It’s Sanders v. Manchin, and the Stakes Couldn’t Be Higher
Over the weekend, the two titans in the Senate—Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) who chairs the powerful Senate Budget Committee and centrist Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) who holds the key 50th Democratic vote in the body—staked out their respective positions over the price tag on the massive budget reconciliation bill which could run as high as $3.5 trillion dollars.
The two seem, at first inspection, worlds apart. Manchin has stated on the record that he does not support a bill priced so high and has indicated his preference is somewhere less than half of that. Sanders counters that the $3.5 trillion is already a compromise off of the $6 trillion he had pushed for, and that without this bill he wouldn’t support Manchin’s $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. Were a true impasse to be reached, both bills would die, sinking President Biden’s agenda utterly. In short, both men have their hands on the triggers, making it mutually assured destruction should either of them squeeze.
The bill as proposed would raise corporate tax rates from 21% up to 26.5% for the top corporate earners, impose a 3% surcharge on people making over $5 million, and raise capital gains tax rates, according to a summary by the Wall Street Journal. It would expand Medicare to cover dental and vision, provide expanded eldercare, extend the just-passed child tax credits for 10 years, and combat climate change with big investments into green energy.
How Joe Manchin Sees It.
Manchin takes issue with the overall price tag even while generally supporting the idea of higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy so that they pay their fair share. Despite stating that he opposes the size of the bill, he has not come forward with any specific proposals on where he would cut the bill back.
Rather, Manchin has taken aim at the alleged haste with which the bill is being pushed through by the House, which has pledged to send the bill to the Senate no later than September 27th. He believes there should be a “pause” on the timetable until senators can better study the effects of the delta variant on the economy, whether inflation is continuing at the pace we’ve seen, and whether there is any need to spend the money now. (Critics point out that the proposed bill would spent the money over 10 years, making its real impact today less impactful.)
“We’ve already put out $5.4 trillion and we’ve tried to help Americans in every way we possibly can, and a lot of the help that we've put out there is still there and it’s going to run clear until next year, 2022, so what's the urgency? What’s the urgency that we have?” Manchin told CNN’s Dana Bash on Sunday. “It’s not the same urgency that we had with the American Rescue Plan. We got that out the door quickly. That was about $2 trillion.”
How Bernie Sanders Sees It
Sanders also hit the news interviews on Sunday touting the need for bold measures to fight climate change and protect the most vulnerable in our society, including children and the elderly. On CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday, he called Manchin’s range of $1.0 to $1.5 trillion “absolutely not acceptable.” On social media, Sanders reiterated a pledge that tied the infrastructure bill Manchin wants to the reconciliation bill Sanders is championing: “We are not going to build bridges just so our people can live under them,” Sanders tweeted.
“We’ve got to lower the costs of prescription drugs for people. We’ve got to expand Medicare to include dental, hearing aids, and eyeglasses. We have to maintain the $300 direct payments we’re giving to working parents, which have lowered childhood poverty in America by 50%,” Sanders said. He further stressed that scientists have warned that “we’ve got a few years left before there will be irreparable, irreversible harm to our planet if we do not address climate change.”
In the end, however, he struck a conciliatory tone even while reminding Manchin that he has the power to sink his prized bipartisan infrastructure deal. He remarked to CNN’s Bash that it would be a “really sad state of affairs” if both the reconciliation bill and the infrastructure bill failed, but he added that he doesn’t believe that will happen.
Conspicuously left out of the conversation over the budget thus far are the 50 Senate Republicans who uniformly oppose the bill and have blasted it as “socialism.” Responding to charges that Democrats simply tax and spend, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki remarked, “If some Republicans in Congress want to have a debate about whether or not we should help middle class families have more breathing room, make eldercare, childcare more affordable, or whether we should protect corporations and the wealthiest Americans—that’s a debate we’re happy to have.”