Susan Walsh/AP Photo
President Joe Biden talks about the May jobs report from the Rehoboth Beach Convention Center in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, June 4, 2021.
Biden is needlessly prolonging negotiations with Republicans over the infrastructure package and giving away the store, right? And he’s gutting his own proposal to raise taxes on corporations—negotiating with himself—right?
Wrong, actually.
But here’s Leah Greenberg of Indivisible, as quoted by Politico:
We’ve seen this dynamic over and over again where Democrats are effectively negotiating with themselves, watering down their own package, not in exchange for votes but in exchange for the hope of keeping the negotiations going … And the inevitable result is that what passes is weaker and less popular than what would have passed if they had gotten bigger and bolder to begin with.
Sorry, that’s totally off.
What Biden is doing is going the last mile to prove that Republicans are not serious about bipartisanship. Then he can revert to a Democrats-only bill, passed via a second reconciliation.
The supposed GOP offer to spend nearly a trillion dollars on infrastructure actually takes all but about $200 billion from the previous relief bill. It’s a complete nonstarter.
And by the way, Leah, how would Biden have gotten any more Republican votes, or those of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (to whom this choreography is really directed) if his plan had been even “bigger and bolder to begin with”?
Regarding Biden’s offer to drop higher corporate taxes as part of the infrastructure package, which has been attacked as another sellout, much of the commentary has it wrong, and Frank Clemente of Americans for Tax Fairness has it right:
It appears that President Biden has not abandoned his campaign pledge to raise the corporate income tax rate to 28%—he has just removed it from consideration as part of negotiations to achieve a bipartisan deal on infrastructure … If the President achieves this bipartisan deal on infrastructure, making corporations pay their fair share by raising the corporate tax rate to at least 28% should then become the foundation of a reconciliation package that would fund the rest of the President’s bold jobs and families investment agenda.
Exactly so.
In short, a bipartisan infrastructure and tax deal with the Republicans was never going to happen. It was always going to be Democrats-only, via the next reconciliation. The only negotiation that matters is with Joe Manchin.
I can get why some of my progressive friends are wary, since we’ve seen this capitulation movie so many times before, with Clinton and Obama. But Biden is a lot better, both on the substance and on the tactics.
