Month: October 2021

Thursday evening, as negotiations over President Biden’s domestic agenda dragged on for hours on Capitol Hill, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin stood at the stern of his large yacht and spoke to some of his West Virginia constituents.

https://twitter.com/EoinHiggins_/status/1443750386066731014?s=20

It would be easy to mock Manchin standing there addressing his people from on high, considering that he and his partner in obstruction Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Arizona, are both behaving like a couple of theatrical divas. In the last few days especially, both of them have been all over the place, ostentatiously declaring their independence and generally driving everyone nuts with their vague and inconsistent objections combined with constant, tiresome grandstanding. But if you can get past the bizarre spectacle and listen to what Manchin said, it’s clear that all is not lost.

Yes, Manchin balked at expanding Medicare benefits with a bogus claim that the federal program is going broke. (It is not.) But, importantly, he did say that he believed in taxing the rich and that we should be negotiating for lower drug prices. That’s a more concrete promise than we’ve seen from him in quite some time.

That little interaction came on the heels of the release earlier in the day of a memo from last summer, co-signed by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (who added that he would try to talk Manchin out of it), that outlined Manchin’s “topline” number for the bill: 1.5 trillion. If Manchin is negotiating in good faith, then that number cannot be written in stone, leaving at least some room for compromise. The publicizing of this proposal was obviously in response to a growing chorus of Democratic frustration that Manchin and Sinema were throwing their weight around and preening for the press without laying out their own counter-offers. After weeks of op-eds and press gaggles in which Manchin was saying that he wanted a “strategic pause” and appeared not to be interested in passing a bill at all, the release of this memo at least ended that charade. Manchin may still blow up the president’s agenda, but he is apparently now negotiating specifics, which is hopeful.

There have been a gazillion pixels deployed on the question of what Kyrsten Sinema really wants and it’s quite difficult to fathom. My personal opinion is that she is simply carving out a brand as an Arizona Maverick and believes that drawing attention to herself as someone who bucks the party will stand her in good stead back home. It’s hard to imagine that destroying the Democratic agenda and ushering in another era of GOP dominance, likely led by Donald Trump, will endear her to her base voters but that seems to be her motivation. It certainly isn’t any adherence to ideology or principle.

But it turns out that she too felt the pressure of the criticism coming from the party and so released a statement on Thursday insisting that she is negotiating with all the parties and has offered specifics, although she didn’t say what those were.

What this all means is that the two bills — and thus Biden’s agenda — still have a chance for passage.

On Thursday night, the House worked with the White House and members of the Senate into the wee hours but were unable to come to an agreement on the reconciliation bill. So they missed the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill by the deadline agreed to by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to appease a small handful of recalcitrant House “moderates.” It was an arbitrary date, so missing it is insignificant in itself. They plan to continue to negotiate today and beyond if that’s what it takes. This is monumentally important legislation and it makes no sense to cobble together a deal at 2 AM for no good reason.

Notably, the House progressives are holding together in their demand that the infrastructure bill will not pass unless the Senate also passes the rest of the Biden agenda in the larger reconciliation package. From the gasps in the media as Thursday night wore on, it seems that few believed they would do it. In fact, they apparently thought that they had done something catastrophic when, in reality, they were just being smart negotiators.

The headline should be that we are setting the Biden agenda back on track, not setting it back. https://t.co/81bwiwsAkB

— Rep. Jared Huffman on Threads @RealJaredHuffman (@JaredHuffman) October 1, 2021

That headline is just wrong. The progressives were not alone in this and it isn’t a big setback. The leadership didn’t whip for votes on Thursday night and for good reason: The entire Democratic caucus minus a small handful in the House and two Senators are on board with this legislation. Even more importantly, the President of the United States is with the progressives as well.

Politico reported on Thursday that the White House is happy with the progressive strategy to hold fast to their terms in the hopes that it would put pressure on Manchin and Sinema to get with the program. It quotes Press Secretary Jen Psaki being downright complimentary in the press briefing this week, saying “[M]embers of the Progressive Caucus want to have an understanding of the path forward on the reconciliation package. They have stated that publicly. You know why? Because they think it’s a historic progressive package that will make bold changes into addressing our climate crisis, into lowering costs for the American people, bringing more women back into the workplace.”

In press appearances, progressives have likewise been on message, making very clear that they want to vote for the Biden agenda and it’s the small rump of so-called moderates who are standing in the way. Politico characterized the relationship this way:

Ultimately, the White House wants to see the infrastructure bill passed when it is brought up. But the idea that it would be comfortable with an effort by a portion of its own party to delay and put into question one of the president’s most important initiatives would have been unheard of in previous administrations. These, however, are not normal times. And this is hardly a normal legislative calendar.

And it is not your grandfather’s Progressive Caucus either. They are a savvy group, leveraging their numbers to pass an ambitious agenda that’s been proposed by a mainstream Democratic president. They are a force to be reckoned with.

I don’t know what will happen today. Pelosi says there will be a vote. It sounds as though Manchin and Sinema have moved off their high horses, at least for now, and are seriously engaged in the details. But there’s nothing wrong with taking the time to hash this out and get an agreement and if it takes some more time it’s worth it. What they all must recognize is that this is their shot to do something historically important and if they don’t succeed they may not get another chance. The future of the country — and the planet — depend on it.

Salon

Continuing on the theme of my earlier post, Jamelle Bouie eschews posting “another jeremiad against the filibuster” and asks, simply, why can we not run the country via majority rule the way your club or school board does?

That in a body already disproportionately weighted towards the least populous states it requires a supermajority to get nearly anything done in the Senate is an affront to one-person, one-vote. So Bouie asks, “What, exactly, are the rules of the Senate — and of Congress in general — for?” Do they facilitate governance or hinder it?

By now their purpose has been lost, Bouie suggests, citing again Henry Cabot Lodge’s 1893 critique of congressional rules:

“The primary and the only proper and intelligent object of all parliamentary law and rules is to provide for and to facilitate the ordinary action of public business,” Lodge wrote. “When any set of parliamentary rules ceases to accomplish this object they have become an abuse — and an abuse of the worst kind.”

It was not just that obstruction stymied the work of government, but that it undermined accountability and made lawmakers less responsible: “If a minority can prevent action, the majority, which is entitled to rule and is entrusted with power, is at once divested of all responsibility, the great safeguard of free representative institutions.”

Lodge had no trouble with the Senate’s tradition of unlimited debate. But, he insisted, the Senate did not exist to debate; it existed to govern and its rules must work to that end. “The two great rights in our representative bodies are voting and debate,” Lodge wrote. “If the courtesy of unlimited debate is granted it must carry with it the reciprocal courtesy of permitting a vote after due discussion.”

Lodge blamed the majority for even allowing the minority to throw sand in the Senate’s gears, writing, “The blame for obstruction rests with the majority, and if there is obstruction it is because the majority permits it.”

Hoary tradition is no excuse. Every few months, designers of computer operating systems upgrade their software. Likely, your machine updates whether or not you want it to and whether or not the upgrade is an actual improvement. But users are by now conditioned to periodic tweaks and roll with the changes. That Senate traditions resist all efforts at upgrading speaks to the dire need for it.

Also for reforms to “traditions” that result not just in the Senate being a counter-majoritarian body, but the House being less representative than originally intended.

The World Population Review offers a list of states in which gerrymandering results in the House, too, being less representative than democracy demands. I mentioned North Carolina’s statewide vote split nearly evenly between Democrats and Republicans, yet how districts are drawn means the GOP controls 8 of 13 House seats. In Texas in 2020, Democrats received 45% of the statewide vote yet hold only 36% of the state’s 35 House seats. In Ohio, Democrats received 43% of the statewide vote, but hold only 25% of its 16 House seats. In Kentucky, Democrats won 34% of the statewide vote, but occupy only one of the state’s 6 seats (17%).

Rules change. Rules should when they no longer serve the people.

Despite the “Dems in disarray” narrative behind the “splintered” and “setback” headlines this morning after Speaker Nancy Pelosi postponed a Thursday vote on Joe Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure package, the House progressive caucus seems very much in array. The media thrives on tension and conflict, so chaos is newsrooms’ go-to storyline.

With a 50-50 Senate, Democrats’ miniscule moderate faction holds a veto over advancing the twin bills stuck in negotiations: the BIF (the bipartisan infrastructure bill) passed by the Senate and awaiting a vote in the House, and the BBB (the Build Back Better social infrastructure reconciliation bill) still unvoted in the Senate. The original deal, progressives are as quick to remind as the moderates are to forget, was for the House to vote on both together. House progressives feared getting rolled by Senate moderates. If the House passed the BIF first, progressives feared moderates would let the BBB die in the Senate. Moderates reinforced that suspicion by insisting that a vote on the BIF take place in the House this week while the BBB remains in limbo in the Senate.

The House progressive caucus is the opposite of disarray. Members stand unified behind passing both arms of the Biden agenda.

All the blazing pixels this morning are an overreaction. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent tweets, “As expected, the postponement of the vote is being treated as a ‘crushing blow’ and a ‘huge setback’ to Biden’s agenda. Utterly ludicrous. Such things happen all the time with complex legislation.” Commentary like this, Sargent complains, “is the opposite of savvy.”

Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer are playing Jenga, but Thursday’s postponement is not the “harbinger of doom” headlines portray.

Paul Waldman and Greg Sargent wrote on Thursday that there is at least movement from one of the Senate holdouts:

On Thursday, we learned that this summer, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) signed a document that laid out what Manchin would tolerate in the reconciliation bill. It limited spending to $1.5 trillion over ten years rather than the $3.5 trillion supported by President Biden and other Democrats.

Some details are reasonable (“Raise the top rate on income: 39.6%”) and others are disturbing (“Fuel neutral,” which seems to mean Manchin wants the bill to do as much to promote fossil fuels as renewables). It’s galling, to be sure, that someone with these priorities wields such enormous influence over the legislative outcome and, by extension, over our future.

But at the very least, in this Manchin did offer a place to start from. That suggests a deal is possible.

As for the other Senate holdout, well, no one knows what Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona wants, least of all Sinema:

Meanwhile, Sen. Sinema’s office released a curt, defensive statement responding to intensifying criticism of her refusal to specify what she can accept in reconciliation. “Biden and his team, along with Senator Schumer and his team, are fully aware of Senator Sinema’s priorities, concerns, and ideas,” it said, offering no details and adding, “we do not negotiate through the press.”

Here again it’s galling that Sinema is being so snide after stringing everyone along in bad faith for so long. But if what she says is true, it means that very real negotiations are taking place. Put these comments together and we have some reason to believe that we’re moving — albeit slowly — toward the destination of a bill.

That is all the more reason for Pelosi to want progressives to keep up the pressure on the Senate to keep the bills linked. Don’t believe us? Sargent asks. The Punchbowl News team has a similar take on the choreography taking place:

Both pieces of legislation are almost as popular as popular gets with the American public. Pelosi’s office put out a statement ten days ago:

An overwhelming majority of Americans, independents, and even four-in-ten Republicans back President Biden and House Democrats’ plan to cut taxes for the middle class, lower costs for working families, create more jobs, and sustain economic growth for years to come. 

New polling from Navigator Research shows high support for the Build Back Better Act with support from:

• 66 percent of Americans
• 61 percent of Independents
• 39 percent of Republicans

Democrats believe we face an urgent choice between keeping an economy that serves the wealthiest and biggest corporations – or finally give middle class families a fair shot.  It turns out the American people agree.

Those numbers won’t keep Democrats’ moderates from defying public opinion or their own constituents’ wants and needs. Nor will they keep others from dissing Biden’s and progressives’ go-big approach.

Damon Linker argues at The Week that Democrats’ narrow margins in Congress indicate progressive overreach “in at least partial defiance of public opinion.” This, despite Biden’s 2020 nationwide popular vote majority and Democrats’ statewide vote in states like mine states where Republican gerrymandering prevents expression of the popular will in the House of Representatives. With the statewide vote essentially even in North Carolina in 2020, Republicans hold 8 of 13 House seats. And, of course, there is the unrepresentative makeup of the Senate.

Defiance of public opinion, indeed.