Capitol Hill negotiations on the spending bills are a mess right now … but a brutal defeat might force congressional Democrats to unify.
A dynamic at play in the seemingly endless negotiations on Capitol Hill is that if Democrats fail to unite behind either of their massive spending bills, the consequences of that failure are likely to forcibly unite them later on.
Right now, the prospects look grim for Democrats. President Biden and Speaker Pelosi are “scrambling” to save the infrastructure bill, in the words of the Washington Post. The New York Times warns, “if Mr. Biden cannot find a way to address [Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s] concerns, while also assuaging progressives and persuading them to support his infrastructure bill, he could see the warring factions in his party kill his entire economic agenda in the span of a few days.” Josh Marshall fumes that Sen. Kyrsten Sinema isn’t negotiating in good faith and declares, “Democrats and the White House need to be ready to kill the infrastructure bill.” Progressives are angry, and contend they’re being betrayed.
Once source tells CNN, “Nobody wants to blink, everyone thinks the other side is about to… Neither is right about that, which puts us in a very bad place.”
If you need a moment to pause and savor the schadenfreude, go ahead and take it.
All of this is good news for those who don’t like either the relatively smaller Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework or the massive $3.5 trillion spending spree. Conservatives and Republicans find the claim that the bill costs zero to be unhinged nonsense, and the ultimate in bad-faith defenses of a gargantuan expansion of the federal government. And while the Democrats may try to blame Republicans somehow, it is the lack of unity among Congressional Democrats that is the preeminent obstacle.
The bad news is that watching one or both bills go down in defeat, when Democrats hold the House and Senate by small margins, would be such a colossal disaster, and such a spectacularly demobilizing message of fundamental incompetence to the party’s grassroots, that failure would almost certainly spur Democrats to unify behind passing something. If this scenario came to pass, Congressional Democrats would be so desperate to counter the perception of an era-defining failure that they would be grabbing anything that could get 218 (really 217, with the vacancies) votes in the House and 50 votes in the Senate. Heading into a traditionally difficult midterm election year, having fumbled the president’s entire economic agenda, would put Democrats on a course where 2010 and 2014 would look like the good old days.
Desperation to avert a midterm disaster can force a lot of legislators to accept a half a loaf instead of a whole one. Democrats may belatedly learn a lesson akin to Benjamin Franklin’s comment at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence: “We must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”