Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Not only do members question whether Congress can work, some of them don’t think it should.
One of the defining features of the past two decades has been a sapping of the public faith that our institutions can manage, well, anything. We’ve lived through a failure in intelligence leading up to 9/11, and a manipulation of that intelligence to push the nation to war in Iraq. We saw massive regulatory failure result in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Leaders chose not to sanction the military for torturing prisoners, or bankers for defrauding homeowners. A dysfunctional political system locked in partisan struggle cannot break past its artificial veto points. The Trump years further cemented the perception of America as a corrupt kleptocracy, and the pandemic exposed these faults even further, failing to protect 600,000 Americans and counting from dying. This is a partial list.
In society at large, the Catholic Church failed its parishioners by protecting pedophiles; leading college athletic institutions did the same. Banks robbed their customers, opioid manufacturers murdered their patients for profit, cops killed unarmed Black people with outrageous regularity, courts let most of these miscreants free as long as they had money and power. Chris Hayes admirably captured this in his 2012 book Twilight of the Elites; the situation has not improved in the intervening years.
Perhaps the greatest challenge President Biden has faced early in his term is the need to restore faith in the institutions he oversees, to present an America that’s able to govern itself and can earn the public trust. The vaccine rollout and emergency economic stimulus provided an auspicious beginning to this project. But the circuitous route to an infrastructure package is revealing that members of the institutions themselves are not immune to the loss of faith in institutions.
For about six months now, the Biden team has mused about a two-step process for infrastructure. They’d begin with a bipartisan, consensus package fixing America’s built environment, with enough support to hurdle one of the greatest symbols of institutional political failure in America, the filibuster. The rest could be fed through the budget reconciliation process, which only requires 51 Senate votes (including the vice president’s). The fact that Biden rolled out an American Jobs Plan (which has mostly the physical infrastructure projects) and an American Families Plan (with caregiving and education investments and welfare payments at the forefront) nods to this two-step agenda.
Nobody believes that Congress can actually function well enough to pass it—not even the actual members of Congress.
The problem with this cunning plan lies with the Democrats in the House and Senate who would have to go along with it. And they just don’t trust one another. This is why a popular infrastructure package (68 percent in the most recent poll) is circling the drain, because in the simplest terms, nobody believes that Congress can actually function well enough to pass it—not even the actual members of Congress.
Here’s where we’re at on the infrastructure package. Twenty-one Senators (ten Democrats and 11 Republicans) have announced support for a vague bill that would include $579 billion in new spending, mostly on physical infrastructure. There’s a “fact sheet” on this proposal that apparently was only written by one of the senators, for the other 20 to consider.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has wholeheartedly rejected the deal as insufficient. Several other House and Senate Democrats have stated, “No climate, no deal,” warning that the lack of provisions tackling carbon emissions makes it unacceptable. (The fact sheet includes $48.5 billion for public transit, $16 billion for capping orphan oil and gas wells that harm the atmosphere, and $15 billion for electric vehicle infrastructure. But that’s well short of the original American Jobs Plan, which the administration already compromised.)
If the idea is to put together a bipartisan bill acceptable to all sides and then pass the rest via reconciliation, why is there such resistance to the bipartisan part of that strategy? Because progressive Democrats fully expect there will be no second bill. They believe moderates like Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) will simply take the bipartisan win and refuse to pass another spending package, leaving it short of the necessary votes.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has proposed that the bipartisan bill be held in the House until the Senate passes the reconciliation companion, and that the House then vote on both bills simultaneously. Some simply want one bill, and failing that, there’s a lot of talk of “chaining” the two bills together. This is the kind of negotiation made between hostage takers and police, each distrustful of the other, each expecting a double-cross. Republicans are practically banking on this being the case; they have explicitly stated that their aim is to pass the bipartisan bill and watch Democrats be unable to pass anything else.
They’re probably right! The social spending and tax increases, which would go into reconciliation, happen to be two of the most popular parts of the agenda. But if Manchin decided he didn’t want to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to ensure poor families get cash assistance to avoid poverty, would you really be surprised? Five House Democratic moderates wrote to Speaker Pelosi this week that they want to see a deficit reduction package before they sign off on anything infrastructure-related; Pelosi only has four votes to spare in the House. The tax proposals have gathered significant Democratic opposition. Reconciliation would be a heavy lift.
Sen. Sanders, chair of the Budget Committee, has started the reconciliation process anyway, and that legislation is expanding. The price tag is up to $6 trillion, with additions to the Biden Jobs and Families Plans that include lowering the Medicare age to 60, adding vision and dental to Medicare, reforming the prescription drug system (which would actually save the government money), and a host of immigration reform proposals. Only half of the bill would be paid for.
Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) have been quite noncommittal on the go-it-alone approach, seeking bipartisan cooperation first. Other Democrats have said that even the $4 trillion price tag of the combined Jobs and Families plans is too high. Sens. Mark Warner (D-VA) and Jon Tester (D-MT) have flatly rejected the $6 trillion package.
The White House has been all over the map. One minute they’re telling House Democrats to prepare to go it alone, the next minute they’re reassuring Democrats that the two-step can work. Unfortunately for the administration, they are presiding over a legislative apparatus that has been fully shorn of trust. Nobody believes anybody else, and furthermore, nobody believes in Biden’s ability to influence their adversaries.
In any context, repairing trust takes years of work. In the context of Congress, the House has seen the Senate subject itself to a nonsensical supermajority tradition for decades, and thus seen all of their bills they spend their time on go to the upper chamber to die. Left-leaning Democrats have seen centrists dash their hopes continually, and centrists seem to believe that progressive demands have threatened to ruin their careers. This isn’t a minor spat that can be papered over with a share session.
Fundamentally, neither side of the Democratic congressional delegation believes in the other’s ability to live up to their commitments. Centrists aren’t buying into that at all, and progressives don’t think it can be done incrementally, with popular support building at each step. With the current composition of Congress, lawmakers who want to do something big need everyone to agree, but at least a faction of the party seems committed to doing as little as possible.
But it’s worse than that. Not only do members question whether Congress can work, some of them don’t think it should. I’ll have more on this in future pieces, but one of the “pay-fors” in the bipartisan package involves privatizing the government’s assets, or selling off public assets to find the money to build the infrastructure. (This is sometimes called “asset recycling.”) That contradicts the basic bargain of the Biden presidency, that a muscular public sector can benefit everyone’s interests. There’s this deep-seated belief that government can’t do things it did routinely in the past, and only by creating private toll roads and selling water systems can we improve the country’s infrastructure. It’s untrue, but it’s part of a belief system that government shouldn’t be a factor in people’s lives.
The delicate balance between bipartisan and unipartisan spending bills is really about getting a non-functional Congress to function. Trust in institutions is earned, and so far the political capital that creates trust has not been stored up. Biden has said that doing nothing is not an option on infrastructure. I’d say we’re closer to that than he thinks.
