As the country waits and watches to see whether House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer can move President Biden’s domestic spending agenda through Congress, the latest round of delays and derailments are not looking promising for Democrats.
From the onset, despite bipartisan agreement on an infrastructure spending bill that passed the Senate, Democrats have been bent on combining the infrastructure bill into a $3.5 trillion dollar domestic budget bill wrought with pork and progressive pet projects. The result has been disastrous for Democrats as Senators within their own party, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, have consistently dissented saying that do not support such irresponsible spending and have held up any progress on the legislation.
One might be asking right now where Vice President Kamala Harris is in all this mess? Her most recent position, as a U.S. Senator, would seem to serve her well in managing this kind of high-profile negotiation? Even she doesn’t want to get hit with the blowback from the slow-motion trainwreck happening in Congress.
In a last-ditch effort, Speaker Pelosi is still attempting to corral votes and get some kind of deal put together before the weekend, but it’s not looking good so far:
President Joe Biden faced a reckoning Thursday after House Democratic leaders, facing a shortfall of support, put off plans to vote on a trillion-dollar infrastructure plan amid sour disagreements over the size and scope of his sweeping domestic agenda.
The delayed vote does not mean the end of Biden’s quest to fundamentally change the country’s social safety net and reorient its tax code. But it does amount to an embarrassing setback for a President who ran on his experience as a master dealmaker and convener of the disparate wings of the Democratic Party.
Having averted a government shutdown, which Democrats were attempting to use as leverage hoping to get Republicans to cave, it’s looking increasingly unlikely that a deal that satisfies progressives within the base of the Democratic Party can be achieved:
Yet without the deadline pressure, it’s unclear how and when liberal and centrist Democrats will find agreement on the expansive plan. The two sides still appeared miles apart when the evening ended Thursday without a deal, and seemed to infuriate some liberals, like independent Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, in the process.
Thursday’s outcome, while not final, is a blow to Biden’s reputation as a consummate Washington horse-trader, a trait he promised voters he would employ to restore trust in government. He may still find a deal, but for now his entire domestic agenda hangs in the balance.
President Biden’s reputation as a congressional horse trader is vastly over-sold and vastly overestimated. Biden spent decades in Washington as a Senator attaching himself to non-controversial issues or basically coasting along as the never-in-danger-of-losing Democratic Senator from Delaware. Serving as Vice President under President Obama, Biden was almost as useless as he is now when it came to helping Obama push agenda items over the line in Congress.
The bottom line for Democrats, and the White House, in particular, is that spending bills and domestic agenda items are hard no matter what the timeframe is, but particularly difficult in an election year. Thus, the goal has been all along to get some large items passed in 2021 and avoid getting into an election-year fight heading up to the 2022 midterms:
Biden is at risk of losing momentum on the $550 billion infrastructure bill, along with a wider $3.5 billion social spending package. Both were central campaign promises, and they are the focus of his domestic policy agenda. With time running out on the legislative calendar for Biden’s first year, White House officials have acknowledged that they are at a pivotal moment, with their domestic agenda likely to face even more hurdles next year, when members of Congress shift attention to their re-election bids.
Democrats run the show in Washington, this is the mess Democrats created by getting greedy and trying to pile on a garbage budget bill to the bipartisan infrastructure bill. In short, this is why Americans have such a low approval and overall view of Congress. They had the chance to pass the infrastructure vill, and they failed to do so due to political pressure from progressives in the party to go big or go home. Right now, they’re almost on their way home after several strikeout rounds of negotiations within the Democratic Party factions.
So far, the only victory Biden achieved was to avoid a government shutdown, which is to say, barely a victory since neither party wants to be blamed for that result. In this case, however, with Democrats controlling the White House and Congress, the blame would squarely be laid at their feet.
Nothing that Biden, or Pelosi or Schumer, for that matter, has done seems to have smoothed over the blaring divisions within the party. Democrats are now badmouthing each other with moderates in the party openly mocking the progressive wing as inexperienced activists:
Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) in a CNN interview dismissed younger liberal lawmakers as newbies who don’t understand how Washington works.
“They haven’t been legislators, most of them, for a very long period of time, and a lot of them have been activists,” he said.
“My car is older than quite a few of the progressives,” Cohen added, criticizing the left flank for not compromising.
Progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are grumbling over the process trying to exert influence but coming up short since she doesn’t have as much influence as she thinks she does, or would like us all to believe:
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) accused Senate centrists of dismissing the policy concerns of progressives, and of not treating them as equal members.
She laughed when asked by a reporter if a $1.5 trillion budget plan goes far enough to address the country’s problems.
“For one year?” the New York progressive asked rhetorically.
“Instead of them asking everyone to cater to themselves, why don’t we come to this process as equal partners?” she said.
AOC is tired of being treated like she still sits at the kids’ table in the House. Well, she does, and Pelosi and Schumer know it, which is why her progressive caucus hasn’t been able to influence this process to their preferred progressive outcome.
Another one of AOC’s colleagues, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, had her own choice words for Rep. Cohen’s description of the “Squad” members as being younger than his car:
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), who is known for having a sharp tone on Twitter and who earlier this week said voting on the infrastructure bill alone would represent a “betrayal,” said Cohen’s words were unfortunate but did not go on the attack.
“This is not what makes it better,” Tlaib told The Hill when asked about the remarks.
“I don’t like responding to comments like that,” Tlaib said. “I’m really here to tell the human stories of my residents.”
The war within the Democratic Party is palpable, and amusing to watch from the outside. Democrats are in control of Washington, they could have had a victory on a $1.5 trillion infrastructure bill supported by both sides, but they squandered it to try and give Biden his “New Deal” type of legislative victory and appease progressives.
