Failure to pass the spending bills is still very much an option.
Failure to pass the spending bills is still very much an option.
S peaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told her members on Thursday, “Don’t embarrass” the president by voting down the bipartisan infrastructure bill. “Do it to save the president humiliation” isn’t the most stirring call in politics, I have to admit.
There were even stranger interpretations of the political moment on offer.
Rep. Connolly recapping Biden remarks today:
"Translation: I'm going to Rome. I want to get off that plane, and disprove Putin and Xi, who say democracies can't get anything done. I'd like to have something at hand to disprove that. Translation, pass the infrastructure bill."
— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) October 28, 2021
So the idea is to pass the infrastructure bill, to secure the framework to enable the passage of universal pre-K, so that Joe Biden can show up in Scotland and puff his chest out to Chairman Xi in the full knowledge that America can also institute the centralized education of the toddlers, just like Beijing!
The president’s own argument for passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill also was about himself. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.” Forget the American people; do it for me, Joe Biden.
Before heading overseas, Biden gave a speech from the East Room that made it sound as if the biggest spending splurge in American history is a tidy bit of economic conservatism. We were going to win the economic competition with China with a “fiscally responsible, fully paid-for” bill that would “lower the inflationary pressures on the economy” and “lower the deficit.” Meanwhile, he’s telling his party that passing these two bills would make his presidency more transformational than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s combined.
Biden’s halting, frail, sometimes slurring speech was all in the service of a “historic economic framework.” Which is like bragging about an epochal memo, or a watershed PowerPoint slide. What was the framework? It was just a grab bag of items in the ever-shrinking Build Back Better legislation, with enormous round dollar figures attached to them.
What this wasn’t, was an agreement between moderate Democratic senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, or progressive House members Cori Bush, Rashida Tlaib, and Pramila Jayapal. Those three House members alone can sink any legislation, and none of them were persuaded to give up their leverage by passing the infrastructure bill by this announced framework, or by the pressing need to puff up Biden ahead of an international flight.
Setting arbitrary deadlines has failed to generate pressure on either the Senate moderates or the House progressives. If you assume that the House progressives will not want to throw away the Democratic majority next year without passing some of the largest U.S. government spending commitments short of a world war, then you will conclude that at some point — maybe before the Christmas recess, or by next spring, they’ll pass something. But are we so sure that they want to pass something? Would the three to six most radical progressive members be punished for torpedoing a bill that they claimed was too watered-down to support? I’m less and less sure.
There are several tripping points. Democrats want to claim their numbers add up, but a subset also wants to pass larger tax breaks for affluent blue staters by reinstating SALT deductions. That’s a strangely passionate issue for many New Democrat House members, including some of the ultraprogressives such as Mondaire Jones of New York.
Failure is still very much an option. And embarrassment, too.