Evan Vucci/AP Photo
President Joe Biden speaks about infrastructure at the Flatirons campus of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, September 14, 2021, in Arvada, Colorado.
No governing party intent on showing the voters how it is responding to their needs would ordinarily choose to do what the Democratic leadership has been forced to do with President Biden’s domestic agenda. Instead of negotiating issues one at a time and enjoying a parade of focused legislative accomplishments, Democrats have jammed nearly all the party’s domestic priorities into one sprawling piece of legislation, setting off a drawn-out fight that exposes the party’s divisions and fails to communicate what it is trying to accomplish.
Three political realities—Senate rules, the makeup of the Democratic Party, and the party’s tiny congressional majorities—have left no choice but to go down this road to an all-in-one reconciliation bill that the media have called the Democrats’ “$3.5 trillion spending plan.” Under Senate rules, reconciliation is the only vehicle for legislation that can escape the filibuster, and there simply aren’t enough Democratic votes available right now to eliminate that hurdle. The diverse coalition that makes up the party has led it to include something for everyone. And its narrow majorities have put the package at the mercy of a single defection in the Senate and just three in the House.
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In an article in The New York Times, Jim Tankersley points out how historically peculiar this situation is. “No president has ever packed as much of his agenda … into a single piece of legislation,” Tankersley writes. “It is almost as if President Franklin D. Roosevelt had stuffed his entire New Deal into one piece of legislation, or if President Lyndon B. Johnson had done the same with his Great Society, instead of pushing through individual components over several years.”
Of course, we probably wouldn’t have had either the New Deal or Great Society if FDR or Lyndon Johnson had been forced to put all their initiatives into one bill. They had other advantages too: enormous congressional majorities and unifying themes to their presidencies that helped the public understand what they were up to.
The individual elements in the reconciliation bill poll well, but you have to follow politics closely to know precisely what’s in it. There’s no single policy or idea at its center, no clear message about the Democratic project as a whole that is equivalent to the New Deal or Great Society. What most people are likely to have heard and remember about the bill is that it’s a “$3.5 trillion spending plan.”
I would be thrilled to see the whole package enacted, but I can imagine many people are confused or indifferent about it. That the legislation has come to be known and defined by its ten-year budgetary cost (without the caveat that the cost is offset by tax increases and budgetary savings) is itself a defeat. The number isn’t the problem; it’s the failure to define the legislation in other terms.
Biden’s job approval numbers have been sinking for the past month, and the exit from Afghanistan and the impact of the delta variant are probably the main explanation. But the debate on the “spending plan,” with its primary focus on budgetary numbers, hasn’t helped.
Enacting the entire plan was never in the cards with an evenly split Senate and a slim majority in the House. Regardless of the budgetary level initially set, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as well as the Blue Dogs in the House were going to prove their centrist bona fides by questioning the price tag. I assume that’s why the Democratic leadership came in originally with $3.5 trillion rather than a lower figure: to give the centrists the opportunity to show their backers that they were able to restrain the crazy progressives. So, yes, these are Sophie’s Choice moments when Democrats have to decide which commitments will survive the cuts that unhappily have to be made. But if they can finally reach a settlement and move ahead, as Biden began the process of attempting this week, it will also be effective theater that allows the centrists to act out their restraining role, while the progressives swallow hard and demonstrate their pragmatism.
To be sure, the battle of the budget bill is not just theater. The three House Democrats who are trying to torpedo the limits on Medicare drug prices are protecting pharmaceutical profits and undercutting the bill’s financing. Other centrists have prevented the party from fully reversing Trump’s cuts in the corporate tax rate. Perhaps Biden shouldn’t have promised to balance new spending with new revenue and spending cuts. But since he did, the centrist resistance on the revenue side constricts the scale of the policies—it’s just a question of how much.
Enacting the entire plan was never in the cards with an evenly split Senate and a slim majority in the House.
This is the price to pay for the breadth of the Democratic coalition. If you find yourself cursing Joe Manchin, just remember there was probably no other Democrat who could have won his West Virginia seat. And the constraint won’t go away until Democrats win both houses of Congress with majorities large enough to survive centrist defections.
So what to do? As my Prospect colleague David Dayen has argued, the president and congressional leaders should concentrate on doing a few big things rather than spreading around the money to a large number of inadequately financed initiatives.
As I see it, two general criteria—one long-term, the other short-term—ought to govern those choices. The first is meeting the central challenge of our time: making the transition to a sustainable green economy. Nearly all Democrats acknowledge that climate change is an “existential” threat, but they don’t always act as if it is. The hour is already late, but now Congress has to do the right and necessary thing and treat the green transition as a top priority.
The second criterion has both a moral and political rationale: making substantial, visible, and immediate progress in alleviating the everyday economic insecurities Americans face. The voters who sent Democrats to Washington not only deserve help, they need to know that the party is delivering for them.
It would be great to do all the things the reconciliation package calls for, including financial support for child care and elder care, universal preschool, federally guaranteed paid family leave, free community college, permanently extending the improved health care subsidies and child tax credits temporarily introduced in the American Recovery Plan, and new Medicare coverage for dental, vision, and hearing costs. We could all pick our favorites on that list.
But in paring it down, I would give preference to policies that can be carried out quickly and will have a big impact, like the child tax credits, as opposed to policies like dental coverage for seniors, which would not go into effect until 2028, in part because of the planning it requires and in part because of an effort to keep down its cost within the ten-year budget window.
But the aim of doing a few big things with impact runs up against the imperative of keeping the different elements of the Democratic coalition satisfied. The Times’s Tankersley cites White House officials as saying that the various planks in the bill “serve as a sort of coalition glue—a something-for-everyone approach that makes it difficult to jettison pieces of the plan in negotiations, even if they prove contentious.” That’s undoubtedly true. But now’s the time it has to be done.
By all means, let’s have a national campaign for dental coverage (and explain to me why it should be for seniors only). Let’s build support for universal community college and some of the other ambitious goals in the bill. But let’s get the Democratic agenda focused in a way that puts existential interests first, delivers visible benefits, and shows voters what they have gained from putting Democrats into the majority and what further gains they can expect from them in the future.
