Something I had previously assumed was that while BIF was bipartisan in the Senate, it was going to be a party-line vote in the House because republicans up for reelection next year didn't want to risk it. Under that thinking, it made sense that, with only five votes to spare, Pelosi couldn't afford to lose progressives.
But then I came across this piece that says "House republican centrists hoped to deliver dozens of votes". So why then is Pelosi not just moving forward regardless of what progressives want?
For the same reason that Boehner didn't move forward with immigration reform even though the votes were there for it to pass. At some point, you can't afford to lose your a significant portion of your caucus. Especially when your close to the end. She's 81, the squad and such can outlast her.
Boehner, I believe, was following the Hastert rule, which was that if you don't have a majority in your party, don't bring it to a vote. But that's not the case here. Still, you are probably right, but I've never seen someone say this explicitly. It seems like it would be a useful pressure point for the pro-BIF side if true.
Every discussion around it, including here saying that progressives are holding it hostage, makes it sound like they have real leverage. But if it's really just that Pelosi wants to be nice to them, that presents a completely different calculus.
It's very hard to Monday morning quarterback the public negotiating tactics among members of Congress who presumably also talk to each other in private, without being a lot more in the know than I, at least, am.
Watching this political process unfold has indeed been disheartening and I wish they would all just go behind closed doors and do that compromising thing that politicians have done since time immemorial. But if they do get to a final agreement, through whatever means, I'll be more happy than sad.
The question is if the Democratic legislators will be happy. Or will they grouse about how they had to come down from $6T to ~$2T, or that they had to increase spending so much, or that the BBB is a misbegotten mess with delayed starts and absurd sunset clauses etc etc.
What gives me hope is that good politicians are excellent bullshitters. If at the end the entire Democratic group smiles happily, sings the praises of the other side for some tough but fair negotiating, and highlights the great things that will happen for the American people -- with more work yet to do in future Democratic Congresses -- then I'll be very pleased.
I think there are three main things going on, which are in tension with each other to some extent.
(1) The progressives think 2022 is lost anyway, which makes a (theoretically at least) high-risk/high-reward play like hostage-taking more attractive.
(2) The progressives think it is strategically more important to maximize their power within the Democratic coalition than to maximize the likelihood that the coalition beats the Republicans. That is because they think that even if Democrats are destined to lose in 2022, the pendulum will inevitably swing back to them at some point because of larger uncontrollable forces that influence public opinion much more than mere policy debates do. So the key to effectuating progressive political change is simply to make sure they're in charge of the Party when the pendulum inevitably swings back to it.
(3) The progressives dislike the BIF *because* it is bipartisan, irrespective of its policy content.
>>>The right thing to do would have been to pass the BIF quickly, and then work with Manchin and Sinema quietly on crafting a reconciliation package that could be swiftly unveiled and passed.<<<
Isn't it possible if they followed Matt's advice that A) ZERO reconciliation bill would have passed (pretty sure that's what progressive feared) and/or B) a mere, say, $900 billion reconciliation would've been all they could get?
Sure, we'll have to see how it goes, and it's still possible the whole thing will fall apart. But if they can get, say, a $2.1 trillion reconciliation bill AND the BIF bill passed, I think it's worth waiting a couple of months for the signing ceremony.
I think the reconciliation package is actually less likely to pass now than it would have been if BIF had passed weeks ago (though it still may well pass). Sinema is not facing any pressure from her right to get BIF passed. The only motivations for passing BIF are (1) sincere goo-goo policy preferences - which is not a political motivation in nature, (2) get a positive news cycle for bipartisanship - which, as Matt writes, has already been spoiled and thus no longer represents any kind of carrot, (3) maybe some very mild pressure from liberals who like lead abatement and what not. Lobbying/dealmaking from Sinema's left may or may not be sufficient/helpful in getting her to sign on to the reconciliation bill in some form, but withholding BIF enactment doesn't add to that pressure, because the only pressure on her to sign BIF now is coming at her from the same side that's trying to pressure her to sign on to reconciliation.
>>get a positive news cycle for bipartisanship - which, as Matt writes, has already been spoiled<<
Matt *claims* this is the case, sure. It's far from clear he's right. I also think this analysis ignores the instincts of people who are closer to the action than any of us (Matt included), namely, progressive members of Congress and their staffers. It's possible they'll ultimately be proven wrong and everything falls apart. It's also possible the president could have had his BIF signing ceremony and the reconciliation negotiations would fall apart. And yes, it's possible they'll get two bills done exceeding $3 trillion in new spending. Time will tell.
At the end of the day, I don't think any of us knows what Sinema -- or for that matter Manchin -- will agree to. Some of her public and leaked comments have been maddening, but I think we'll all have to just wait and see.
Where are you getting your numbers from? You link to the New York Times, but that doesn't provide the same breakdown for the BIF as you quote, and it doesn't have information on the FAST Act from the last round.
I think your numbers are wrong. Previous surface transportation bills maintain an 80-20 split between highways and transit. The BIF includes only 18.7% for transit. You may be arguing that the overall numbers are higher, but as a bigger bill it's a lower share than the precedent from 1986 onward.
For all the people who are saying they should roll the BIF into BBB, recognize that would make it much harder to pass. The BIF is pretty much unpaid* for - i.e. going on debt. Rolling a trillion dollars in the BBB and doing it through reconciliation means that you have to come up with more tax increases or other spending reductions. How many Dem moderates in the Senate and House want to pass an even larger partisan tax increase to run against than was already in the BBB?
*I recognize that various people pretended that the BIF was paid for through "pay fors" and such but that is nonsense.
I'm curious on the electorates rank ordering of both bills, compromised bills, infrastructure only and no bill passed. My guess is something is preferred to nothing for 75% and prioritizing passing everything is 25%. My guess is the median position is infrastructure only. I get that this is probably against the economic interest of many voters, but what's new there?
Unfortunately, your numbers are a bit off for BIF (I suspect they're from the "increases over 'baseline'" from some of the summaries being tossed around when the bill passed).
(Embarrassingly my Amtrak numbers were off... I excluded $15 bn of "doesn't have to be Amtrak but is probably Amtrak" funding for a different bucket... So Amtrak total is $34 bn (+24 bn or *240%* vs FAST Act))
“no good reason to be running train routes where the revenue is so low that it’s genuinely impossible to keep the route in a state of good repair“
What on Earth are you talking about? The only tracks that Amtrak owns are the NEC. It takes very little to keep rural stations and Superliners in SOGR.
More broadly, you should think of Amtrak itself as infrastructure—it is the only realistic way to travel long-distance for a big chunk of the population that is kind of invisible, like the 50-yo non-college median voter or Black folks in SC who voted for Joe Biden. I’d be happy to show you around Libby, Montana sometime.
Without knowing a lot more about both men than I have any desire to know, I would suppose the Mendez was an Arizona highways specialist whereas Porcari was a generalist.
Interesting and, of course, hostage taking only works if the other side values the hostage more than the sacrifices they have to make to save it. The flip side is that Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate have made hostage taking their most important tactical weapon. They seem to have little interest in good faith bargaining. Instead they resort to crude name calling.
I totally buy the positive vibes take on the BIF, but it seems a little ridiculous to me to suggest that the BBB bill would have survived without progressive hostage taking. I think Maninema, in particular, would have no problems just spiking BBB, full stop, in part for the reasons outlined in the "Sinema must be stopped" column (https://www.slowboring.com/p/sinema-menace). For a particular kind of moderate, spiking something big IS a win, because it "proves to the folks back home" that you are a Real Maverick, Unbeholden To Any Party.
Whatever is or isn't in Sinema's head do you think spiking the BBB would help her win a Democratic primary? Or allow her to win the general via a Joe Lieberman independent strategy? I think not. Maybe she doesn't care about winning reelection, but if so spiking the BBB would seem an extremely poor strategy.
Getting it down to $1.8T, on the other hand, probably wouldn't hurt and probably would help her.
I'm honestly unsure. Also, you can never discount the possibility that she is just wrong in her political calculations. Or that she holds sincere beliefs that would lead her to take that action against her political interests. The timeline of her next election is also an important variable.
But I also think that all this unpredictability makes it more reasonable for the progressives to want to hold leverage over her (the BIF), rather than simply trusting that they could convince her to vote for BBB based on the merits.
Nobody knows nothing. We have no idea how much leverage holding the BIF hostage gives the progressives over Sinema. Maybe she'd be happy to walk away from it; I don't know.
Agreed. At very least "spiking" BBB seemed a possibility. It still is a possibility. But at least now there's an incentive for the crypto-Republicans to stay on board.
Spiking an enormous spending plan that comes right on the heels of a truly astounding level of federal spending is a prudent act regardless of which party one belongs to.
That is nonsense. Spending needs to reflect a basket of factors that range from need (how big is the problem?) to ability to pay (what is the long-term cost of borrowing? will this project generate net cost or net revenue?) to the existence of other policy levers (could we cover this spending by raising taxes or making cuts elsewhere?) and other policy concerns (the classic "starve the beast" theory of GOP tax cuts). The BBB includes a bunch of pay-fors and claims to be budget neutral; if you think those are incorrect, then your claim would be, "I think the pay-fors are wrong, and the right way to get to politicians' stated goal of budget neutrality is..." Spiking stuff, by contrast, is about a feeling--the point wasn't to achieve the goal of budget neutrality; it was to be seen spiking stuff. You don't spike the football because you want to score (you already scored). You spike it because it feels good and sends a message.
“Spending needs to reflect a basket of factors that range from need (how big is the problem?) to ability to pay (what is the long-term cost of borrowing? will this project generate net cost or net revenue?) to the existence of other policy levers (could we cover this spending by raising taxes or making cuts elsewhere?)”
None of that has been discussed as far as I can tell. Your calculus also leaves out the most important question: Will this money be better spent by the federal government or by the people who will be taxed? The assumption - again, as far as I can tell - is that the federal government is assumed to be the best judge of that.
You're absolutely right, Ken: passing the BBB would be a foolish thing for a Republican Congress to do and in complete violation of their views on the role of government spending on the public weal.
But on behalf of the Democratic Congress, I want to say thank you for your interest in what is the best policy for that Congress to pass.
I feel like I can understand why the progressives are doing this. They're sick and tired of the party not being willing to throw them a bone. At the end of the day though, they need to be able to win more elections and they haven't proven themselves able to do that. And this is coming from someone who considers himself to be a "Sanders Socialist".
If you told progressives a few years ago that just in 2021, they would get a $1.9T recovery bill, a $1T infrastructure bill, and a $1.5-2T social spending bill, they wouldn't have thought that would be a win?
"But I do want to say that I think this whole strategy was misguided. Not only is the BIF a good and important piece of legislation on its own, but its bipartisan nature could and should have been a medium-sized political win."
The whole strategy was necessitated by the fact that Sinema & Manchin opted to back the filibuster (and by implication, the Republican blockade on all other bills) whole-heartedly and then wanted to negotiate the BIF as a 'bipartisan' substitute and something they could point to when implicitly vetoing all other bills. McConnell gave it to them because it gave HIM leverage.
They chose to play this particular game. Biden backed the House here to stop the obvious scam, given that the R's would happily dump the BIF as well if they didn't need it as a Trojan house. Thus we have Sinema claiming progressives and Biden went back on promises *they* *didn't* *make*.
Two can play at that game and here we are. (Which, again, was McConnell's scheme.)
"Being involved in bipartisan bills is a good look for anyone in a difficult race. But progressives have already killed the good vibes via the linkage. So not just Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, but also Jacky Rosen and Maggie Hasan and everyone else who’d like an upbeat news cycle about bipartisan comity have already taken the L. All this is actually doing is making everyone feel more nervous about 2022 and Biden’s increasingly weak political standing."
Sure, but it's still cover for blockading the various voting rights bills and any, say, anti-gerrymandering bills. That's why Gottheimer was trying to force the BIF out of the House - so he can then vote no on everything else.
As for the win - it would've passed, we'd have had a few good news cycles and then it would be back to refusing to pass voting rights bills (or any other bills, full stop) and saying all the exact same shit they're saying now.
If you like the bill (sounds fine, excepting maybe the financing) and the House needs to come back down on the reconciliation bill, then bump the reconciliation bill to 3.6 trillion and fold the entirety of the BIF (except perhaps the exact financing mechanism for the BIF) into the reconciliation bill - effectively cutting down the reconciliation bill down by a trillion or so. Then we get the larger chunk of the reconciliation bill and the BIF.
Problem solved.
elm
then sinema & manchin can threaten to vote down their own bill
It seems to me that Sinema and Manchin specifically want the current theater. They want the story to be the two of them standing up as balancing forces for their own party.
I think this is bad for the party, bad for the country, and bad for Democratic moderates (including those two), but I also think Sinema and Manchin disagree with me on this. I think they see political value in visibly pissing off the Democratic base, so they see it as against their interest to arrive at a compromise quietly.
Passing BIF quickly then negotiating quietly with Manchinema sounds fine in a vacuum, but it was mostly Manchinema who blew that up by saying they were going to back out of the linkage. The linkage was why the overwhelming majority of Democratic legislators and the president were willing to countenance BIF. "Fine, do your thing, but the really transformative stuff will come in BBB." I mean, BBB was his damned campaign slogan.
We also need to consider that "negotiating quietly" is a non-starter in today's world. Everything becomes an online beef session.
No Biden blew it up by mentioning the linkage in the 1st place after he just told the republicans that the deal was done. Biden instead should have shut his mouth and taken the win
Manchin and Sinema and even the Senate never agreed to any linkage, so they haven’t backed out of anything. If there was actual linkage, Schumer would have held the BIF from a vote until it could be tied to the reconciliation vote. He didn’t do that - Instead the Senate passed it and sent it to the House. The linkage only applied/applies to the House and that was a demand which came from the Progressive caucus. If anyone abandoned the linkage it is Pelosi who schedule a vote on the BIF after saying she wouldn’t (And then reneged on that).
I’m not sure what you mean by “negotiating quietly” but in my view the problem is the lack of any type of negotiation. Up until this point, progressives have refused to drop below 3.5 trillion and moderates, lead by Manchin and Sinema, have refused to go up to that level. It seems we are finally getting to a place where actual negotiations may happen instead the the public and private brow-beating that’s wasted the last two months of time.
"The linkage was why the overwhelming majority of Democratic legislators and the president were willing to countenance BIF."
This seems backwards to me. If Manchin OR Sinema or Any other Democratic Senator decides not to vote yes, then NOTHING passes in reconciliation. Biden didn't countenance the BIF, the BIF is his best hope of getting something passed when the Senate is dead even and they can only afford to lose 5 votes in the House.
Reverse the situation to see what I mean. Imagine if Republicans had the positions the Democrats had now and had a bipartisan tax cut for a trillion dollars, but the Freedom caucus was holding things up because they wanted to pass an additional 3.5 trillion tax cut. If they blow up all the tax cuts because they can't get the additional 3.5 trillion, are the moderates the ones who are considered crazy?
Right. Isn’t that the dynamic that got us the linkage in the first place? Manchinema brought on this linkage, which for all the reasons MY laid out, seems tactically bad.
Something I had previously assumed was that while BIF was bipartisan in the Senate, it was going to be a party-line vote in the House because republicans up for reelection next year didn't want to risk it. Under that thinking, it made sense that, with only five votes to spare, Pelosi couldn't afford to lose progressives.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/06/gop-centrists-infrastructure-delays-515182
But then I came across this piece that says "House republican centrists hoped to deliver dozens of votes". So why then is Pelosi not just moving forward regardless of what progressives want?
For the same reason that Boehner didn't move forward with immigration reform even though the votes were there for it to pass. At some point, you can't afford to lose your a significant portion of your caucus. Especially when your close to the end. She's 81, the squad and such can outlast her.
Boehner, I believe, was following the Hastert rule, which was that if you don't have a majority in your party, don't bring it to a vote. But that's not the case here. Still, you are probably right, but I've never seen someone say this explicitly. It seems like it would be a useful pressure point for the pro-BIF side if true.
Every discussion around it, including here saying that progressives are holding it hostage, makes it sound like they have real leverage. But if it's really just that Pelosi wants to be nice to them, that presents a completely different calculus.
It's very hard to Monday morning quarterback the public negotiating tactics among members of Congress who presumably also talk to each other in private, without being a lot more in the know than I, at least, am.
Absolutely. I guess I'm just trying to figure out if I'm missing something or if the reporting is generally misrepresenting it?
Watching this political process unfold has indeed been disheartening and I wish they would all just go behind closed doors and do that compromising thing that politicians have done since time immemorial. But if they do get to a final agreement, through whatever means, I'll be more happy than sad.
The question is if the Democratic legislators will be happy. Or will they grouse about how they had to come down from $6T to ~$2T, or that they had to increase spending so much, or that the BBB is a misbegotten mess with delayed starts and absurd sunset clauses etc etc.
What gives me hope is that good politicians are excellent bullshitters. If at the end the entire Democratic group smiles happily, sings the praises of the other side for some tough but fair negotiating, and highlights the great things that will happen for the American people -- with more work yet to do in future Democratic Congresses -- then I'll be very pleased.
I think both wings of the caucus need to go back and rewatch De Niro/Al Capone's "Part of a Team" speech from The Untouchables. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHH9EYZHoVU
I think there are three main things going on, which are in tension with each other to some extent.
(1) The progressives think 2022 is lost anyway, which makes a (theoretically at least) high-risk/high-reward play like hostage-taking more attractive.
(2) The progressives think it is strategically more important to maximize their power within the Democratic coalition than to maximize the likelihood that the coalition beats the Republicans. That is because they think that even if Democrats are destined to lose in 2022, the pendulum will inevitably swing back to them at some point because of larger uncontrollable forces that influence public opinion much more than mere policy debates do. So the key to effectuating progressive political change is simply to make sure they're in charge of the Party when the pendulum inevitably swings back to it.
(3) The progressives dislike the BIF *because* it is bipartisan, irrespective of its policy content.
>>>The right thing to do would have been to pass the BIF quickly, and then work with Manchin and Sinema quietly on crafting a reconciliation package that could be swiftly unveiled and passed.<<<
Isn't it possible if they followed Matt's advice that A) ZERO reconciliation bill would have passed (pretty sure that's what progressive feared) and/or B) a mere, say, $900 billion reconciliation would've been all they could get?
Sure, we'll have to see how it goes, and it's still possible the whole thing will fall apart. But if they can get, say, a $2.1 trillion reconciliation bill AND the BIF bill passed, I think it's worth waiting a couple of months for the signing ceremony.
I think the reconciliation package is actually less likely to pass now than it would have been if BIF had passed weeks ago (though it still may well pass). Sinema is not facing any pressure from her right to get BIF passed. The only motivations for passing BIF are (1) sincere goo-goo policy preferences - which is not a political motivation in nature, (2) get a positive news cycle for bipartisanship - which, as Matt writes, has already been spoiled and thus no longer represents any kind of carrot, (3) maybe some very mild pressure from liberals who like lead abatement and what not. Lobbying/dealmaking from Sinema's left may or may not be sufficient/helpful in getting her to sign on to the reconciliation bill in some form, but withholding BIF enactment doesn't add to that pressure, because the only pressure on her to sign BIF now is coming at her from the same side that's trying to pressure her to sign on to reconciliation.
>>get a positive news cycle for bipartisanship - which, as Matt writes, has already been spoiled<<
Matt *claims* this is the case, sure. It's far from clear he's right. I also think this analysis ignores the instincts of people who are closer to the action than any of us (Matt included), namely, progressive members of Congress and their staffers. It's possible they'll ultimately be proven wrong and everything falls apart. It's also possible the president could have had his BIF signing ceremony and the reconciliation negotiations would fall apart. And yes, it's possible they'll get two bills done exceeding $3 trillion in new spending. Time will tell.
At the end of the day, I don't think any of us knows what Sinema -- or for that matter Manchin -- will agree to. Some of her public and leaked comments have been maddening, but I think we'll all have to just wait and see.
Where are you getting your numbers from? You link to the New York Times, but that doesn't provide the same breakdown for the BIF as you quote, and it doesn't have information on the FAST Act from the last round.
I think your numbers are wrong. Previous surface transportation bills maintain an 80-20 split between highways and transit. The BIF includes only 18.7% for transit. You may be arguing that the overall numbers are higher, but as a bigger bill it's a lower share than the precedent from 1986 onward.
For all the people who are saying they should roll the BIF into BBB, recognize that would make it much harder to pass. The BIF is pretty much unpaid* for - i.e. going on debt. Rolling a trillion dollars in the BBB and doing it through reconciliation means that you have to come up with more tax increases or other spending reductions. How many Dem moderates in the Senate and House want to pass an even larger partisan tax increase to run against than was already in the BBB?
*I recognize that various people pretended that the BIF was paid for through "pay fors" and such but that is nonsense.
I'm curious on the electorates rank ordering of both bills, compromised bills, infrastructure only and no bill passed. My guess is something is preferred to nothing for 75% and prioritizing passing everything is 25%. My guess is the median position is infrastructure only. I get that this is probably against the economic interest of many voters, but what's new there?
Hey Matt -
Unfortunately, your numbers are a bit off for BIF (I suspect they're from the "increases over 'baseline'" from some of the summaries being tossed around when the bill passed).
For those interested, the text of the BIF bill is here: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/BILLS-117hr3684eas/pdf/BILLS-117hr3684eas.pdf
And the text of the old bill (FAST Act) is here: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-114publ94/pdf/PLAW-114publ94.pdf
For BIF, it includes (all these numbers over five years):
$273 bn (+66 bn or 32% vs FAST Act) for the Federal Aid Highway Program (Sec. 11101(a)(1) or pg. 21 of BIF)
$70 bn (+21 bn or 44% vs FAST Act) for the Mass Transit Account (Sec. 30017 or pg. 1,275 of BIF)
$19 bn (+11 bn or a whopping *139%* vs FAST Act) for Amtrak (Sec. 22101(a) and (b) or pg. 695 of BIF)
Upping Kris's comments, Matt's numbers on the BIF are wrong. Post needs correction.
(Embarrassingly my Amtrak numbers were off... I excluded $15 bn of "doesn't have to be Amtrak but is probably Amtrak" funding for a different bucket... So Amtrak total is $34 bn (+24 bn or *240%* vs FAST Act))
“no good reason to be running train routes where the revenue is so low that it’s genuinely impossible to keep the route in a state of good repair“
What on Earth are you talking about? The only tracks that Amtrak owns are the NEC. It takes very little to keep rural stations and Superliners in SOGR.
More broadly, you should think of Amtrak itself as infrastructure—it is the only realistic way to travel long-distance for a big chunk of the population that is kind of invisible, like the 50-yo non-college median voter or Black folks in SC who voted for Joe Biden. I’d be happy to show you around Libby, Montana sometime.
I think you’re thinking of Greyhound more than Amtrak.
"1991 Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991" --> Department of Redundancy Department
Anthony Foxx had an experienced deputy:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Porcari
But this time it's different because Buttigieg?
Factually different, yes: Mendez was AZ and Porcari was in MD. Do you believe for some reason that is an important distinction?
Without knowing a lot more about both men than I have any desire to know, I would suppose the Mendez was an Arizona highways specialist whereas Porcari was a generalist.
Interesting and, of course, hostage taking only works if the other side values the hostage more than the sacrifices they have to make to save it. The flip side is that Mitch McConnell and the Republican Senate have made hostage taking their most important tactical weapon. They seem to have little interest in good faith bargaining. Instead they resort to crude name calling.
I totally buy the positive vibes take on the BIF, but it seems a little ridiculous to me to suggest that the BBB bill would have survived without progressive hostage taking. I think Maninema, in particular, would have no problems just spiking BBB, full stop, in part for the reasons outlined in the "Sinema must be stopped" column (https://www.slowboring.com/p/sinema-menace). For a particular kind of moderate, spiking something big IS a win, because it "proves to the folks back home" that you are a Real Maverick, Unbeholden To Any Party.
Whatever is or isn't in Sinema's head do you think spiking the BBB would help her win a Democratic primary? Or allow her to win the general via a Joe Lieberman independent strategy? I think not. Maybe she doesn't care about winning reelection, but if so spiking the BBB would seem an extremely poor strategy.
Getting it down to $1.8T, on the other hand, probably wouldn't hurt and probably would help her.
I'm honestly unsure. Also, you can never discount the possibility that she is just wrong in her political calculations. Or that she holds sincere beliefs that would lead her to take that action against her political interests. The timeline of her next election is also an important variable.
But I also think that all this unpredictability makes it more reasonable for the progressives to want to hold leverage over her (the BIF), rather than simply trusting that they could convince her to vote for BBB based on the merits.
Nobody knows nothing. We have no idea how much leverage holding the BIF hostage gives the progressives over Sinema. Maybe she'd be happy to walk away from it; I don't know.
Agreed. At very least "spiking" BBB seemed a possibility. It still is a possibility. But at least now there's an incentive for the crypto-Republicans to stay on board.
Spiking an enormous spending plan that comes right on the heels of a truly astounding level of federal spending is a prudent act regardless of which party one belongs to.
That is nonsense. Spending needs to reflect a basket of factors that range from need (how big is the problem?) to ability to pay (what is the long-term cost of borrowing? will this project generate net cost or net revenue?) to the existence of other policy levers (could we cover this spending by raising taxes or making cuts elsewhere?) and other policy concerns (the classic "starve the beast" theory of GOP tax cuts). The BBB includes a bunch of pay-fors and claims to be budget neutral; if you think those are incorrect, then your claim would be, "I think the pay-fors are wrong, and the right way to get to politicians' stated goal of budget neutrality is..." Spiking stuff, by contrast, is about a feeling--the point wasn't to achieve the goal of budget neutrality; it was to be seen spiking stuff. You don't spike the football because you want to score (you already scored). You spike it because it feels good and sends a message.
“Spending needs to reflect a basket of factors that range from need (how big is the problem?) to ability to pay (what is the long-term cost of borrowing? will this project generate net cost or net revenue?) to the existence of other policy levers (could we cover this spending by raising taxes or making cuts elsewhere?)”
None of that has been discussed as far as I can tell. Your calculus also leaves out the most important question: Will this money be better spent by the federal government or by the people who will be taxed? The assumption - again, as far as I can tell - is that the federal government is assumed to be the best judge of that.
You're absolutely right, Ken: passing the BBB would be a foolish thing for a Republican Congress to do and in complete violation of their views on the role of government spending on the public weal.
But on behalf of the Democratic Congress, I want to say thank you for your interest in what is the best policy for that Congress to pass.
If you believe I am a Republican or supported their fiscal policies when they were in charge, you are way off the mark.
I feel like I can understand why the progressives are doing this. They're sick and tired of the party not being willing to throw them a bone. At the end of the day though, they need to be able to win more elections and they haven't proven themselves able to do that. And this is coming from someone who considers himself to be a "Sanders Socialist".
If you told progressives a few years ago that just in 2021, they would get a $1.9T recovery bill, a $1T infrastructure bill, and a $1.5-2T social spending bill, they wouldn't have thought that would be a win?
"But I do want to say that I think this whole strategy was misguided. Not only is the BIF a good and important piece of legislation on its own, but its bipartisan nature could and should have been a medium-sized political win."
The whole strategy was necessitated by the fact that Sinema & Manchin opted to back the filibuster (and by implication, the Republican blockade on all other bills) whole-heartedly and then wanted to negotiate the BIF as a 'bipartisan' substitute and something they could point to when implicitly vetoing all other bills. McConnell gave it to them because it gave HIM leverage.
They chose to play this particular game. Biden backed the House here to stop the obvious scam, given that the R's would happily dump the BIF as well if they didn't need it as a Trojan house. Thus we have Sinema claiming progressives and Biden went back on promises *they* *didn't* *make*.
Two can play at that game and here we are. (Which, again, was McConnell's scheme.)
"Being involved in bipartisan bills is a good look for anyone in a difficult race. But progressives have already killed the good vibes via the linkage. So not just Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, but also Jacky Rosen and Maggie Hasan and everyone else who’d like an upbeat news cycle about bipartisan comity have already taken the L. All this is actually doing is making everyone feel more nervous about 2022 and Biden’s increasingly weak political standing."
Sure, but it's still cover for blockading the various voting rights bills and any, say, anti-gerrymandering bills. That's why Gottheimer was trying to force the BIF out of the House - so he can then vote no on everything else.
As for the win - it would've passed, we'd have had a few good news cycles and then it would be back to refusing to pass voting rights bills (or any other bills, full stop) and saying all the exact same shit they're saying now.
If you like the bill (sounds fine, excepting maybe the financing) and the House needs to come back down on the reconciliation bill, then bump the reconciliation bill to 3.6 trillion and fold the entirety of the BIF (except perhaps the exact financing mechanism for the BIF) into the reconciliation bill - effectively cutting down the reconciliation bill down by a trillion or so. Then we get the larger chunk of the reconciliation bill and the BIF.
Problem solved.
elm
then sinema & manchin can threaten to vote down their own bill
It seems to me that Sinema and Manchin specifically want the current theater. They want the story to be the two of them standing up as balancing forces for their own party.
I think this is bad for the party, bad for the country, and bad for Democratic moderates (including those two), but I also think Sinema and Manchin disagree with me on this. I think they see political value in visibly pissing off the Democratic base, so they see it as against their interest to arrive at a compromise quietly.
Passing BIF quickly then negotiating quietly with Manchinema sounds fine in a vacuum, but it was mostly Manchinema who blew that up by saying they were going to back out of the linkage. The linkage was why the overwhelming majority of Democratic legislators and the president were willing to countenance BIF. "Fine, do your thing, but the really transformative stuff will come in BBB." I mean, BBB was his damned campaign slogan.
We also need to consider that "negotiating quietly" is a non-starter in today's world. Everything becomes an online beef session.
No Biden blew it up by mentioning the linkage in the 1st place after he just told the republicans that the deal was done. Biden instead should have shut his mouth and taken the win
"Manchinema" love that. What about "Sinematic Manchinations"
Manchin and Sinema and even the Senate never agreed to any linkage, so they haven’t backed out of anything. If there was actual linkage, Schumer would have held the BIF from a vote until it could be tied to the reconciliation vote. He didn’t do that - Instead the Senate passed it and sent it to the House. The linkage only applied/applies to the House and that was a demand which came from the Progressive caucus. If anyone abandoned the linkage it is Pelosi who schedule a vote on the BIF after saying she wouldn’t (And then reneged on that).
I’m not sure what you mean by “negotiating quietly” but in my view the problem is the lack of any type of negotiation. Up until this point, progressives have refused to drop below 3.5 trillion and moderates, lead by Manchin and Sinema, have refused to go up to that level. It seems we are finally getting to a place where actual negotiations may happen instead the the public and private brow-beating that’s wasted the last two months of time.
"The linkage was why the overwhelming majority of Democratic legislators and the president were willing to countenance BIF."
This seems backwards to me. If Manchin OR Sinema or Any other Democratic Senator decides not to vote yes, then NOTHING passes in reconciliation. Biden didn't countenance the BIF, the BIF is his best hope of getting something passed when the Senate is dead even and they can only afford to lose 5 votes in the House.
Reverse the situation to see what I mean. Imagine if Republicans had the positions the Democrats had now and had a bipartisan tax cut for a trillion dollars, but the Freedom caucus was holding things up because they wanted to pass an additional 3.5 trillion tax cut. If they blow up all the tax cuts because they can't get the additional 3.5 trillion, are the moderates the ones who are considered crazy?
That is...an inapt comparison.
Right. Isn’t that the dynamic that got us the linkage in the first place? Manchinema brought on this linkage, which for all the reasons MY laid out, seems tactically bad.
I think if I had to choose, I would go Sinchin over Manchinema.