The president is looking less and less like a modern-day FDR.
The president is looking less and less like a modern-day FDR.
A s all the bluster from President Biden’s first 100 days has receded into the background, so too are the vast declarations of him becoming a transformational president akin to FDR. The reality is that with his agenda flailing, he is looking like a placeholder president. And even he seems to recognize it.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden said this week. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends.” Putting aside the fact that this was a lie — Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have voted 100 percent of the time with Biden — it is revealing that he is already on the defensive about his lack of progress.
When Biden entered office, it was more or less a forgone conclusion that he would end up with some sort of COVID-relief bill. It’s true that at $1.9 trillion, the price tag was high, and it included many liberal wish-list items (such as hundreds of billions of dollars for states, school funding that had nothing to do with reopening this fall, and a temporary Obamacare extension). But the measure was more akin to Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill (i.e. sending lots of money out the door for a fixed period) than it was to Obamacare, which created a permanent new government entitlement.
Biden has spent the last six weeks campaigning for two proposals totaling $4.1 trillion, which would come much closer to the kind of transformational agenda that the Left has been pushing. Billed as infrastructure and family plans, these behemoths include climate-change items, free community college, universal pre-K, subsidized childcare, housing, and paid leave, among other provisions. But several developments have made it less likely that Biden’s ambitions will be realized.
So far, Biden has not been willing to reduce the price of his infrastructure bill enough to gain the support of Republicans led by Senators Shelley Moore Capito who could give him enough votes to pass something without having to worry about a filibuster.
Further complicating matters is news that the Senate parliamentarian has advised Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer that Democrats would be limited in the number of times that they can use the maneuver known as reconciliation to pass legislation with a simple majority.
Democrats had hoped they could turn the budget resolution they already used as a vehicle to pass the COVID-relief bill into some sort of manna from heaven, allowing them to pass multiple reconciliation bills throughout the year. This would have given Democrats the flexibility to break Biden’s $4.1 trillion demands into smaller pieces, perhaps some passing with Republican help while others are passed only with Democrats. Once these plans were passed, they could use next year’s reconciliation bill on other measures, such as to expand Obamacare. But now that strategy is out the window. Instead of getting multiple chances at reconciliation this year, they only can get one more attempt this calendar year, and one next year.
Passing one $4.1 trillion bill through the Senate, and coming up with all the ways to pay for it, is going to be an extremely tall order. And passing major legislation next year, with the midterms approaching, is going to be especially difficult. What’s more, the fact that the parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough put the kibosh on Schumer’s reconciliation gambit (after earlier this year blocking Democrats from passing a minimum-wage increase through this process), suggests that she is going to make it hard for Democrats to shoehorn all of their priorities into a massive reconciliation package.
It’s true that in theory, Democrats could decide to nuke the filibuster, or fire the parliamentarian and instate a new one who will allow them to do whatever they want. The problem is that either plan would require the support of Senators Manchin and Sinema, who so far have resisted such ideas.
Adding further to Biden’s problems is that this debate is happening within the context of rising fears of inflation and with the White House projecting that debt as a share of the economy will rise to the highest level in American history this year, surpassing the World War II record.
Democrats, even so-called moderate ones like Manchin and Sinema, still love spending money. So it’s quite possible Biden will find a way to get more cash out the door. But the type of permanent structural change that Biden and his left-wing partners have been talking about is looking less and less likely.