2.0). 
by Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0).
With some wailing and gnashing of teeth among progressives, Democrats may be nearing a draft of President Joe Biden’s spending bill to which party conservatives will agree. Not the originally floated $6 trillion. Not the heavily reported $3.5 trillion. But somewhere approaching the $1.5 trillion that Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia insists was his final offer. Fellow conservative(?), Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona offered nothing except noes.
With party leaders eager to cut a deal and start moving the legislation in days, progressives are grudgingly assessing whether it’s time to be pragmatic, back a compromise and declare victory.
An agreement would bring another bonus — freeing for final House approval a bipartisan, Senate-approved $1 trillion package of road, water and broadband projects that progressives have sidetracked to pressure moderates to back the larger economic bill.
“Of course I don’t like it,” said progressive Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, of the outsize influence moderates have had in compressing the package and erasing some of its provisions. “These are all things that we’ve been fighting for. For decades.” But she said with Democratic unity needed, the party should use the bill to “open the door” to its priorities and then try extending and expanding them later.
With the slimmest of margins is the House and none in the Senate, Democrats have little room to negotiate with conservative Senate Democrats determined to, as Donald Trump once said, “Use your leverage.”
“So the question is would we prefer not getting anything, or would we prefer something that can at least be a down payment on some of the transformational programs that we want,” said Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., chairman of the House Rules Committee.
Don’t let the perfect, etc.
And enemies of the good? For their part, Manchin and Sinema don’t seem familiar with the expression, “Don’t shit where you eat.”
“At some point, you have to realize that legislating requires respect for the rest of the people you’re working with,” Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., a progressive and chairman of the House Budget Committee, said of Manchin and Sinema. “And when you have forced a 50% cut essentially in a giant program, I think you’ve done a disservice to all the people you serve with.”
“I’m pissed off, man,” said freshman Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., one of the party’s most progressive members, singling out Manchin. “It’s just unacceptable to me that one person from one state can have all this power and make these decisions that will crush my district and districts like mine across the country.”
Sinema’s electoral fate in Arizona is uncertain, but Manchin need not worry about being Liz Cheneyed. Senate Democrats still need him.
David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, recommended in the New York Times on Tuesday that if two of their own prevent Democrats from passing the sweeping legislation of their dreams, Biden and his party should “enact permanent, simple, meaningful programs, and connect them to his argument about how government can work again.”
In essence, build less better:
For too many years, Congress has tried to resolve longstanding policy issues by erecting complicated systems that an untutored public must navigate. Ordinary people who qualify for benefits — usually because they are in great financial need — are drafted into becoming unpaid bureaucrats, forced to spend time and effort to access what the system owes them. It’s confusing and exasperating, and it has sapped the faith that Americans once had in their government. Simply put, Democrats cannot continue to campaign on solving big problems and then fail to deliver without destroying their political project and alienating voters.
Hybrid public-private, means-tested and sunsetted programs simply reinforce Ronald Reagan’s epigram that I won’t repeat here. Efforts to massage out any supposed moral hazards simply add to the cost and line the pockets of insurance executives. Keep it simple, stupid, is still good advice, and Dayen offers it here.
Democrats could subsequently run on a record of actually solving problems, rather than gesturing in their direction. If all the programs were functional yet time-limited, there could be an argument for trying to win elections on extending them. But the path Democrats are going down now, hoping to mobilize voters around poorly designed programs that lock out many of the middle-class suburban voters they have just started to attract again, is a much bigger risk.
Better to prove government can make more people’s lives better than to make a hash of doing too much poorly, says Dayen.
The Covid-19 pandemic highlighted fissures in our society that had festered for decades: the lack of child care when schools shuttered, the lack of shelter during a shelter-in-place order, the lack of health insurance when people lost jobs, the lack of sick leave when workers fell ill with Covid, the lack of at-home care amid tragic outbreaks at nursing homes, the lack of even $400 to cover emergency expenses when disaster struck. Build Back Better represents an effort to never again make citizens so vulnerable, in the next pandemic or in an enduring emergency like the climate crisis.
The Build Back Better Act cannot be enacted as envisioned because of a few corporate Democrats. But Mr. Biden could ensure that what survives actually fills those critical gaps — in family care, in health care, in housing, in cash assistance — not with half-measures but with real relief. That would align the agenda with why voters gave Mr. Biden the presidency in the first place: to get America back to normal, and to make normal better. It would also establish Democrats as worthy of America’s trust.
In essence, Democrats may have to build back trust before they can build back more. Lasting upgrades to the welfare state that apply universally will do that better than time-limited and “undercooked” programs no matter how precious.
Democrats are likely to lose their majorities in both houses of Congress in 2022. They have to prove they can govern for the public good now. Then message the hell out of it if they expect any chance to do it again over the remaining decade. Proving they can do that may be an even greater challenge than passing any bill.