Between them, Manchin and Sinema are going to give the Republicans everything they want by blocking Biden’s agenda in the Senate. Manchin wants a ‘pause’; Sinema simply says no. Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo has taken a look at this and has a simple answer:
By which he means the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill (BIF), as opposed to the reconciliation bill aka Build Back Better bill (BBB). Democrats have been trying to keep the bills linked out of the very real fear that BBB will fall by the wayside if they don’t. If it’s going to be the BIF alone, Marshall says kill it. His conclusion is this:
...As has been the case throughout this maddening year there are just too many factors that aren’t visible to us. Democrats will have to rely on Nancy Pelosi and others to make good decisions based on knowledge of details they cannot share. But to the extent we can be clear on goals, to the extent we must shape transitory tactics with a clear understanding of where we want to end up, a final outcome that is an infrastructure bill and nothing else is just not tenable. It leaves too many critical priorities unaddressed – especially climate – and makes a mockery of the whole Democratic coalition.
If it’s the BIF and nothing else, kill the BIF.
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Marshall brings up an important point. Remember when George W. Bush tried to privatize Social Security? Many Democrats were ready to negotiate and compromise to keep it from being worse than it was going to be — as though the GOP was going to compromise on anything.
What happened instead was this:
...Democrats finally settled on the right approach which was: no. No negotiations. No support. No nothing. Democrats couldn’t control the outcome. But they could clarify what was happening. Democrats support Social Security. Republicans want to abolish it.
In the end, Bush’s plan collapsed. Democrats were ready to lose well and that helped them win.
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The point Marshall makes about losing well is this: losing well is a key way to win in the long run — because losing poorly can leave you far worse off.
But it’s worth thinking through the alternative scenario. What if Bush had in fact abolished most of Social Security. That would have been a policy disaster for hundreds of millions of Americans. But if the Democrats had been part of it it would have been disastrous for them as a party. The cases are very different but there are some similarities to now. If the upshot of the Biden presidency is that Democrats delivered the votes for Kyrsten Sinema’s infrastructure bill vanity project and got nothing else it will be profoundly self-discrediting for the Democratic party in addition to being a disaster for the climate future and much else. Democrats and the White House need to be ready to kill the infrastructure bill.
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Marshall lays out the fundamental cluelessness of Sinema and Manchin and what their sabotage could mean for the Democratic Party and Biden’s agenda:
...I had a conversation yesterday similar to a number I’ve heard over recent days: a business lobbyist explaining that yes, they want the infrastructure bill real bad and that their optimal scenario is that the infrastructure bill passes and the reconciliation bill goes down to defeat entirely. A separate irony is that most of those people – the ones who appear to have Sinema’s ear – seem entirely unable to grasp the implications for the Democratic party if that is indeed the final outcome. It will rip the Democratic coalition apart. Of course, in general, that’s not their concern or their problem. But it certainly means all the self-styled “moderates” they’re working with now will go down to defeat – both because of primaries but also just as the natural consequence of a Democratic rout. More business friendly Democrats in blue seats will also get replaced by more progressive members. I am consistently surprised how people whose whole job is politics, supposedly, seem to have so little grasp of its basic functions.
This should not be a hard decision. Republicans will support nothing coming from Democrats. They want them to lose on everything and they make no secret of it. Manchin and Sinema are gambling that there will be no consequences for them if they sink Biden’s agenda, one supported by a majority of Democrats in Congress and a majority of Americans. And make no mistake — it will be their fault. (Manchin makes some incoherent excuses; Sinema won’t negotiate at all, let alone negotiate in good faith.)
Democrats control the White House and both chambers of Congress. This may literally be a “do or die” moment for American democracy. It’s not just on infrastructure after all.
Manchin helped craft a reasonably good voting rights bill — but it will never pass as long as he insists there must be at least 10 GOP Senators to vote for it. Which, of course, will never happen because it would stop their plans to rig voting in their favor and gerrymander till the cows come home.
He and Sinema both regard the filibuster as sacred and bipartisan votes as the only way to craft ‘legitimate’ legislation. They are effectively enablers of an abusive relationship. Sinema is reportedly refusing to negotiate on the BBB bill until after the BIF is passed.
- The Arizona Democrat reportedly told Biden that she’s “not there” and that “I’ve been very clear with you from the start.”
- She reportedly won’t give specifics until after the bipartisan infrastructure bill has been passed.
Of course, we have only her word that she will have anything to offer. She’s deliberately trying to derail the two-track strategy at work here. And then there’s the debt ceiling...
Jack Holmes at Esquire has a pointed question:
The current Congress has the chance to address multiple generational crises and they're busy making up their own.
It remains completely insane—abjectly nuts—that you cannot just pass a bill in the Senate with a majority of votes. The Senate is by design a starkly undemocratic body where a person who gets a couple hundred thousand citizens' votes has equal power with someone who gets millions. The chamber is currently split 50-50 between the two major-party caucuses, but the 50 Democrats and Independents represent 41.5 million more people than the 50 Republicans do. So warped is our perception of things, however, that the 50+1 votes Democrats used to pass a pandemic relief package earlier this year—they relied on the tie-breaking vote of Vice President Kamala Harris—seemed to strain democratic legitimacy. In reality, it was a means of rescuing some legitimacy, not to mention functionality, for a legislative body on the brink. A legislature that cannot respond to a crisis and deliver in a way that reflects the people's will is in big trouble.
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What you may have picked up on by now is that all of this shit is completely made up and incredibly dumb. The Senate was already a body weighted grossly in favor of inaction, and thus the status quo, which tends to benefit the most powerful people in our society and relegate the concerns of the marginalized to well beyond the margins. In its current form, where the filibuster blocks most everything besides judges and Pentagon spending, it is complete farce. The Founders did not create the filibuster, or the Parliamentarian, or budget reconciliation, not that it would matter all that much if they did. We’re seeing this nonsense play out in practice with the debt ceiling. It takes 50+1 votes to raise it—and pay for bills already accrued—but 60 votes to end debate and advance to a vote. Republicans are blocking the motion to advance.
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Republicans may be in the minority, but they’re still in control — thanks to Sinema and Manchin. They’ve learned this much ‘bipartisan’ behavior — taking hostages works for the GOP, so why not them?
UPDATE: Shorter version — Sinema and Manchin are playing Lucy and the Football. Because they can. They can only do it as long as Charlie Brown is going to put up with it. Sometimes taking the ball and going home is the only thing you can do.
Update: See Kerry Eleveld — Wherein Kyrsten Sinema is singlehandedly blowing up the entire Democratic agenda.
Campaign Action
"Literally, one senator—one Senator—Kyrsten Sinema, is holding up the will of the entire Democratic party," Rep. Ro Khanna of California toldCNN's John Berman Tuesday night.
"The president keeps begging her—tell us what you want, put a proposal forward," added Khanna.
Khanna, a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, noted that progressives have been open to compromise all along the way—coming down from a $6 trillion budget bill to a $3.5 trillion budget bill, offering to front-load the benefits and shorten their life in order to get the measure within reach of Democratic moderates. But how do you compromise, Khanna wondered, when Sinema won't lay down a marker?
"What's mindboggling is you have unanimity in the House—tomorrow the Speaker could get a deal in the House on a number," Khanna said, adding that he believed at least 48 Democratic senators could also back that deal, and probably Manchin too.
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Read the whole thing. And make a call.
UPDATE: Via Alternet, reference to Josh Marshall and Greg Sargent on how Sinema is not negotiating in good faith. From Sargent (WAPO paywall warning)
...Sinema, Sargent notes, opposes the $3.5 trillion bill's "overall spending level but won't say what she would support."
"The key point here is her apparent refusal to say what she's for in the reconciliation bill," Sargent stresses. "First off, this confirms that progressives are right to worry that if Democrats pass the infrastructure bill first, there's no telling whether Sinema — or Manchin and other centrists — will be there to support something substantial in reconciliation. Sinema not only won't say what she wants; she apparently doesn't want to have to specify it at all until the smaller bill passes."
Sargent continues, "Second, note that when progressives ask Sinema to say what she wants, they are in effect asking what she wants in concessions from them. Yet Sinema won't specify this. It's almost an insistence that the infrastructure bill must pass entirely on her terms. That seems almost designed to prevent any kind of accommodation — a level of bad faith that's genuinely hard to fathom."
As early as March, Sinema showed who she intended to be. The photo above is her voting no on increasing the minimum wage. Note that the always fair and balanced NY Times described her at the time at the link as having become “centrist” and “moderate”. It appears sticking it to progressives has become her brand. She is well on the way to becoming the Ted Cruz of the Senate Democrats in terms of popularity — except that even Ted Cruz toes the party line.
UPDATE: Joe Manchin must be getting upset that Sinema has been getting all the attention. Laura Clawson reports he’s issued a statement, which among other things, includes this boilerplate that looks like standard GOP talking points:
“While I am hopeful that common ground can be found that would result in another historic investment in our nation, I cannot—and will not—support trillions in spending or an all-or-nothing approach that ignores the brutal fiscal reality our nation faces.”
His full statement is a doozy; he really REALLY does not want to see the BBB go through.
Dem has some rejoinders about inflation fears and has picked up some Paul Krugman tweets from June that address Manchin’s bloviating.
Rachel Maddow has this to say — which shows Manchin is screwing his own voters.
Robert Reich asks the obvious question.
That sound you hear is Mitch McConnell laughing his evil ass off. With ‘Democrats’ like these two clowns, who needs Republicans?
UPDATE #6 10-1-21: This post is still trending, though who knows for how much longer? Voting on BIF has been put off after it became clear majority Democrats in the House would vote it down. Joe Manchin finally gave up a number — $1.5 trillion is all he will put up with for BBB, and supposedly he’d told Schumer this months ago. He also said he didn’t want a vote before October 1 — what’s up with that?
Although the media is screaming that the Democrats are in disarray and in danger of breaking up, the real story is how many of them are sticking together against a handful of obstructionists. David Roberts at Volts has this to say about why we have a two track process going on, and on, and on…
Y’all, it’s not particularly healthy, but all I can think about these days is politics.
We are in the end game. A small faction of corporatist Democrats, including Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (W.V.) and a handful of jerkoffs in the House, are attempting to decouple the bipartisan infrastructure bill (BIB) from the Build Back Better Act (BBBA), which is to be passed through reconciliation.
The understanding, going back months now, has been that the bills would proceed (and pass) in tandem. They were a package. The corporatists need the progressives to pass the BIB; the progressives need the corporatists to pass the BBBA.
Now that the BIB has passed the Senate, the corporatists want to back out of that understanding. They want the House to pass the BIB, and the president to sign it, before there is an agreement on the BBBA.
Their motivation is clear enough: Sinema and Manchin want the BIB to pass to show that “bipartisanship works.” It’s their signature achievement, in which they have wrapped up their not-inconsiderable egos.
They also want to eviscerate the BBBA. But they can’t do that as long as they need the votes of progressives to pass the BIB.
Those votes are the only leverage progressives have in this process — the only leverage Biden has to get the bulk of his agenda passed.
The corporatists in the House bullied Pelosi into having a vote on the BIB on Monday, betting that progressives wouldn’t call their bluff — that other Dems would back down and be good party soldiers as usual. It was their big bid to decouple the bills.
But guess what? Progressives held firm. Enough of them told Pelosi that they wouldn’t vote for the bill that, in the end, she delayed the vote until last night. And then last night, progressives continued to hold firm, so she delayed the vote again.
This is the biggest flex by House progressives in my memory, the result of many months of organizing work through which the caucus’s new leader, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), has worked to make it a more cohesive and influential force.
That’s where things stand. Supposedly they’re going to try a vote again on Friday (I’m writing this on Thursday night), so for all I know, by the time this post goes up, things will have changed again. Everything is very much in flux.
For now, though, progressives have avoided being railroaded. The substantial climate agenda in the BBBA is still on the table, though it is under heavy fire and hanging on by a thread.
As I have been emphasizing, the stakes of this political maneuvering could not be higher. This is the last chance for big US climate legislation for at least a decade if not more — our big chance to take something to international climate negotiations that inspires other countries to take action — and we all know that if we delay action for another decade, it will be too late to restrict global warming to 1.5°C or even 2°C.
If you ever felt like taking action, now’s the time. Start at Call for Climate.
Meanwhile: what do y’all think? Should progressives hold the line? Should they risk the possibility that the corporatists are willing to let both bills die? How long should they play this game of chicken, and who do you think will swerve first?
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In other news, Paul Krugman says in his newsletter that Biden should end the debt ceiling nonsense by having the Treasury mint a trillion dollar coin.
So what does this have to do with platinum coins? Well, there’s a strange provision in U.S. law that empowers the Treasury secretary to mint and issue platinum coins in any quantity and denomination she chooses. Presumably the purpose of this provision was to allow the creation of coins celebrating people or events. But the language doesn’t say that. So on the face of it, Janet Yellen could mint a platinum coin with a face value of $1 trillion — no, it needn’t include $1 trillion worth of platinum — deposit it at the Federal Reserve and draw on that account to keep paying the government’s bills without borrowing.
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Alternatively, Biden could simply declare that the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, which says that the validity of federal debt may not be questioned, renders the debt ceiling moot.
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BONUS — Joe Manchin’s “houseboat”. In case you were wondering, it’s named “Almost Heaven” — John Denver reference to West Virginia. A flotilla of kayakers are currently paddling around it to keep the pressure on him to stop being a fossil fuel stooge and pass BBB. Manchin lives here in D.C. because it’s cheaper than trying to buy a home, where the starting price is around $1million by reports.
Pro Tip Joe: Pass BBB — it includes money to build affordable housing.
UPDATE #7 10-1-21: Digby and Tom Sullivan both weigh in on what’s happening in D.C. with BIF and BBB. Read them both, but one of the key points is that a majority of Democrats are holding firm that both bills must pass, or neither. Further, the White House is with the progressives on this. Both Manchin and Sinema show signs that the pressure is getting to them.