Everyone Can Hold the Twin Infrastructure Deals Hostage. That Makes for a Tough Path Ahead.
Progressives and centrists all have their hands on the legislative buzzer, leaving the White House in a serious bind.
When you look at where we find ourselves with two of the most consequential pieces of legislation before Congress—the twin-tracked “hard” and the “soft” infrastructure bills—it’s hard to escape a troubling feeling: Both rely upon the cooperation of partisans who detest each other’s agendas and would be willing to sink everything to prevent the other side from getting what it wants.
Take the “hard” infrastructure bill for roads, bridges, highways and some broadband. That is the result of painstaking compromise among a group of 10 centrist senators, five from each party. The bill purportedly doesn’t raise new taxes, which is why it can’t be very big and why it’s limited to “hard” but agreed-upon-as-necessary transportation and communications upgrades and investments. Progressives are quite wary of this bill because it contains none of the things that they believe are actually also critical, such as real action on climate change, child care for working families, and eldercare. The Progressive Caucus in the House has made it clear, with the vocal support of Nancy Pelosi, that they won’t even consider the hard bill without a soft bill alongside it that funds all that. In effect, they intend to hold the hard bill hostage unless and until the soft bill also clears the Senate.
But the soft bill, which will have a price tag anywhere between $2 and $6 trillion dollars depending on how effective Joe Manchin and Bernie Sander are at getting their respective ways, simply can’t be paid for without new revenue. President Biden has made it clear he won’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000 annually, so this by default means higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals. And yet, this was something the GOP centrists expressly refused to consider at all in the hard infrastructure bill, meaning that there likely won’t be a single GOP senator willing to support the soft bill because of its tax implications. More critically, if the soft bill arrives before them with a host of new taxes, effectively undoing the 2017 Trump tax cuts, members of the GOP centrist group could torpedo the hard infrastructure bill unless those new taxes are removed or reduced in the soft bill. In effect, they also could hold the hard bill hostage until the soft bill comes in far lower.
The hard bill is the darling of centrist Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema because it helps prove their point that bipartisanship is not dead and that the filibuster rule need not be abolished. To save the hard bill, they might seek to use the mere threat of the loss of GOP support for it as leverage to get their way in the soft bill, a move that would infuriate progressives in their own party. Imagine Manchin saying he won’t go any higher than $2 trillion and won’t raise corporate taxes any higher than 25%, because he needs to keep the GOP from balking on the other compromise bill they negotiated. Majority Leader Schumer would be wise to warn Manchin and Sinema now that adding their own weight to such GOP threats would be an unacceptable betrayal of the party because it plays directly into the GOP’s hands.
On the other side of things, progressives like Sens. Sanders who chairs the Senate Budget Committee, likely would respond that if the GOP doesn’t want to support the hard bill they already agreed to and are instead tying it to a bill they knew would be proceeding in tandem, then Democrats should bypass them entirely and pass both bills through the reconciliation process, which can’t be filibustered. If Manchin and Sinema want to be the ones to sink the hard and soft bills, let them show their colors now.
Moderate Democrats worry, of course, that threats of this nature are unproductive, and that with patience Manchin and Sinema can be brought into the fold, just as they were with the American Rescue Plan which also passed with exactly 50 votes plus a tie-breaker from Vice President Harris. After all, just weeks ago, Manchin was saying he wouldn’t support a Democratic-only infrastructure bill, and now he says he will—just as he did with the voting rights bill after a quiet pressure campaign from civil rights activists succeeded.
In short, it is no exaggeration to say that many parties—from centrist GOP and Democratic senators, to the chair of the Budget Committee, to the Speaker of the House—have their hands on the legislative buzzer. It is a type of prisoners dilemma with unimaginably high stakes, where everyone’s better off if a deal can be reached, but there’s a strong incentive to go for the best deal you can get for yourself by hitting your hostage buzzer before the other side hits theirs. The White House and its negotiators must somehow steer these massive twin ships into a harbor so narrow that the hard bill survives a filibuster with at least 10 GOP senators in support, while the soft bill clears without a single defection by Democratic senators on either the left or the right.
Possible? Yes. Likely? Hmmm.