To hear Team WIN THE MORNING tell it, President Joe Biden has his infrastructure deal, one that can get 60 Senate votes with significant GOP cooperation, and one that will pass the House as well.
PRESIDENT AHAB: Well, we’ll be damned. JOE BIDEN appears to have all but secured that elusive bipartisan infrastructure deal that both parties have been prattling on about for years. The core group of 10 Senate centrists working on the proposal emerged from a meeting with White House officials Wednesday night and declared that they had a working framework.
TODAY members of that group have been invited to the White House to meet with the president.
Republican Sens. ROB PORTMAN (Ohio) and SUSAN COLLINS (Maine) cautioned that there are still a few details to iron out. But a well-positioned administration source tells us this thing is basically cooked. All that’s left are the handshakes.
SO NOW WHAT? While lawmakers draft up the text, expect the White House to start leaning on Democrats to get in line. We know that so far at least 11 Senate Republicans have agreed to back this plan, but just as many Democrats have expressed reservations, creating tricky math for leadership.
Sen. CHRIS MURPHY (D-Conn.) alluded to this predicament on CNN on Wednesday night. “That deal has 20 votes — not 60 votes,” he said, noting that the group of 21 that wrote the plan will now need to sell this to their colleagues.
The whipping campaign will heat up at a time when party tensions are on the rise. Sen. BERNIE SANDERS (I-Vt.) — who, at least in the immediate term, looks like the loser in this deal — fumed Wednesday on national television that he’s sick of talking about Sen. JOE MANCHIN (D-W.Va.). (We hear you, senator!) Our colleagues Laura Barrón-López and Nicholas Wu have a story up today about how Biden’s honeymoon with the left is over, as progressives are now calling him out by name.
The winners, aside from Biden? Manchin and Sen. KYRSTEN SINEMA (D-Ariz.) top the list. The Democratic duo comes out of this with not only their bipartisan deal, but also effective veto power over the massive reconciliation bill that Sanders et al. are drafting. Neither moderate senator has offered an assurance they’ll back it, despite demands from liberals.
Indeed, the big remaining question about the almost-done deal — which we’re told includes $559 billion in new spending — is whether progressives will go along. It’s one thing to issue threats via the media, another to reject a personal plea from your president. But progressives will also be taking a risk if they do abide. The list of priorities they’d like to pack into the reconciliation bill runs off the page: paid family leave, child care subsidies, climate investments, free community college, an expansion of Medicare, corporate tax hikes. And who knows what Manchin and Sinema will insist on axing after the thing they wanted most — infrastructure — will already be signed into law.
The optimistic view of the situation, from the White House perspective, goes something like this: Manchin and Sinema will be under enormous pressure to support a reconciliation bill after Biden bucked his left flank to make a bipartisan deal on infrastructure. They also point out that by first moving $1 trillion of infrastructure spending through a bipartisan bill, it reduces the price tag of the reconciliation bill by that same amount, making it easier for moderates to support it. There’s also an argument that with $1 trillion of infrastructure removed from the bigger bill, progressives have some more room now for their other priorities.
Seems a bit rosy, but then again, we would not have predicted the bipartisan talks would go this far.
Finally, the Biden-Schumer-Pelosi plan is to move these two bills simultaneously, with each bill needing the other to pass. “We can’t get the bipartisan bill done unless we’re sure we’re getting the budget reconciliation bill done,” Schumer said Wednesday night. “We can’t get the budget reconciliation bill done unless we’re sure of the bipartisan [bill].” Democratic leaders are trying to lash Manchin and the moderates to Bernie and the progressives. The message seems to be: If one side’s bill goes down, so does the other’s.
Lot of chances here for Lucy to yank the football away from Charlie Brown, and Nancy Pelosi's margin in the House is extremely thin. If Kevin McCarthy was as crafty as Mitch, he'd find a way to extort huge cuts in the bill in exchange for support that the Squad couldn't sabotage, for instance,but McCarthy's not that crafty, and Nancy is much better at the job.
We'll see how this pans out. I expect further cuts to the already massively scaled-down bill. But we're about to get a huge helping of "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good" again, as our politics have been for all of my adult life on the Democratic side.
Republicans are pretending to be very, very angry about President Biden’s newly-announced plans to pursue infrastructure and jobs proposals on two tracks — one bipartisan, the other via a simple majority “reconciliation” vote.
But behind this display of fake histrionics lies a very real trap, one designed to bait Democrats into turning on one another.
In case any Democrats are tempted to take this bait, don’t. The only response to GOP anger is for Democrats to remain solidly unified, though this situation also illustrates how challenging this will prove.
Biden and House Democratic leaders have announced that they will not pass a bipartisan Senate bill on infrastructure — one in keeping with the newly-reached bipartisan deal — until the Senate completes a second reconciliation package advancing progressive priorities.
In response, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has now erupted in fake-outrage to Politico:
“I’m not doing that. That’s extortion! I’m not going to do that. The Dems are being told you can’t get your bipartisan work product passed unless you sign on to what the left wants, and I’m not playing that game.”
Meanwhile, a senior GOP aide told Politico that in announcing this two-track strategy, Biden “did real damage” to the possibility of passing the bipartisan bill.
This line was also voiced by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who insisted that Democrats are showing their intention to “hold the bipartisan agreement hostage” to getting reconciliation done.
The clear threat here is that Democrats must drop plans to pass a reconciliation package or forget about getting a bipartisan package first. This is empty bluster sitting atop a pile of baloney.
Republicans have long known that Democrats would converge on this endgame. Indeed, Democrats publicly vowed for months to proceed on “two tracks.”
While working toward a bipartisan compromise on bricks-and-mortar infrastructure, Democrats would craft a reconciliation package containing Biden’s other priorities: Child supports, paid family and medical leave, and investments in education, health care and climate.
If the bipartisan deal were reached (as it now has been), Democrats would pass the reconciliation piece by a simple majority. If the bipartisan deal falls apart, they’d pass everything that way. Republicans have always known that even with a bipartisan deal, Democrats will do a lot more alone.
Now Republicans think they can bluff Democrats into killing a whole host of their most cherished priorities as a precondition for their support for something way more modest that largely consists of previously existing highway and covid-19 relief funding? No way.
This is why the GOP threat is an empty one. If Republicans do sink the bipartisan deal, Democrats still have the option of passing a large package by themselves, via reconciliation.
The trap here is to try to force Manchin and Sinema to drop the reconciliation bill threat and take the "bipartisan" bill, otherwise Republicans will go on TV and say bad things about them. If Manchin and/or Sinema are dumb enough to fall for this, the game is over, and then Republicans can still scuttle the bill and leave Dems with nothing, blaming Biden It would be a complete victory for McConnell.
But I don't think even Manchin and Sinema are this thickheaded to kill reconciliation even after the GOP pulls the plug on the deal they worked for. It's an empty threat...unless Manchin and Sinema do Republicans' work for them.
However, it may not even make it to the Senate, and increasingly it looks like Pelosi doesn't have the votes in the House.
Progressive Democrats’ concerns that their more centrist colleagues won’t support President Joe Biden’s larger spending and tax agenda are starting to bear out.
Oregon Rep. Kurt Schrader, a member of the fiscally conscious Blue Dog Coalition, said in an interview that he’s planning to vote against a budget resolution that would include reconciliation instructions for trillions of dollars in additional spending. Another moderate House Democrat, who requested anonymity to speak freely about a position that would upset party leaders, said the same.
With those two expected “no” votes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t have much more room to maneuver on that first step toward passing a big spending bill, let alone the reconciliation legislation itself that would contain all the details.
She can only lose two more Democratic votes and still adopt the budget resolution in her narrowly divided 220-211 chamber, since no Republicans are likely to vote for it, as budget resolutions are designed to be partisan wish lists.
So again, we'll see.
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