Please, enough with your takes about how Biden is a legislative mastermind, wheeling and dealing like a modern-day LBJ. He is a bumbling buffoon, past his prime, over his peak, out of his depths. He is ready to trade it all away. For what? For nothing. (1/8)

The "permitting reform" deal somehow manages to all at once roll back the National Environmental Policy Act AND rubber-stamp approval of the 2,000,000,000-cubic-feet-per-day fracked gas Mountain Valley Pipeline. (2/8)

Meanwhile the potentially useful parts of permitting reform (updating the electrical grid and facilitating inter-region clean energy transfer) got punted indefinitely. Biden just got a "study" which would stall the issue for 1.5 years and bring no guarantee of future action (3/8)

So Biden literally got all the negative parts of permitting reform, and now all momentum will be lost for the good parts, whose fate will be much less certain now that they cannot ride the coattails of the broader package (4/8).