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Many influential interest groups and lawmakers are fighting to include different ideas.

Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said he supported the infrastructure plan’s inclusion of the Pro Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize

The fraught politics of personal cars, SUVs and diesel trucks, meanwhile, meant some highly effective climate policies didn’t make it into Biden’s plan.

White House Deputy National Climate Adviser Ali Zaidi said in a phone interview. “It’s about making sure that the investments are made in a way that stretches the geography of opportunity to every Zip code, that fully avails the environmental justice upside and totally leans into the supply- chain and domestic manufacturing opportunities that all this presents.”

“The focus across the board is to try to deliver the upside in small towns and big cities and all the places in between, with an emphasis on communities that are very often left behind and left out,

“In the climate space, if we cared only about optimizing economic efficiency we’d probably only consider a carbon price,” he added. “But as we’ve learned from over 15 years of carbon-pricing around the globe, that works out better on economists’ whiteboards than it does in reality.”

Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy team at the center-left think tank Third Way, said in an email, “The 'best’ use of taxpayer funds isn’t always the one that maximizes economic efficiencies.”

Some of the biggest emissions savings in transportation would come from ending the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035, followed soon after by heavy trucks. The plan avoids those politically dicey mandates.

The incentives and other policies mirror those championed by Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has called for major rebates when drivers buy electric vehicles.

The president’s infrastructure ambitions depend on Schumer’s ability to shepherd a package through the evenly split Senate.

Even supporters of the infrastructure push say it has elements that bend to political forces. Some economists, for instance, believe the plan’s call for “Buy American” provisions to ensure infrastructure is made by American workers will drive up the cost of the measures for the federal government. But those provisions are fiercely supported by unions and other liberal groups because they boost the amount of federal spending that has to be directed to American workers.

Democrats effectively succeeded in running out the clock on this year's legislative session by depriving the Republicans of a quorum needed to pass the bill in a late-night session

Among other steps, the bill makes mail-in voting more difficult, bans after-hours and drive-through voting that helped Black and Latino voters in the Houston area cast their ballots in 2020. It prohibits early voting on Sundays -- a popular practice for Black churches -- before 1 pm and makes it easier to overturn an election.

"When you are pushed to extremes you respond to that with extreme(s)," Moody said on CNN's "New Day" on Monday.

Some Democrats may see hope in the fact that Manchin was angry and disappointed that Republicans used the filibuster to kill off the bipartisan January 6 commission. But he has so far given no indication that he will temper his desire for bipartisan action.

More evidence of Republican efforts to build on Trump's election fraud lies are causing some Democrats to wonder how much longer it will be politically feasible for Biden to pursue deals with a Republican Party that appears bent on locking them out of power.

"Let's be clear. If 10 Republican Senators cannot even vote for a bipartisan commission to investigate the January 6th insurrection, 10 Republican Senators will not vote for anything meaningful to improve the lives of the American people. We must abolish the filibuster & act now," Sanders wrote.

If the infrastructure deal fails, that event may come to be seen as the moment when a more partisan White House approach became inevitable.

If the emergency theory seems despairing, the moderate theory seems like it could benefit from a little more strategic thinking, especially about what kind of legislation would prevent some future subversion of the vote. (A reform to the bafflingly complex Electoral Count Act of 1887 seems like a place to start.)

This is the point when I’m supposed to tell you which of these three approaches will actually Stop Trump and which will ignominiously fail. But the frustrating truth is that as adaptations to the unprecedented weirdness of the Trump phenomenon, all three attitudes — maximalist, moderate and deliberately inactive — seem somewhat reasonable.

It was meant, as the Supreme Court described it in 1975, “to free widowed and divorced mothers from the necessity of working, so that they could remain home to supervise their children.”

Eligibility was determined by states and localities, which found various ways to exclude Black women. With the civil rights revolution in the 1960s, however, more Black mothers were able to receive benefits.

But universal day care programs that would help women work didn’t go anywhere either. In 1971, Congress passed a bill that would have created a national network of high-quality, sliding-scale child care centers, akin to those that exist in many European countries. Urged on by Patrick Buchanan, Richard Nixon vetoed it, writing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the national government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family‐centered approach.”

Ever since, efforts to expand government-supported child care have faced furious opposition from the religious right.

At the same time, many on the right, driven partly by concerns about low birthrates, have awoken to the crushing financial burden of parenthood. The public policy debate is thus no longer whether to subsidize child rearing, but how. Mitt Romney’s Family Security Act, for example, would give parents $350 a month for each child under 6, and $250 a month for children between 6 and 17, up to $1,250 per family per month.

With the laissez-faire economic assumptions that dominated America since the Reagan administration discredited, Democrats no longer cower when the right accuses them of fostering big government. As Biden said in his address to Congress on Wednesday, “Trickle-down economics has never worked.”

This doesn’t mean that the American Families Plan is going to happen. With little chance of any Republican support, it would have to be passed through the reconciliation process, so its fate likely lies in the hands of Joe Manchin, the Senate’s most conservative Democrat. Still, it’s amazing that it’s suddenly possible that American parenthood could actually become a less financially brutalizing experience.

That means passing big, bold legislation. And the institution Schumer leads — the Senate — is the primary obstacle to that happening.

How do you win over Trump voters? What kinds of economic policies can help deliver Democrats victory in 2022? How should the party approach topics like race and gender? How will he pass bills, like the For The People Act, that can’t go through budget reconciliation? And, of course, what do you do about the filibuster?

The year after that shameful vote, Democrats lost their Senate majority and Senate Republicans blocked life-saving gun bills for the following six years.

These votes came after a gun sold without a completed background check was used to kill nine African Americans during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. These bills were the only two gun violence prevention measures to pass out of the House that year and they ended up on Senate Majority Leader McConnell's desk in his "Senate Graveyard."

On March 11, the House passed Thompson and Clyburn's background check bills once again. Sen. Chris Murphy who introduced S.529, the companion bill to Rep. Thompson's bill, is tasked with passing the bill in the Senate.

The Brady background check and the assault weapons ban bills were signed into law more than 27 years ago, the last time Congress passed a meaningful gun control bill.

The gun violence prevention movement worked tirelessly to secure a Democratic majority in the House, the Senate and the White House. It's time for Democratic senators to reform the rules to force an up-or-down vote on lifesaving gun violence prevention measures. They must not squander this opportunity to take meaningful action to end the gun violence crisis in our nation.

Without ending the Senate filibuster, public safety policies with broad American support will not make it onto President Biden's desk. That means we can expect more than 100 Americans to keep dying by guns every single day.

The “Build Back Better” plan that his economic advisers recommended Mr. Biden pursue this week would lead with those physical investments: a combination of spending and tax incentives on traditional infrastructure, high-growth industry cultivation and carbon-reducing energy investment that documents suggest could top $2 trillion

At the same time, Democratic leaders will most likely prepare to move at least one part of Mr. Biden’s plans quickly through the budget reconciliation process, which allows senators to skirt the filibuster and pass legislation with a bare majority, as they did for the coronavirus relief bill. Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the chairman of the Finance Committee, said in an interview that he is drawing up legislative text for tax increases to fund the Biden spending: “I’m going to start rolling out specific proposals so that people can have ideas about how they might proceed,” he said.

Of course, it’s not yet certain that Senate Democrats will even unify in support of the bill. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who votes against his party with some regularity, is the lone Democrat who didn’t sponsor it, and he has yet to signal unequivocal support. If he does get behind it, he would have to work to roll back the filibuster as well (something that he and at least one other Democratic senator, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, haven’t yet gotten behind) in order to make that support mean anything.

Biden's relief proposal now shifts to Congress, where it may change substantially as Democratic leaders transform it into a bill. They must decide whether they want to use a special legislative process called reconciliation, which would require only a simple majority of votes to pass the Senate -- eliminating the need for Republican support -- but would limit the provisions that could be included. Also, reconciliation also be used only sparingly each year.

In his speech Thursday night, Biden said he would like to work with members of both parties to enact his American Rescue Plan, indicating that he wants to go the traditional route, which would require the backing of at least 10 Republican senators.

Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York told The Washington Post on Thursday that people should get an additional $2,000 in stimulus checks on top of the $600 they received as part of the $900 billion relief package lawmakers passed last month -- more than the $1,400 top-off payment Biden is suggesting.

In coming weeks, senators will have their hands full with President Donald Trump's impeachment trial and with voting on the President-elect's Cabinet nominees, none of whom have been confirmed yet.

Whatever leaders decide, the effort is expected to have an easier time passing in the House -- which approved a $3 trillion relief package last May that contained measures similar to those in Biden's plan -- even though Democrats now hold a slimmer majority there.

One of those senators is Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia. He has recently expressed doubts over providing $2,000 in stimulus payments, preferring a more targeted approach.

President-elect Joe Biden unveiled a $1.9 trillion relief package Thursday that included more stimulus payments and other direct aid, but don't expect to see those funds in your bank account anytime soon.

On one closely watched issue, Republican Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa offered an amendment to prevent a hike in the minimum wage to $15 an hour during a pandemic

Democrats want to include a $15 minimum wage in the Covid relief bill, but her measure could have been complicated for centrist members

But before a roll call vote was called, Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont Independent who is the chair of the Budget Committee and a champion of the $15 minimum wage, intervened and said his proposal would actually make the jump to $15 over five years, not right away as Ernst had formulated in her amendment.

The budget resolution that passed is not the Covid relief bill. It simply sets the stage for Democrats to be able to use a process known as "budget reconciliation" to pass the relief bill on a party-line vote, possibly in late February or March, after the impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump is complete in the Senate.

The House already passed the budget measure earlier in the week.

Biden has said he is willing to go forward without the support of Republicans, but he's also stressed that he's willing to make certain concessions if it will earn bipartisan support.

Congressional Democrats have also made clear that they think time is of the essence on the proposal, and a deep divergence remains between Biden's $1.9 trillion and the $618 billion GOP proposal.

The counterproposal still includes $160 billion to battle the pandemic, but Republican senators want to send smaller, more targeted relief checks and only extend unemployment benefits through June, not September.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated during a briefing this week there are certain "bottom lines" that Biden wants to be in the next round of Covid-19 relief

"His view is that at this point in our country, when 1-in-7 American families don't have enough food to eat, we need to make sure people get the relief they need and are not left behind,"

Republicans are unhappy Democrats are resorting to the aggressive tactic, though, arguing it will set a partisan tone for the rest of Biden's presidency and that he's not operating as the political unifier he pledged to be

The 10 Senate Republicans who met with the President to discuss his relief package are pushing for talks to continue

The measure passed by a voice vote, signaling that Democrats were not attempting to defeat it. Mr. Biden’s stimulus package would increase the wage to $15 per hour by 2025, and Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, who has been leading the push for the wage increase in the Senate, said he would not contest Ms. Ernst’s effort because he had never sought to raise it during the pandemic.

“A $15 federal minimum wage would be devastating for our hardest-hit small businesses at a time they can least afford it,” Ms. Ernst said on the Senate floor. “We should not have a one-size-fits-all policy set by Washington politicians.”

Among the amendments that passed with bipartisan support — by a vote of 99 to 1 — on Thursday was a measure from Mr. Manchin and Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, to restrict $1,400 direct checks included in Mr. Biden’s plan from going to high earners, though it did not specify what income level was too high. Democrats have largely agreed to limit payouts for Americans with higher incomes.

The day had started as one of triumph for Mr. Biden and his party, with Democrats coming off elections the day before that sealed control of the Senate by picking up two seats in Georgia and Congress scheduled to clear away the last formal Republican objections to his victory by certifying the Electoral College outcome.

Filling out his cabinet, Mr. Biden chose Judge Merrick B. Garland, whose Supreme Court nomination Republicans blocked in 2016, to be attorney general, placing the task of repairing a beleaguered Justice Department in the hands of a centrist judge.

The assault on the Capitol by pro-Trump demonstrators devolved into a physical confrontation that halted the process of certifying the Electoral College outcome

It’s not protest. It’s insurrection.

Other interest groups quickly seized on the Georgia results to ratchet up the pressure on Mr. Biden to make good on his campaign promises.

“The work of the moment and the work of the next four years must be the restoration of democracy, of decency, honor, respect, the rule of law,” he said, adding later: “We must step up

Mr. Biden’s advisers are deep into the process of developing policy proposals to deliver to Congress in the coming weeks, starting with another stimulus package

Shortly after, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter a one-minute video in which he empathized with the rioters because “we had an election that was stolen from us,” but then urged them to “go home now. We have to have peace. We have to have law and order.”

The Democratic victories in Georgia put Mr. Biden’s party in control at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue and reduced the risk of total partisan gridlock in Congress, at least for two years.

“With Schumer in control of the calendar, he’s got the opportunity to do some really substantial things.”

The Biden team is also drafting proposals to implement the president-elect’s “Build Back Better” campaign agenda, including new government spending on clean energy, infrastructure, health care and education, financed by tax increases on the rich and corporations.

Mr. Biden’s allies in the Senate expressed optimism that, armed with committee chairmanships and control of the legislative calendar, they could advance the president-elect’s policy goals.

“We need to fix a lot of the damage Trump’s done, and then there’s pent-up demand for a whole lot of things — what do we do about climate and about racial inequality, about wealth inequality, about structural racism,” said Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, who is set to be the top Democrat on the Senate Banking Committee.

Mr. Biden has also proposed the most ambitious climate agenda of any president in history, including $2 trillion in spending on green initiatives. A majority in the Senate gives Mr. Biden options to make some of that happen.

But Mr. Biden’s agenda will be constrained by the Democrats’ narrow advantages in the House and in the Senate, where moderate Democrats such as Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona will wield vast power over which plans can pass.

Before the outbreak of violence on Capitol Hill, Mr. Biden signaled on Wednesday morning that despite the shift of Senate control to Democrats, he would still attempt to build legislative coalitions with Republicans on his top priorities

A high-profile business lobbying group that has long supported many Republicans, the National Association of Manufacturers, denounced Mr. Trump on Wednesday for inciting the violence and suggested it was time for his administration to invoke a constitutional provision to remove him

There's no question, when looking at the landscape, that major Democratic gains -- along the line of a 6- or 7-seat net pickup are possible.  At the moment the Cook Political Report, a non-partisan campaign tip sheet, rates 10 GOP-held seats in its most endangered categories as opposed to just two Democratic seats

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) promised that "everything is on the table" if Republicans, as they are expected to do, move forward before the election to confirm President Trump's pick for the Supreme Court vacancy caused by Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death last week.

Adding seats to the Supreme Court, eliminating the filibuster entirely and granting statehood to DC and Puerto Rico.

While it's not clear just how far Schumer would be willing to take his threat if and when Democrats retake the majority and he is placed in charge of running the chamber, any student who has ever taken a poli-sci class can understand why a bigger majority makes these things more possible.

If Schumer, say, is overseeing a 51-seat Democratic majority in 2021, he can only afford to lose two votes of his colleagues on any major legislation.

Now consider how different Schumer's outlook would be if he was sitting on a 53- or 54-seat majority. He could afford to let Manchin and Sinema go their own ways on this issue or that -- and still be left with wiggle room to get things passed by simple majority.

This is euphemism. There was no issue with the election. State legislatures passed laws, courts interpreted them, and officials put them into action. This was true in states Trump won, like Texas and North Carolina, as much as it was in states he lost. It almost goes without saying that the real issue, the reason Republicans are actually unhappy, is that Biden is president and Democrats control Congress.

in 2009, during the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, that all but three Republican senators (two of whom are now gone) refused to support a desperately needed stimulus package. And to get their support to reach the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, Obama had to cut spending well below what the economy needed. In the House, all the yes votes came from Democrats.

Both McConnell and then-House Republican leader John Boehner, he writes, realized that if “they fought a rearguard action, if they generated controversy and threw sand in the gears, they at least had a chance to energize their base and slow me and the Democrats down at a time when the country was sure to be impatient.”

they can assure moderate voters that radicalism won’t be on the table since progressives would have to negotiate with middle-of-the-roaders such as Manchin, Warner and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to get anything passed. But unlike McConnell, all three members of this moderate trio want to get things done — and want the new president to succeed.

This convergence of fossil-fuel dependence, cultural conservatism, and isolation from the most dynamic modern industries captures how comprehensively the two parties are divided by their exposure to, and attitudes about, the changes reshaping America.

The irony is that the energy transition may represent the best chance for the states most reliant on fossil fuels to benefit from the new sources of economic growth.

Last year Walter co-wrote a detailed study on how a shift away from fossil fuels would affect the states. Replacing fossil fuels with lower-carbon energy sources, she said, will create “a tremendous amount of jobs in Republican states.”

The 19 states that top the EIA’s latest rankings—for the most carbon emitted per dollar of economic output in 2018—present a singular profile. They begin with Wyoming, West Virginia, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Alaska at the top of the list and then extend across the South (including Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas), the heartland (including Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska), and the Mountain West (Montana, New Mexico)

The political leadership in these states has opposed most efforts to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels to clean energy sources. Fourteen of these states, for instance, have joined in a lawsuit (led by West Virginia) now before the Supreme Court that could undercut the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions.

The Republican senators from these states have also uniformly opposed proposals to limit carbon emissions, such as a clean-electricity standard to phase out carbon-emitting electricity.

That resistance underscores the extent to which the energy transition has been woven into the larger struggle over the country’s direction between what I’ve called the Democrats’ “coalition of transformation” and the competing Republican “coalition of restoration.”

all Senate Republicans are opposing the Build Back Better Act’s more sweeping incentives, which energy analysts agree could enormously accelerate the development of those sources.

Almost all of the states fighting the energy transition are expressing equally intense resistance to social change. In effect, they are fighting the future on both fronts.

The core problem for these states, Muro notes, is that most of them tend to lack the well-educated workers who are, in essence, the crucial raw material for not only internet, computing, and communications firms but also advanced manufacturing.

the torrent of culturally conservative legislation across the fossil-fuel-reliant states (and GOP-controlled states more broadly) adds another barrier to tech companies pursuing significant expansions in them. “They want to decentralize somewhat, but they are very concerned about how this plays with the people they are trying to hire,” Muro says. Companies, he adds, “need to make sure the talent is not put off” by these restrictive social policies.

Devashree Saha, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute, told me most economic models project that, overall, the transition from a fossil-fuel to a clean-energy economy will create more jobs than it destroys in energy-related sectors.

The bipartisan infrastructure bill that Biden signed last year included several provisions designed to channel jobs in the clean-energy economy toward places that would be hurt by diminished reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal communities. The now-stalled Build Back Better plan contains further incentives to steer that investment, though those haven’t been sufficient to overcome the opposition from Republicans representing the fossil-fuel states, or Manchin.

The most important exception to this pattern is that many congressional Republicans have backed tax credits to encourage deployment of wind and solar power.

The loud demands for more domestic oil and gas drilling since Russia invaded Ukraine, and the fierce opposition to any regulation of carbon emissions, show how a low-carbon future has become just another count in the indictment Republicans use to convince their voters that Democrats want to uproot America from its deepest traditions and transform it into something unrecognizable

Democrats say the billionaires tax could be one of the most politically popular elements of their social safety net and climate change bill, which is expected to cost at least $1.5 trillion and could be completed as soon as Wednesday.

“I think there is an absolute understanding that at a time of massive income and wealth inequality, when you have people like Jeff Bezos, in a given year, not paying a nickel in federal income taxes, that these guys are going to have to start paying their fair share,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent.

Such tax avoidance could be adapted to the new system, for instance by shifting wealth from tradable assets like stocks to less liquid ones like real estate or companies.

Democrats’ tax proposal would impose a new interest charge on them, which would be paid when those assets were sold, on top of the existing capital gains tax.

They could also deem up to $1 billion of tradable stock in a single corporation to be a non-tradable asset, to ensure that founders of a company could maintain their controlling shares.

For instance, any gift or bequest that did not go to a spouse or charity would be considered a taxable event, subject to capital gains taxation.

“direct taxes” — a term without clear definition — should be apportioned among the states so that each state’s residents pay a share equal to the share of the state’s population.

For all the challenges confronting him, the president attempted to stay optimistic. As Biden departed the news conference, he offered a thumbs up when asked if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — key Democratic votes — were on board with his $1.75 trillion spending package for families, health care and renewable energy. The president also shrugged off his recent decline in the polls, saying that numbers go up and down

Biden’s overall take on his efforts: On climate change, he’s got $900 billion planned for renewable energy, and Congress will vote this coming week.

The president did leave the G-20 with commitments by his fellow leaders on a global minimum tax that would make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes by assigning their profits to countries with low tax rates.

The president met Sunday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose office said the meeting was held in a “positive atmosphere” despite tensions over human rights and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian missile system, among other issues.

Biden heads Monday to the U.N. climate summit in Scotland, where he’ll once again face questions about whether the world’s wealthiest are doing enough to stop the warming of the Earth by moving away from fossil fuels.

The tensions have risen as Ford and other global automakers have spent billions of dollars designing and building EVs, a move that looked especially smart a year ago when they were caught off guard by the strong demand for their new offerings. 

This past week, General Motors said it would delay opening a large EV truck factory in Michigan by a year, citing a need “to better manage capital investments while aligning with evolving EV demand.” The move followed an earlier announcement by Ford pushing back to late 2024 a target of building 600,000 EVs annually. The company has also temporarily cut one of the production shifts for its electric pickup and paused construction of a $3.5 billion battery plant in Michigan. 

In the U.S., for every five Democrats owning an EV there are two Republicans, said Alexander Edwards, president of Strategic Vision, which surveys new-vehicle buyers. 

His data finds that Democrats give priority to “environmentally friendly” when buying their cars while Republicans have other things they are looking for, such as performance and prestige.

On the campaign trail, however, EVs don’t always sound so cool. The GOP presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy, who is against subsidies, has drawn laughs as he suggests that EV buyers are motivated by “a psychological insecurity,” while former Vice President Mike Pence said during the second Republican presidential primary debate that Biden’s efforts “are driving American gasoline, automotive manufacturing, into the graveyard.”  

As the Democrat talks about trying to protect automotive jobs and help the environment with green technology, they raise concerns about losing work and question whether the governments should subsidize them or mandate future zero-emission vehicle sales, as California has done.  

“The real question is whether we’ll lead or we’ll fall behind in the race to the future; or whether we’ll build these vehicles and the batteries that go in them here in the United States or rely on other countries,” Biden said while visiting a Ford factory early in his administration. 

Underpinning the politics of EVs is an economic divide, made more stark by the rise of interest rates. Most EVs are more expensive than the average new vehicle—which sold for about $46,000 in September.

As new cars and trucks become more costly, the practical effect on buyers shows up in Strategic Vision’s survey: The median family household income of new-car buyers has risen to $122,000. That is a significant increase from around $90,000, where it had been at for a couple of decades until just recently. EV buyers are even better off, with a median household income of $186,000.

In some ways, the green car tensions are a return to the 2012 political season, when GM’s Chevrolet Volt became the embodiment of the Obama administration’s rescue of the Detroit auto industry in 2009 and efforts to promote electrified vehicles.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination, said the problem with the “Obama car” was that one couldn’t put a gun rack in the plug-in hybrid vehicle.

Sales of the Volt disappointed, and Dan Akerson, then CEO of GM, was left fuming that the company hadn’t designed the sedan to become “a political punching bag.”

GM later killed off the Volt.