The West Virginia senator’s comment from mid June underscores how Biden undermined talks by abruptly linking the bill to a social-welfare spending package.
The West Virginia senator’s comment from mid-June underscores how Biden undermined talks by abruptly linking the bill to a social-welfare spending package.
A t the White House on Thursday, President Biden, flanked by a group of five Democratic senators and five Republican senators, announced: “We have a deal.”
The deal that Biden and the ten senators had agreed to was a legislative framework to spend $579 billion on infrastructure over the next five years.
Biden noted that Republicans hadn’t agreed to include any of his social-welfare spending in the deal.
“We’ll see what happens in a reconciliation bill in the budget process,” Biden said of the spending proposals not included in the deal. “If we get some compromise there, and if we can’t, see if I can attract all the Democrats to a position. But they’re going to move on a dual track, and that’s all I’ll say.”
“You know, a lot of us go back a long way, where we’re used to doing one thing: Give each other our word and that’s the end,” Biden added. “Nobody questions it. They have my word, I’ll stick with what they proposed, and they’ve given me their word as well. So, where I come from, that’s good enough for me.”
Biden’s statement that he would “see what happens” with a reconciliation clearly indicated that the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill did not depend on passage of the reconciliation bill.
One of the Senate Democrats’ lead negotiators — Joe Manchin of West Virginia — agreed on June 16 that the bipartisan bill should not depend on passage of a partisan bill. “It should not be conditional,” Manchin told CNN’s Manu Raju. “It should be based on the merit of what the bill is.”
But mere hours after Biden’s first White House press conference with the bipartisan group of senators, the president held a solo press conference where he added a new condition to the deal he’d made: Biden said he would sign the bipartisan deal only if Congress passed a reconciliation bill, which Democrats can pass without any Republican support.
“If this [bipartisan deal] is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Biden said at the second press conference.
With that remark, Biden turned the bipartisan bill into a hostage that would be killed if Joe Manchin and Bernie Sanders could not agree on a Democrats-only reconciliation bill to increase social spending by trillions of dollars.
Of course, the bipartisan bill would remain a hostage only if ten or more Senate Republicans are willing to vote for it.
And why would ten Senate Republicans offer themselves up as willing hostages in a ploy to pressure Joe Manchin and other moderate Democrats to reach an agreement with the far Left?
A big reason Republicans had entered into bipartisan negotiations with moderate Democrats in the first place was that a bipartisan deal on “core infrastructure” would reduce pressure on moderate Democrats to sign onto Bernie Sanders’s wish list.
Republican negotiators of the bipartisan deal had never insisted that Democrats would not attempt a reconciliation bill after the passage of the bipartisan deal, but they had also never agreed that enactment of the bipartisan bill would depend on enactment of a partisan bill.
By making passage of the former dependent on the latter, Biden may very well have killed the deal he was so proud to announce on Thursday.
South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, one of eleven GOP senators who had expressed support for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, told Politico in an interview on Thursday night that Biden had made Republicans supportive of a bipartisan deal look like “f[***]ing idiot[s].”
“If he’s gonna tie them together, he can forget it!” Graham said. “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.”