Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call
Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) speaks during the Blue Dog Coalition news conference on tax reform on October 4, 2017.
Several months ago, Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-FL) announced that she won’t be running for re-election. Recently, she explained why in a worshipful interview with Rachel Bade at Politico, excerpted in its Playbook newsletter (“Presented by PhRMA”): She’s mad about Democrats criticizing her for not supporting President Biden’s agenda. “I am surprised at how short the memory is. It’s as short as being celebrated for having flipped a seat and then excoriated for taking votes that help you keep that seat,” she said.
This is a crock. Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda is dead because a handful of the party’s most conservative members, including Murphy, killed it. Now the party has nothing of legislative substance to run on, and members in swing districts are looking down the barrel of a possible midterm electoral bloodbath. The culprits are starting to head for the exits, scapegoating everyone but themselves for the consequences of their horrible decisions.
Let’s review some recent history. Last year’s floor time in Congress was taken up by debate over two measures: a bipartisan infrastructure bill and Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. The infrastructure package was basically a gussied-up highway bill, with some money for Amtrak and a few other things, but overall a minor achievement at best. BBB, meanwhile, contained virtually the entire Biden agenda: a permanent extension of the Child Tax Credit that has slashed poverty, a half-decent climate policy package, and a bunch of other goodies, paid for with prescription drug cost controls and tax hikes on the rich.
It’s important to be clear that despite its relative ambition, BBB was a massive compromise compared to, say, Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign platform. There were only modest reforms on health care; the paid leave program was butchered so Rep. Richie Neal (D-MA) could shovel money to his life insurance company donors; and the bill provided maybe 10 percent of what any sane party would spend to fight climate change. But leftists in Congress figured it was as much as they could reasonably expect—Biden had won the presidential primary, after all, and they have only a handful of socialists and maybe half of the party caucus consider themselves progressives.
From the start, the Democrats’ left wing argued that both of these bills—infrastructure and BBB—should be passed at the same time, because they didn’t trust the party’s right wing with BBB. The left feared that if conservatives like Sens. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) got the infrastructure package they (and corporate lobbying groups) wanted, they would pocket the victory and block BBB. We’ve seen this story before—with the size of the 2009 Recovery Act, the public option in Obamacare, expansions of union organizing rights, and many other instances where big promises were abandoned to satisfy the demands of corporate Dems. Only by passing both bills simultaneously so that neither faction could betray the other, the left reasoned, could both be ensured passage.
For a while, the party leadership got behind this strategy. But conservative Democrats dragged the process out for month after month with procedural dithering, whining all the time that they wanted infrastructure first. Murphy was one of the loudest complainers. “I have called on an immediate vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed through the Senate,” she said on NPR in August. That same month, she wrote an op-ed demanding it be passed before BBB. When the infrastructure vote was delayed again in October, she released a furious statement: “I am profoundly disappointed and disillusioned by this process.”
A handful of representatives even threatened to vote against BBB if they didn’t get the immediate infrastructure vote they wanted (though Murphy was not among them). Eventually Biden caved, apparently after meeting with Manchin and getting a promise that he would support the party agenda in some form. Biden then convinced the progressives to give up on the simultaneous strategy, and the infrastructure package went though.
It turns out Manchin was almost certainly lying to Biden’s face. As my colleague David Dayen points out, Manchin instantly started coming up with rapidly shifting pretexts why he didn’t like BBB—it would cause inflation, it didn’t go through the committee process, Biden’s staffers were rude to him, or it would encourage unionization at non-union automakers—most recently, that the reconciliation process is not for doing policy at all. It simply makes no sense.
In short, the left had been right all along. Manchin, Murphy, and the other conservative Dems got everything they wanted, and promptly stabbed the other 98 percent of the party in the back.
Let’s return now to that Politico interview. Murphy portrays herself as a victim of ruthless party apparatchiks, who wanted to pass full communism that just wouldn’t fly in her district. The leadership tried to “beat moderates into submission” to get Biden’s agenda through, she complains to Bade, and some third-party groups even spent money trying to get her to support the president, instead of letting members like her “vote their district.”
In the process, she bizarrely implies Joe Biden is just as bad as fascist Republicans who tried to overthrow the government. While complaining about people trying to strong-arm her into supporting her own party’s president, she said: “I don’t want to hand this country and the agenda over to a party that’s trying to dismantle democracy. But I also don’t want to hand my party over to the faction that wants to dismantle capitalism. I think both of those forces are dangerous and detrimental to this country.”
Like so many centrists, Murphy got everything she asked for, the party’s prospects have been trashed as a direct consequence, and now it’s everyone’s fault but her own.
It’s notable that Murphy doesn’t mention a single item in BBB that she opposed, much less that would bring socialism to our shores. Nor does she provide any evidence whatsoever that destroying Biden’s agenda was even helpful to her politically. That’s probably because the particulars of BBB poll at about 65 to 70 percent support. Letting Medicare negotiate prescription drug prices, for instance, polls at 4-to-1 support—and it’s something Democrats have been promising to do for almost two decades straight. By the same token, even a passing familiarity with peer nations renders her notion that Biden’s agenda is some kind of Bolshevik revolution totally unhinged. It wouldn’t be out of place in a center-right German party platform, let alone the Nordic social democracies.
And now, instead of fighting it out in a district that might be more Republican-leaning after redistricting (maps are not out yet), but would surely still be worth a shot, she’s giving up. Like so many centrists, she got everything she asked for, the party’s prospects have been trashed as a direct consequence, and now it’s everyone’s fault but her own.
It’s hard to know whether Murphy actually believes what she is saying. At a guess, her stance seems to be some mixture of neoliberal ideology—she supports a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, an idea that is so deranged even most Republicans don’t support it, because it would cause instant global financial apocalypse—and opportunism. After all, with her bloody fingerprints on the knife in the back of Build Back Better, cushy no-show corporate “consulting” jobs will be hers for the taking.
Whatever the case, the Democratic Party could use a better class of moderate—perhaps one that would support a moderate Democratic president when he is trying to pass a moderate and much-needed agenda.
