Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. Joe Manchin in 2019
Today is Memorial Day, which President Biden held out as a deadline for negotiations on a bipartisan infrastructure package. I suppose we have “progress,” at least on setting a new deadline, about a week or two from now. But you can block out the spin of offers and counter-offers between the White House and Republicans. If you want to know whether there’s any progress being made, look to Senate Democrats, and whether they’re finally resigning themselves to going it alone.
The latest Republican proposal, touted at $928 billion, seems like it’s closing the gap with Biden’s new $1.7 trillion offer for “traditional” infrastructure projects like surface transportation, airports and waterways, and broadband deployment. But the GOP bill is far less than meets the eye. Only $257 billion of it goes above baseline levels of current programs; Republicans are counting spending that would have been done anyway within the context of their bill. While they are trying to create cleavages between the president and his staff by asserting that Biden would support a $1 trillion bill, what they’re offering in reality is about a quarter of that. Furthermore, there is already a bipartisan agreement on a highway bill at $304 billion that is recapitulated in this offer.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki used the $1 trillion number in her polite statement on the GOP proposal, while noting everything it left out—money for veterans’ hospitals and clean energy investment, to begin with. Funding for energy retrofits for buildings, the Civilian Climate Corps, nearly all of the money for electric vehicles, and the cancellation of fossil fuel subsidies are also gone; what was a pretty expansive climate bill would turn harmful for greenhouse gas emissions, if the bulk of the spending goes toward more highways. And the $400 billion on elder care has also been squeezed out.
The only negotiation of value going on right now is in Joe Manchin’s head.
But this negotiation is not really going anywhere. The $1.5 trillion spending gap notwithstanding, there’s no consensus on the revenue side. Republicans reject all of the Democratic plans to tax the rich and corporations, and their substitute is a fantasy. They wrongly claim that there are hundreds of billions in unused COVID relief funds sitting around. As the White House has made clear, 95 percent of the funds from the two bills from 2020 are already committed, and what isn’t is mostly earmarked for rural hospitals. You could pilfer from the American Rescue Plan, the March bill, but the likeliest candidate for that would be the $350 billion for state and local government, and that already can go toward infrastructure projects. So you’d be pulling back infrastructure money to fund infrastructure.
If there’s no agreement on revenue, there’s not going to be a deal. I’ve seen some murmuring from a couple GOP Senators about deficit spending but I don’t seriously believe that could draw a critical mass of votes. There’s also loose talk about funding the IRS, but that has a budget scoring problem, not to mention the fact that conservatives are furious about the very idea of giving the IRS adequate funding, and that will unquestionably deter any segment of Republicans from going along.
Liberals cheered the Republican proposal as so off base that it would spur the White House to break off talks and work on a Democrats-only package through reconciliation. And many Senate Democrats were quick to pan the GOP proposal and argue for a go-it-alone approach. But the more important development last week was the building of a bipartisan “gang,” with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) and a handful of Republicans getting together on their own policy. The contours of it sound exactly like the GOP offer, however: roads and bridges, mass transit and broadband, with no electric vehicle or elder care money. The Manchin plan appears to use user fees as a funding source, which the White House has already rejected, as it would raise taxes on people making under $400,000 a year.
This all suggests that Manchin is throwing in with something that looks like the GOP plan, a traditional infrastructure bill that maybe doesn’t offer much beyond the baseline numbers. More important, he’s asking for more time to come up with a bipartisan deal, even though he’s headed down a road that will demonstrably lead to an impasse. These negotiations between the GOP and the White House have been a kind of shadow play, intended to show Democrats wary of a unilateral push that the Republicans aren’t operating in good faith. But Manchin is saying no, they in fact are.
The conceit of this entire process is that you can pass a “skinny” bill through regular order (presuming you actually have enough Republican votes for it in the Senate and enough Democratic votes in the House) and then go back and pick up everything in a reconciliation bill later. But you can’t do that without the support of every Democrat in the House. And so you have to indulge Manchin at some level, to get him to play out the string, before moving to the reconciliation conversation. Moreover, some Democrats are rightly concerned that passing the traditional infrastructure bill loosens the pressure to pass anything else, stranding the other important investments in the package.
This delay is entirely in service to enticing a handful of Republicans on something they obviously don’t want to vote for. If you have a feeling of déjà vu, you’re not alone. Even Max Baucus, the former Montana senator who spent months trying to get Republican support for the Affordable Care Act to no avail, said last week, “I doubt you’re going to see much bipartisanship in the end. Frankly, a lot of Republicans would rather not see a bipartisan bill. They say they would, but deep down they don’t.” Apparently every Democratic lawmaker must spend a decade or so learning this on their own, before reluctantly reaching the conclusion that their friends on the other side of the aisle don’t have their best interests at heart.
So the only negotiation of value going on right now is in Joe Manchin’s head. But Joe Biden should try to get in there as well. We’re probably going to be arguing about this through the fall. Biden knows his agenda is inextricably linked to the success of the public investment package; he took most of his other campaign promises out of his budget proposal. He needs to find a strategy that will work, and fast. It’s clear that won’t go through the Republicans, so severing Manchin from them is the only chance to make this work.
