The right wing of congressional Democrats is making a lot of noise about the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package that contains the centerpieces of Joe Biden’s agenda. While all Senate Democrats voted to approve the budget allowing the reconciliation bill to be considered, a handful of right-wing House Democrats, spearheaded by New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer, now say they won’t vote to approve that budget resolution unless they can decouple the infrastructure bill from reconciliation—voting to approve it right away, which would give their right-wing Democratic counterparts in the Senate carte blanche to pare the reconciliation bill down to a bare nubbin.

By so doing, Gottheimer & Ilk aren’t really attacking the progressives’ priorities, which were embodied in the $6 trillion reconciliation package that Bernie Sanders introduced, before he accepted the compromise level of $3.5 trillion. They’re attacking the programs and processes put forth by Speaker Pelosi, Leader Schumer, and, yes, President Biden, who vowed to sign either both bills or neither before Republican rumbling compelled him to make a rhetorical retreat. They’re attacking the near-consensus positions of the entire party—to expand Medicare and child care, create paid sick leave and child-raising supports, make community college tuition-free, enact universal pre-K, and bring into being a number of programs to fight the climate crisis.

They are every bit as at odds with mainstream Democratic beliefs as the Dixiecrats were in 1964 and 1965, when that mainstream enacted the landmark civil rights and Great Society programs over the Dixiecrats’ opposition.

So it’s time for our neo-Dixiecrats to be forthright about what and whom they’re opposing. Their war isn’t against Bernie and AOC. It’s against Good Moderate Joe. If Gottheimer et al. mean what they say, at least one of them should announce his or her intent to run against Biden in the 2024 Democratic primaries. That’s what their opposition is really about.