So…Deal or No Deal?
As President Biden departed Thursday for the Global Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, he sounded triumphant. A framework for his Build Back Better (BBB) plan had been reached among Democrats, meaning among other things $555 billion in new spending to address the climate crisis. The White House has now begun to issue broad, positive statements about how the economy will be transformed by the plan: an historic expansion of the social safety net for working families (particularly those with young children), the uninsured, and the elderly through increased coverage of medical costs for the most needy.
Vox summarized the BBB’s framework for spending as follows:
The bill will be paid for by a new 15 percent minimum corporate tax, a surcharge on high-income earners, increased enforcement by the IRS, a tax upon stock buybacks, and other measures that the two holdouts in the senate, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, appear to have finally accepted.
So why aren’t Democrats cutting the ribbon and popping the champagne? Why aren’t they moving forward with votes? After all, there’s a bipartisan infrastructure framework (BIF) awaiting approval by the Democrats in the House—a vote that is now over a month delayed. Moderate members are growing impatient, saying enough is enough. Why not pass the infrastructure bill now, they argue, and then pass BBB in November based on the framework President Biden announced? Delay, they say, only hurts the president abroad as he tries to convince the world of America’s commitment to addressing climate change, and the governor’s race in Virginia is so close that the Democrats could use a jolt of good news to motivate voters to the polls.
What’s more, the two corporatist holdouts in the senate sounded generally supportive of the framework after its announcement on Thursday. Sen. Joe Manchin told his Senate colleagues that it was something he could “work with” while Sen. Kyrsten Sinema noted there had been “significant progress” and said, “I look forward to getting this done.”
All good, but not so fast, says the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), which comprises 94 voting members in the House. While there is a general framework with which everyone seems satisfied, the legislative text of the BBB is still only around 90 percent complete, meaning that critical details around the last 10 percent of the proposal have yet to be worked out. As the CPC consistently has said for months, its members are unwilling to vote through the BIF without a concurrent vote on BBB. (This was the expected culmination of the Democrats’ “mutual assured destruction” that I wrote about back in July—one that Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Schumer rather cleverly set up by dual-tracking but tying these bills’ fates together, while handing both moderates and centrists the power to blow up the other side’s priorities.)
Yesterday, to no one’s surprise, CPC Chair Pramila Jayapal announced that there were “too many ‘no’ votes for the BIF to pass today. However, we are committed to staying here until we get this Build Back Better Act done, get the legislative text,” she added as a positive note. Meanwhile, over in the Senate, progressive leaders backed up their House colleagues. Senator Sanders, who has championed a large and transformative bill, also sounded cautious about the state of play. “Clearly to my mind it has some major gaps in it,” he said.
The liberals’ mistrust is somewhat understandable given the many bombs dropped in these final days that blew holes in key aspects of the plan. For example, Sen. Manchin’s eleventh hour opposition to paid family leave caused it to fall out of the bill entirely, and Sen. Sinema’s recently announced opposition to undoing the Trump tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy left negotiators scrambling to come up with ways to pay for it all.
A vote isn’t likely now until sometime next week at the earliest. Congressional staffers will work through the weekend to complete the final text of the bill based on the framework announced by the White House. And Rep. Jayapal may be able to corral progressives to vote through the BIF based solely on proposed legislative language text of the BBB and verbal assurances from President Biden, but that is likely as far as she can go. Everything will depend on whether there are any remaining surprises in the text. And that power still lies with the senate obstructionists.
The total amount of the bill now looks to come in around $1.75 trillion, roughly half of the $3.5 trillion initially announced. To those disappointed by the size of the final package, it is not uncommon in politics or any rounds of negotiations to demand something big initially yet wind up with only half of it. That is the fact of compromise, and we are currently stuck with a senate where two people who don’t share progressive values hold absolute veto power.
A few months ago, handicappers would have put the odds of sailing two bills (each with price tags north of a trillion dollars) safely into harbor in the middle of a bad political storm were quite low, especially given a House majority of just five seats and an exactly evenly split Senate. Even when President Obama enjoyed much stronger Democratic majorities in Congress back in 2009, he could not get the ACA through intact: Key provisions were scuttled by his own party members, including the core of it comprising the public option.
The takeaway is this: If the BBB framework as announced actually passes with nearly all Democrats in the House and every single Democrat in the Senate in favor, with Vice President Kamala Harris again casting the decisive tie-breaker, it will be a legislative achievement that is frankly unparalleled, especially given how transformational it is to our entire understanding and acceptance of the social safety net. But the twin vessels aren’t docked at harbor yet, and they could still be torpedoed next week. Even so, most handicappers today likely would say that the chances of a big progressive victory are looking pretty decent as we come down to the wire.
Prayers and thoughts of positivity.