This, from Brian Klass, a WaPo columnist and politics professor, appears to be the consensus take on things as they are:
Looking at the news, it's clear that there are two emergencies facing the United States - Republican attempts to create American authoritarianism and worsening climate change.
— Brian Klaas (@brianklaas) August 30, 2021
Neither is being treated like an emergency. Both are.
Yet the emergencies — the threats — are not equal.
U.S. action on climate change (or on any pressing issue) hinges on averting Republican authoritarianism, which hinges on the success of Republican state legislatures rigging the electoral process, which, so far, they're accomplishing.
Election subversion is the political story, the national emergency, the one real, monstrous threat "facing the U.S." until November 2024. Nothing else matters — not climate change and what to do about it, not Trump or no Trump in three years, not Gov. DeSantis as a Trumpian doppelgänger, not Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell's obstructionism, not the filibuster, not even gerrymandering — compared to Republicans' theft of American democracy.
For with that will come Republican authoritarianism. And with that, it's game over. On everything.
And congressional Democrats had better wake the fuck up. Rather than investing time on ill-informed criticisms of President Biden and what's happening 7,000 miles away in a country forsaken 20 or 1,200 years ago, they might want to focus on the orchestrated evil occurring in our backyard.