Democrats want to spend some $4 trillion on proposals that include some spending to build physical infrastructure but consist mostly of other wish-list items.
There have been a lot of charges, counter-charges, and self-inflicted injuries from Thursday’s White House meeting on a bipartisan “infrastructure” deal, and the White House’s Saturday press release disclaiming Joe Biden’s remarks. Nobody who participated in the charade comes out of this mess looking particularly good, but the “who knew what and when” controversy obscures the fundamental reality that the proposed deal is not a compromise at all.
Here’s the lay of the land: Democrats want to spend some $4 trillion on a bunch of proposals that include some spending to build physical infrastructure but consist mostly of a grab bag of other liberal and progressive wish-list items. Combined with what they have already passed this year, that would amount to $6 trillion in new spending — more than the entire pre-COVID federal budget. (Biden’s budget projected a total increase of $8 trillion in spending over the CBO’s baseline — a staggering $62,280 in increased spending for every household in the country.) To enact new laws, they need ten Republican votes in the Senate to overcome a filibuster. They can pass new spending without Republican votes, but that has two downsides: It removes the veneer of bipartisanship, and it requires them to use the budget-reconciliation procedure that the Senate parliamentarian says they can only use one more time this year. That is a bottleneck that not all of their proposals may survive.
Some Republicans are in favor of some infrastructure spending, and are even willing to swallow some non-infrastructure spending to get it. But none want to support the broader proposal. In a traditional compromise, there could be a middle ground: Republicans move up from zero to spend some of the money that Biden and other Democrats want, and the Democrats move down from $4 trillion. The proposed deal is for $579 billion of new spending, which comes to $1.2 trillion if you include spending that is already in the budget baseline. There is also some posturing at work. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema oppose repealing the filibuster, but they are at least ostensibly doing so on the theory that bipartisan cooperation is possible. Manchin, in particular, wants to deliver a bipartisan infrastructure deal. By going along, these Republicans can give Manchin and Sinema some cover against internal fire from within their own party.
The controversy comes from Biden appearing to suggest, at Thursday’s press conference, that he actually had a deal with Republicans to move down from $4 trillion:
We have a deal. And I think it’s really important — we’ve all agreed — that none of us got what we — all that we wanted. I clearly didn’t get all I wanted. . . . Republicans and this group did not want to go along with my — any of my Family Plan issues — the childcare tax credits, the human infrastructure that I talk about. And that — we’ll see what happens in the reconciliation bill and the budget process — if that — if we get some compromise there. And if we can’t, see if I can attract all the Democrats to a position that is there. But we’re going to — they’re going to move on a dual track. And — and that’s all I’ll say. But I want to thank each and every one of them. It’s been — 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. 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.
You can read that word salad as many times as you like without resolving the ambiguity of whether he’s saying he gave Republicans his word and he got less than everything he wanted and would stick with that, or whether he was still committed to also push for the rest of the spending on a party-line basis via reconciliation. Things he said before the press conference suggested the latter. Biden then turned around after the press conference and told reporters that he would not even sign the bipartisan deal unless the rest of the spending passed via reconciliation: “If only one comes to me, this is the only one that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.” This is where things stood when our editorial Thursday night denounced the whole thing as a fraud.
The White House, embarrassed yet again by its most unreliable spokesman, issued a statement in the president’s name on Saturday that backed off the position that Biden would sign the bipartisan deal only if he also got the rest of the spending elsewhere:
I have been clear from the start that it was my hope that the infrastructure plan could be one that Democrats and Republicans would work on together, while I would seek to pass my Families Plan and other provisions through the process known as reconciliation. There has been no doubt or ambiguity about my intention to proceed this way.
At a press conference after announcing the bipartisan agreement, I indicated that I would refuse to sign the infrastructure bill if it was sent to me without my Families Plan and other priorities, including clean energy. That statement understandably upset some Republicans, who do not see the two plans as linked; they are hoping to defeat my Families Plan—and do not want their support for the infrastructure plan to be seen as aiding passage of the Families Plan. My comments also created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent.
So to be clear: our bipartisan agreement does not preclude Republicans from attempting to defeat my Families Plan; likewise, they should have no objections to my devoted efforts to pass that Families Plan and other proposals in tandem.
The statement did not, however, back off the White House’s position that is the real core of the problem for Republicans: that they were agreeing to give Biden half a loaf (really a lot less than half), but Biden would take it and also try to get the rest of the loaf passed anyway on a party-line basis via reconciliation:
Some other Democrats have said they might oppose the Infrastructure Plan because it omits items they think are important: that is a mistake, in my view. Some Republicans now say that they might oppose the infrastructure plan because I am also trying to pass the American Families Plan: that is also a mistake, in my view. I intend to work hard to get both of them passed, because our country needs both—and I ran a winning campaign for President that promised to deliver on both. No one should be surprised that that is precisely what I am doing.
The fundamental problem here is still that Republicans get nothing at all out of the deal. Contrary to his talk about how “none of us got what we — all that we wanted. I clearly didn’t get all I wanted,” Biden still says that he will pursue everything he wanted — and pursue it this year, in this budget cycle, even over the objections of the very people who are trying to cut a deal with him. What, then, is the point? Maybe there is some strategic play here to give further cover to Democrats who might defect from the reconciliation bill, but who are those Democrats? There is no possible way in which this will, at the end of 2021, be seen as a bipartisan compromise in which both sides knew what they were getting, and got it. Either Democrats will get everything they want, in which case Republicans cut a deal for nothing at all, or Democrats will not get what Biden promised to be the outcome of this deal. In either event, no matter who has said what to whom in private, it’s a high-stakes gamble on future events rather than a deal.