Ignore the infighting among moderates and progressives — because (spoiler alert!) Democrats will pass a pair of massive spending bills anyway.
Ignore the infighting among moderates and progressives — because (spoiler alert!) Democrats will pass a pair of massive spending bills anyway.
W hen so-called moderate House Democrats decided to give up their demands and help pass their party’s $3.5 trillion budget framework, it not only provided a short-term victory for Speaker Nancy Pelosi, but it also made clear that President Biden’s massive spending agenda is now too big to fail.
No doubt, in the coming months, we’ll go through panicked news cycles portraying the Biden legislative agenda as near the brink of collapse. There will be headlines featuring declarations from Senator Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.), and House Democrats about how the reconciliation bill is too large, adds too much to the deficit, and raises too many taxes. And there will be Twitter clapbacks from AOC and her Squadmates vowing to bail unless the bills address progressive concerns. But you can ignore the daily drama, because (spoiler alert!) Democrats will pass a pair of massive spending bills anyway.
This is not to minimize the very real obstacles facing Democrats in the coming months. Party leaders maintain only a narrow majority in the House and cannot lose a single vote in the Senate. That will mean crafting a bill that both AOC and Manchin can endorse. The bigger the bill, the more that Democrats risk alienating moderates with tax hikes or deficit spending. The smaller the bill, the higher the risk that progressives will balk. All of their proposals will have to pass muster with the Senate parliamentarian. And there is the potential for a chicken-and-egg dilemma of whether the House passes the smaller $550 billion infrastructure bill favored by moderates before or after the larger reconciliation bill favored by progressives. But the fundamentals still point to Democrats getting something across the finish line.
At the end of the day, progressives are going to vote for any bill that spends a lot of money in areas that are important to them, and despite their confident boasts, moderates are not going to tank the entire Biden domestic agenda. Some may argue that the Afghanistan fiasco, which has damaged Biden’s approval ratings, could weaken his juice on Capitol Hill. But it could also do the opposite, by increasing the desperation among Democrats to give Biden a big victory rather than have his major initiative go down in flames in the wake of a massive foreign-policy disaster.
To be clear, this does not mean that Democrats will necessarily pass all of the $4.1 trillion in combined spending envisioned by the two bills. But they are starting off with an extraordinarily high number — the reconciliation bill alone is triple the inflation-adjusted cost of Obamacare at the time of passage. This means that there will be plenty of room to scale back the legislation while still moving the ball forward on many progressive priorities. As currently conceived, the reconciliation bill would offer subsidized child care, universal pre-K, and free community college. It would expand Obamacare as well as add dental and vision coverage to Medicare. It would represent a significant down payment on the Green New Deal. And that doesn’t even include all the goodies in the separate infrastructure bill that Republicans, inexplicably, already signed on to.
Moderates, almost by definition, are more eager to compromise and more transactional than their ideological counterparts. They want to claim to have accomplished something and are traditionally easily bought off. Take, for example, the Obamacare negotiations during which Democrat Ben Nelson infamously made a laundry list of demands that would have to be met to secure his support. Just days later, he decided to vote for the bill after Harry Reid agreed to a little more Medicaid funding for Nebraska. So, there will be concessions to moderates. The price tag is likely to come down, some provisions may be nixed or downsized, and there may be some special favors. But the remaining legislation is still likely to be substantial.
Whatever progressives may say during the process, when push comes to shove, they aren’t going to vote down a bill because it’s, say, $3 trillion instead of $3.5 trillion when there’s an opportunity to advance the ball on issues they care about. Just as no conservative is going to vote against a major tax cut — even if it’s smaller than they would have preferred — no progressive is going to nuke trillions of dollars in spending just because they would prefer to spend more.
So, whatever you may read in the fall about Biden’s agenda being doomed, don’t get too excited. Democrats are going to be spending a giant pile of cash real soon.