It looks like it …
I hesitate to get too excited about this because well …you know. Lucy, football blah,blah,blah. But this time it looks pretty solid. And it’s good.
Joe Manchin and Chuck Schumer looked at loggerheads after their talks on a sweeping climate, tax and health care bill ran aground nearly two weeks ago. In fact, they were working on Washington’s best-kept secret.
On July 18, four days after Manchin and Schumer’s talks seemed to fizzle out with only a limited health care deal, Manchin reached out to Schumer to see if he was amenable to picking things back up. By Wednesday afternoon, they had a deal on a bill that includes energy and tax policy, a turnaround after the two deadlocked on Democrats’ marquee party-line agenda.
“It’s like two brothers from different mothers, I guess. He gets pissed off, I get pissed off, and we’ll go back and forth. He basically put out statements, and the dogs came after me again,” Manchin said in an interview on Wednesday. “We just worked through it.”
All throughout last week, Manchin stayed quiet about the talks even as most senators, staffers and journalists had moved on: “I didn’t know if it could come to fruition. I really didn’t know, OK, so why talk about something, again, build people’s hopes up? I got the ire of everybody.”
That ire turned into jubilation within the Democratic Party by Wednesday night after Manchin and Schumer announced what they dubbed “the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022,” which is slated for the Senate floor next week. There’s still significant concerns to be dealt with over whether it can meet chamber rules for avoiding a filibuster, and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) hasn’t signed off yet — but Manchin’s deal with Schumer amounts to the best news for Democrats in weeks.
Moreover, Manchin’s announcement came hours after final passage of semiconductor legislation, a bill Republicans threatened to block mere weeks ago in an effort to stop Democrats from pursuing a party-line tax, climate and health care package.
The Manchin-Schumer deal includes roughly $370 billion in energy and climate spending, $300 billion in deficit reduction, three years of subsidies for Affordable Care Act premiums, prescription drug reform and significant tax changes. Manchin said the bill was at one point “bigger than that” but that’s where the two Democrats settled.
As part of the agreement announced Wednesday, Schumer and Speaker Nancy Pelosi agreed to pass legislation governing energy permits. Manchin said he spoke to Schumer, Pelosi and President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
After Manchin’s talks with Biden stalled last December on the more sweeping Democratic bill known as Build Back Better, Manchin recalled Biden telling him: “Joe, it’s not going to help for me to be involved in this … if you can do anything, good. If not, I understand.”
“You know, as an old senator, he understands things are a little rough at times,” Manchin said. In a statement, Biden thanked Manchin and Schumer for their work and described the deal as “the action the American people have been waiting for.”
I don’t know for sure what happened here but we have to assume this was not as it seemed. Just hours after they passed the Chips and Science Act that includes $52 billion in subsidies for chipmakers building new foundries in the U.S. and $170 billion in incentives for scientific research and development to bolster the U.S.’s ability to compete with China, which the Republicans had held as leverage over the Dems if they went through with a big reconciliation package, the Dems produced a complete bill, all 700+ pages of it. It certainly appears that the collapse was a feint to get McConnell to pass the other bill, thinking reconciliation was off the table.
This is very good news. Will it help Democrats in the midterms? Probably not. Polls show that most people don’t even know they passed the infrastructure bill. But if the Dems lose control of one or both houses of congress next year this will be the last meaningful legislation passed and these are important items, particularly the drug pricing and climate policies.
Meanwhile, the Republicans are crying like a bunch of toddlers:
“Well, it was obviously a double cross by Joe Manchin,” Tom Cotton said. “Just two weeks ago he said he wasn’t gonna support a bill like this. He’s been saying for months that he wouldn’t support so many of the provisions in this bill, he called them gimmicks or smoke and mirrors budgeting, but now he’s going to apparently support all of them.”
Boo hoo hoo.
Al Gore says:
The Inflation Reduction Act has the potential to be a historic turning point. It represents the single largest investment in climate solutions & environmental justice in US history. Decades of tireless work by climate advocates across the country led to this moment.
No deal is perfect and we need many more actions to solve the climate crisis. Yet, this bill is a long overdue and necessary step to ensure the US takes decisive action on the climate crisis that helps our economy and provides leadership for the world by example.
It’s time to join together in support of this bold #ClimateAction – and then accelerate our efforts to continue our work to move away from the dirty energy economy of the past and toward a sustainable future.
Originally tweeted by Al Gore (@algore) on July 28, 2022.
Update — Dave Dayen on this deal:
Five years ago today, the late John McCain strode onto the Senate floor and delivered a thumbs-down to the Republican repeal of Obamacare, a white whale they had been pursuing since well before obtaining a governing trifecta. The legislative agenda in the Trump years narrowed to a historically unpopular tax cut and deregulation.
One year ago today, Chuck Schumer and Joe Manchin signed a secret deal to deliver a $1.5 trillion reconciliation bill that would include “no additional handouts or transfer payments” on any health or family care policies, and investments in “fuel neutral” energy, with carbon-capture technologies mandated for fossil fuel infrastructure, a zero-emission vehicle credit that included hydrogen fuel cell cars, with parity for both renewable and fossil fuel tax credits. Among the measures to help pay for it were a corporate minimum tax of 15 percent and an end to the carried interest loophole.
For 364 days, Manchin went back and forth on pretty much all of these provisions, rejecting the bill outright, then crawling back to the table, going into bargaining with Schumer, leaving that bargaining, and coming back. And one year to the day later, we have a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which includes everything in that previous paragraph and a lot more on energy and climate, plus the ACA insurance exchange subsidies and prescription drug price reforms we knew about. But overall, the bill spends $433 billion, a little over $1 trillion less than that original topline. Much of its revenue goes to deficit reduction.
There is no such thing as a genuine surprise in Washington—usually. This was a genuine surprise. I had been talking to people this week who would or should have known that talks between Manchin and Schumer, thought to be moribund, were taking place. The closest I got to foreknowledge was one source saying that they just didn’t believe it. An army of reporters, lobbyists, and hangers-on didn’t know this was happening.
The reveal was made a few hours after the Senate cleared the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill that offers semiconductor manufacturers subsidies for reshoring and boosts science programs. Mitch McConnell had threatened that bill, something highly cherished by Schumer, if Democrats persisted with a party-line bill that raised taxes and boosted clean energy. When Manchin walked away from negotiations with Schumer just two weeks ago over those two items, McConnell let his guard down and allowed a vote on CHIPS, which was popular with many of his Republican colleagues. Schumer and Manchin waited until that cleared the Senate before announcing a reconciliation deal with taxes and climate back in.
If you told me a cosmic ray hit Washington and flipped everyone’s brains, giving Schumer the Machiavellian cunning of a Republican and giving McConnell the guileless approach of a Democrat, that might be a more plausible explanation for this display than the truth. It’s a near-legendary turn of events that infuriated McConnell so much he took hostage a bill to give dying veterans exposed to toxic burn pits medical care, something Republicans passed overwhelmingly just a few weeks ago (it needed a technical fix). The combination of the revival of the Biden agenda and red-faced Republicans making terrible choices on highly popular legislation is one for the ages.
Can it be that Democrats have finally accepted the nature of their opposition and are willing to govern accordingly?