Oh, please! Coal baron Joe Manchin isn't voting against Biden's Build Back Better plan - i.e., the bulk of Biden's domeestic legislative agenda - because he's worried it will feed inflation. He got the corporate-friendly Republican ("bipartisan") plan he wanted and successfully played the White House for suckers. And that's assuming that the White House wasn't more-or-less aware that this was the most likely outcome of the negotiating strategy they used all along.
In terms of political damage to the Democrats going into 2022, I would say the biggest harm came from stringing out the BBB negotiations until the end of the year. If Manchinema had been forced to take an up-or-down vote on the reconciliation packed in the summer, Biden would at least looked to Democratic voters like he made a serious fight and lost. And then he could have spent the time since using various Executive actions and explaining that the situation is too serious to let the fate of the economy be refereed by a rightwing coal baron who lives on his yacht.
Given what White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in her official statement yesterday, I would also say that whatever protocol it was on which they were operating was ill-advised in this case. It would have been much more effective in terms of reaching the Democratic base if Biden himself had made the comments publicly.
On Tuesday of this week, Senator Manchin came to the White House and submitted—to the President, in person, directly—a written outline for a Build Back Better bill that was the same size and scope as the President’s framework, and covered many of the same priorities. While that framework was missing key priorities, we believed it could lead to a compromise acceptable to all. Senator Manchin promised to continue conversations in the days ahead, and to work with us to reach that common ground. If his comments on FOX and written statement indicate an end to that effort, they represent a sudden and inexplicable reversal in his position, and a breach of his commitments to the President and the Senator’s colleagues in the House and Senate. ...It's also clear in retrospect that it was a mistake to split the BBB package into two pieces so that a part of it could be blessed by a few Republicans and passed off as "bipartisan." And once the two-bill strategy was in place, it was a mistake for Democratic leadership to allow the "bipartisan" one to be passed before the main and far more important "reconciliation" one.
Senator Manchin will have to explain to those families paying $1,000 a month for insulin why they need to keep paying that, instead of $35 for that vital medicine. He will have to explain to the nearly two million women who would get the affordable day care they need to return to work why he opposes a plan to get them the help they need. Maybe Senator Manchin can explain to the millions of children who have been lifted out of poverty, in part due to the Child Tax Credit, why he wants to end a program that is helping achieve this milestone — we cannot. [my emphasis]
And it was clearly a mistake for the members of the Progressive Caucus in the House to trust the assurances from the White House and Nancy Pelosi that Manchinema would come through on the reconciliation bill. They gave away all their leverage the moment they did that.
Given the nature of our money-soaked politics in the US, it's always possible that this outcome was something like Biden's actual plan all along. Given how it played out, I don't hink that's the case. The official White House statement Psaki put out doesn't really sound like the kind of thing that Joe Manchin would have agreed to as part of his political kabuki.
On the other hand, it would be naive to believe that the Democratic Party's biggest business donors are entirely displeased with this outcome. Cenk Uygur and the TYT team provide an unsentimental assessment of the latest development in Bernie BLASTS Manchin & Sinema For Torpedoing Build Back Better 12/18/2021:
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