the bells, set the fireworks off, Democrats in Washington have, lemme see if I’m reading this correctly, “done something”??? After over 18 months of hell, and the headfake to end all headfakes from Joe Manchin, Senate Democrats passed the Build Back Better Inflation Reduction Act on a 51-50 party line split, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting the tie-breaking vote. (And yes, every time I write something like “51 Democrats back the IRA,” it is funny to me.) Among other things, the IRA (lol again) contains the biggest government investment in American history in the fight against climate change; the consensus is that the climate provisions in the bill will cut emissions by around 40 percent by 2030. The IRA (sorry, but it’s still funny) will also allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of some prescription drugs and will raise some taxes on big corporations.

So what are we to make of this? Some liberals are already proclaiming that the entire Earth has been saved.

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Other people are pleading with us to just recognize that a great thing has happened, rather than point out the flaws in the IRA (ok, I swear this is the last time, but seriously, “Dems say that the IRA deserves our unswerving support” is just objectively hilarious as a sentence!!!):

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And still others are lashing out at the politicians who dared to find fault with any portion of the bill—namely, you guessed it, Bernie Sanders:

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Well, I am here to tell you: the planet has not been saved. It’s OK to criticize the bill. And you have every right to demand more from your government, even when it makes progress on something important. These shouldn’t be difficult ideas to process, but here we are.

Let’s just go through these points one by one.