We know the spending levels, and a bit about how that spending would be paid for, but much less about what that spending would be meant to achieve.
Our perception of the bipartisan infrastructure talks in the Senate has been strangely focused on process so far, because we still don’t really know the fine details of the substance of the proposal under discussion. We know the spending levels, and a bit about how that spending would be paid for, but much less about what that spending would be meant to achieve. That makes it impossible to know if the bill will be worth supporting.
For some people, the spending levels are enough reason to oppose the effort. They don’t need to know more than that Republicans are talking to Democrats about spending money on infrastructure. I don’t think that makes sense, especially because there was likely going to be some kind of significant infrastructure bill this year in any case. The surface-transportation reauthorization process was well under way — the last such bill was passed in 2015, it expired last September and was extended at that point for one year, through September 30 of this year. Some elements of that reauthorization were already worked out by committees in both houses, including most notably a $300 billion bipartisan highway bill that passed unanimously in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in May. Other elements of that reauthorization (such as public transit, rail, and the Highway Trust Fund) fall under the jurisdictions of other committees, but all had begun work toward measures on this front. The scale of what’s being talked about in these Senate negotiations just isn’t all that different from where that process was headed.
In fact, it was because things were moving, and with support from both parties, that the Democrats first sought to pass off their entire social-policy agenda as part of an infrastructure bill. They figured they would unify their party while forcing Republicans to oppose something they would call infrastructure spending, and that this could help apply pressure to moderate Democrats to support a reconciliation bill full of policies they don’t like. It was those moderate Democrats who really made this alternative bipartisan track happen in the Senate, in order to avoid that fate. The Republicans who are working with them are glad to disrupt the Left’s legislative strategy, and also think that showing that bipartisan deal-making is possible will weaken attacks on the filibuster.
And whether this alternative track produces a bipartisan infrastructure bill or not, it stands a decent chance of disrupting the Democrats’ plans, or at the very least costing them a lot of time they won’t be able to get back. The tacit support of Mitch McConnell and his team is a pretty good sign that he thinks the politics of this makes good sense too.
But that is not to say that obstruction is the aim of the process for those involved. Most if not all of them seem plainly to want an infrastructure bill, and to be working to enable this process to succeed. This has repeatedly come as a surprise to both observers of and participants in this process, who have all basically been wondering exactly when and why it would blow up. It still could, of course, but again and again the players involved have found themselves surprised to make it to the next phase, and toward a real bill.
By now, it’s pretty clear that this could really happen, and it’s increasingly clear that it could also create a real problem for the larger, partisan bill that the Democrats are looking to advance. I think that’s actually the bigger story of this week. Chuck Schumer started the week saying this was the time to show real progress on both bills — the bipartisan bill that’s really about infrastructure and the Democrats’ reconciliation bill that’s about lots of other things. And as the week draws to a close, we have seen real progress on the first, but not on the second.
That progress also revealed the kind of leverage that the handful of Senate moderates have over Senator Schumer. On Wednesday, he tried a cheap stunt to move the bipartisan group along (or call its bluff), forcing a procedural vote to begin debate on their bill while they were still negotiating it. He knew that the Republican members of the group would not vote to start debate on a bill that didn’t exist yet. He knew it because he had found himself in that position a number of times when Democrats were in the minority. In March of 2020, for instance, while the details of the CARES Act were being worked out, Mitch McConnell forced a procedural vote to begin debate on the still nonexistent bill, in an effort to embarrass the Democrats and push them along. When they voted against cloture, McConnell accused the Democrats of playing games with COVID relief. Schumer took to the floor to denounce the stunt. “The majority leader was well aware of how the vote would go before it happened but he chose to go forward with it anyway even though negotiations are continuing,” he said then. “So who’s playing games?”
Well now it’s Schumer playing games, but he doesn’t seem to be gaining much by it. The bipartisan group basically ignored the procedural vote, and continued its work, and Schumer gave them more time because he needs his moderates. He has faced this problem all spring and summer. His effort to build up pressure on Democratic moderates to eliminate the filibuster last month — especially by setting up debates on election-reform bills — was a total flop too. Then as now, they ignored him and left him without much to do about it.
That pattern could spell trouble for the Democrats’ two-track strategy. At this point, the gimmick of passing off a broad progressive agenda as infrastructure is looking like it was a mistake. The idea was that both wings of the Democratic Party wanted infrastructure spending, and the far Left also wanted lots of social-program spending. By combining the two, the moderates could just point to the infrastructure spending to justify their support of the rest. Whether that was ever going to persuade senators Manchin and Sinema and others is hard to say, but that’s just no longer what is going on anyway. The emergence of the bipartisan Senate infrastructure group has split up the two bills and left the Democrats with essentially two parallel legislative strategies being pursued simultaneously. One of those strategies, the one surrounding the bipartisan Senate bill, is well suited to a nearly tied Congress — in which Democrats control the Senate only by virtue of the vice president’s vote and hold barely 51 percent of the House. The other is completely unsuited to that reality. And pursuing them in parallel, rather than jointly, isn’t well suited to that reality either.
I can think of some progressive Democrats in both houses who might be more likely to vote for the freestanding bipartisan infrastructure bill because it is somehow attached to the more radical and partisan reconciliation bill. They want that bigger partisan bill, and they want infrastructure spending, so why not? But who are the moderate Democrats who are more likely to vote for that partisan reconciliation bill because they also get a separate, moderate infrastructure bill? It sure seems like the handful of Senate Democratic moderates are more afraid of the Bernie Sanders reconciliation bill than they are eager for infrastructure spending, so that giving them the latter in return for their vote on the former may just not be attractive enough.
And the bipartisan bill, if it comes together, could also easily gain enough momentum to break its bond with the Democrats’ reconciliation bill. If, as looks likely, the next phase of this process involves Republican senator Rob Portman negotiating directly with the White House on remaining details, then the president will be all the more invested in the outcome, and it will be only more difficult for Nancy Pelosi to insist that the resulting bill can only get a vote after both houses have passed the Democrats’ partisan reconciliation bill. If the bipartisan infrastructure bill passes, Joe Manchin will pocket the win but still have as much leverage as ever over the reconciliation process. He has much less to lose than Bernie Sanders or Chuck Schumer do from that process breaking down.
That strikes me as the real story this week. The Democrats will ultimately pass a budget for next year, and they will almost certainly do it in the form of a reconciliation bill. It could still be the big Bernie Sanders bill they are now struggling to formulate. But their strategy for getting there has gotten all tangled up now, as the realities of a tied Senate have yielded up a remarkably traditional kind of cross-partisan policy bargaining process.
That doesn’t mean everything has broken down for the Democrats. I’ve learned over the years that when it comes to a contentious legislative process like this, success and failure feel exactly the same while they are happening. They feel like a chaotic series of near-death experiences. The fact that the Democrats’ legislative strategy now has that feel to it doesn’t mean it won’t work. But I do think that both as a matter of substance and as a matter of strategy, the bipartisan infrastructure process makes sense for Republicans.
We are out of the habit of grasping how legislative achievements could be desirable for a minority party in Congress, and so the first instinct of a lot of conservatives is to treat any form of cross-partisan cooperation as a failure. But I don’t think that’s right. For those of us who want to see some recovery of Congress’s capacity to serve as an arena for bargaining and accommodation, the sight of members compelled by complicated political circumstances to negotiate across party lines ought to be welcome. Now let’s see what they come up with.