R.I.P, Build Back Better "reconciliation" bill: Merry Christmas (to corporate donors) from Manchinema

From the upper left hand of the New York Times' website early Monday morning:

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. ...

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]

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.

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:

How much of the Biden program will Manchinema take down?

The good news ... conservatives have been "owning the libs" over climate change for the last 30 years. So there's that for at least them to be happy about..

For better or worse - for better and worse, actually - the future is open. In the negotiations over the Biden infrastructure bills, the prospects are looking dimmer than most Democrats would like. The play isn't over until it's over. But the stakes are huge. The Democrats need to deliver visible, tangible benefits to the public, in time enough for people to experience those benefits before Novembert 2022. And they need to pass substantive voting rights legislation to block as much as possible of the Republicans' neo-segregationist voter-suppression plans which they are actively putting into place.

Howard Dean, for one, seems to think that the two-infrastructure-bill approach to which Manchinema agreed before they started stalling it indefinitely is a bad sign;

Finally, it's well worth keeping in mind that the big fights over infrastructure and voting-right legislation have been fights among Democrats. But, as Norman Ornstein recently reminded us, we shouldn't let anyone forget the role Republicans are playing in this:

David Sirota makes the case for holding a vote on the main Biden bill ("reconciliation") soon in Call Their Bluff Right Now Daily Poster 10/17/2021. Unless Manchinema decide this week they are ready to move to a substantive deal, we're at the point where it does more harm than good to keep pretending that they are negotiating in good faith. Taking a vote your side knows you're going to lose is sometimes pointless. But here, it's not. Manchin and Sinema are just helping the Republicans make Biden and the Democrats look weak and ineffectual at this point. Forcing them to actually to take a stand up or down is probably the only chance left to pressure them to support the Biden plan. It will look bad for the Democrats, but stringing out the vote indefinitely looks worse.

What are the risks and possibilities here in a worst-case scenario, which in this case I mean that the Biden infrastructure package goes down - and approving only the Republican ("bipartisan") piece would effective mean the package went down - and no substantive voting rights bill is passed? The big risks includes (1) people are disappointed that more substantive benefits weren't enacted; (2) Democratic voters are discouraged to see that a Democratic President with a Democratic House and Senate is still being slapped around by the Republicans: and, (3)the Republican voter-suppression measures are very effective.

What do the Democrats have to do in case the infrastructure legislation and the voting-rights legislation fail - both of which seem currently to be Manchinema's goal?

Obviously, doing an extremely good job of turning out the vote in 2022 is a critical priority. In theory, the Democrats understand this. Biden has even floated the idea that the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts could adequately counter the Republican voter-suppression laws and tricks. He seemed to be using that as an excuse for the Democrats not enacting voting-rights measures, which had a bad sound. But he certainly recognizes (in theory) the need for vigorous GOTV.

The Democrats also have an active legal pushback against the neo-segregationist laws going, spearheaded by Mark Elias. Elias recognizes both the urgency of court action under existing laws, but also that new federal laws are urgently needed:

Elias' Democracy Docket blog is a good source for updates on the legal situation. In this 10/13/2021 post, he describes the current situation this way:

At the federal level, Democrats have proposed two pieces of significant voting rights legislation, the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act and the Freedom to Vote Act. Together they would rival the magnitude of the 1965 Civil Rights Act, yet neither has prospects for success as long as the Senate’s filibuster rule applies.

Facing this grim reality, some have begun to urge Congress to ignore voter suppression and focus exclusively on the potential for election subversion in 2024. Specifically, they obsess over the outdated and imprecise Electoral Count Act — the process by which states select and Congress certifies presidential electors. While no one questions that this Act needs reform, the idea that we can fix democracy simply by revising this one law is simplistic and wrong. It ignores the fact that election subversion begins with the rules used for voting and continues through state certification processes. It also ignores the reality that presidential elections are not the only ones being targeted for subversion. [my emphasis]

A big wild card is the ongoing but uncertain effects of the pandemic on voter behavior. On the most optimistic side, the pandemic dramatically demonstrated that government not only can do big things, but also that active government is sometimes indispensable. Since Democrats compared to the Republicans have long defended a narrative more supportive of goverment action on behalf of the people. So this could be a positive for them.

Another uncertainty is the effect of the current conspiracy pandemic, which unfortunately also got a big boost from uncertainty and fear related to the pandemic. The Republicans are using the anti-vax sentiment and also their white supremacist narrative against the alleged threat of "critical race theory" to fire up the voting base, not unlike what we saw with the "Tea Party" in 2009. On the other hand, the antivax hysteria is so nuts and to people with a better grip on reality is such an obvious danger to public health that the Democrats could also benefit from the reaction against the conspiracy-mongering.

Another big uncertainty is Trump and the Trumpistas. Polls are showing that the Republican base has embraced radical insurrectionist views that Trump has encouraged. Trump is also out in the public eye. So Trump voters can be expected to be highly motivated in 2022. But there are other possibilities, as well. With Trump very much in the news, that could potentially "nationalize" the 2022 midterms for Democratic voters. They might be disgusted with the Democrats' ineffectiveness in Washington. But if Trump is staying in everyone's faces in 2022, anti-Trump sentiment could counteract discouragement among Democratic voters. Some of the elections next month could give us a clue about these effects. The prosecutions and investigations over the January 6 attack on the Capitol are also keeping the seriousness of radical-right violence in the news.

A related wild card is the risk of an uptick in violent attacks from radical Trumpistas. No one has a better record on covering the far-right scene than Dave Neiwert, in reports like this one: Black 'American' flags at right-wing protests, on front porches vow ‘no quarter’ against liberals Daily Kos 10/14/2021. It seems like the kind of thing that would provoke an electoral reaction against the Republicans. But these are uncertain times.

If the infrastructure program fails to pass and Manchinema block voting rights legislation, there will be an ever great incentive for Biden to pursue executive actions aggressively. The American Prospect in its Executive Action Tracker is keeping track of the Biden-Harris Administration's progress or lack thereof for dozens of potential executive actions that executive editor David Dayen has identified. Even a very important option that Biden has so far largely resisted, the forgiveness of college loans held by the federal government, would be hugely popular and would provide significant, immediate economic stimulus. (See Marcia Brown's Cancel Student Debt — Almost All of It The American Prospect 09/23/2019)

It's also important to keep in mind that while the big battles over infrastructure and voting-rights legislation this year have been fights among Democrats. But, as Norman Ornstein recently reminded us, we shouldn't let anyone forget the Republicans' role in this:

Prime Minister Joe Manchin goes full segregationist

Prime Minister Joe Manchin declared in a new published op-ed that he supports segregation and opposes democracy: Why I'm voting against the For the People Act Charleston [WV] Gazette-Mail 06/06/2021. The For The People Act, also known as H.R.1, is the main piece of legislation passed by the House and now pending in the Senate, which would give the federal government the authorization to reverse many of the segregationist voter-suppression laws Republicans are continuing to pass across the country.

His "argument" is that the Republican are passing blatantly partisan voter-suppression laws, so any federal law to prevent that should also be supported by the Republicans whose party is so completely committed to voter suppression. No, it's not an actual argument. It doesn't even rise to the level of gaslighting. It just means that PM Manchin supports the Republicans' segregationist voter-suppression laws.

And, to re-emphasize his commitment to the Democratic Party of Theodore Bilbo and Ross Barnett, he writes, "I will not vote to weaken or eliminate the filibuster."

That also means that his claim that he will support the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a bill designed to remove the objections that the Supreme Court used to gut the 1965 Voting Rights Act, is effectively meaningless. Unless the filibuster is adjusted or abolish, the Senate Republicans will just kill it with the filibuster.

A nominal Democrat, PM Manchin is all on board with the Republican program to "Orbanize" the US by extreme gerrymandering like that in Viktor Orbán's Hungary to insure the Republicans always win a majority of seats even when Democrats win a majority of votes, by suppressing African-American and Latino votes and restricting voter access for poor whites, and by setting aside the rule of law, at least when it comes to members of the Republican Party or the oligarchs who support them.

I'm going to start using the word "segregation" a lot more for our current political situation. The core of Southern segregation was the disenfranchisement of African-Americans in defiance of the 13th and 14 Amendments to the Constitution.

The segregated schools and the endless number of official restrictions designed to restrict and demean black citizens are probably what comes to mind for most people when the word "segrgation" is mentioned. But the foundation, the core of the segregation system was the suppression of the rights of African-American voters. It was dominant in the South for at least 80 years, depending on what post 1875 date your pick as the end of Reconstruction.

Reuters reports on the latest from PM Orbán-Manchin, Manchin to oppose voting rights bill pushed by Democrats 06/07/2021:

TYT's Cenk Uygur expressed his disgust at PM Orbán-Manchin on Twitter:

Joe Biden’s first term is now over with Manchin saying he’s against both filibuster reform & For the People Act. Biden doesn’t have the inclination to fight back. They’ll get almost nothing done from now on. Manchin just handed Congress back to @GOP. He’s worse than a Republican.

— Cenk Uygur (@cenkuygur) June 6, 2021

Here is Democratic National Committee Chair Jaime Harrison responding to PM Orbán-Manchin's latest reaffirmation of his support of segregation and his hostility to democracy, DNC Chair With Direct Response to Sen. Joe Manchin Bill Decision 06/6/2021:

How do you solve a problem like Joe Manchin? (Someone should write a song about this)

The nominally Democratic Senator from West Virginia is acting out his "President Manchin" schtick again. He's now threatening to block any filibuster change and is even making noises about blocking the use of reconciliation, one of the current workarounds to the filibuster.

Emma Vigeland and Sam Seder discuss his latest dance in, Joe Manchin Yet Again Proves How Much He Sucks 06/09/2021 (It's not a pro-Manchin commentary!):

Josh Marshall discusses it in New Terrible News from Manchin! Yay! TPM 04/08/20201.

Marshall isn't ready to consign Manchin completely to the DINO category. And he seems to think an actual party switch is unlikely:

This view [of Manchin as a DINO or Republican wannabe] has the benefit of moral clarity. But it’s not true. Manchin just voted for the massive COVID relief bill and he’ll likely vote for a very big infrastructure bill, albeit probably with more slimming than the relief bill got. If Manchin were or wanted to be a Republican I guarantee you he could become one and be welcomed with open arms at any moment. Indeed, his political position and longevity in office would become much simpler.

He thinks President Manchin is playing a murkier game:

Manchin has said that his guiding priority is the success of the Biden presidency. And I think he means it. Yes, his claims about Biden and the filibuster are in wild contradiction. But that being the case doesn’t mean they have to change.

Never is a long time. Even 18 months is a long time. Manchin can say one thing categorically now and just change his mind later. That doesn’t mean it’s likely that it will happen. But it can. And Democrats need to keep operating on the possibility it could. But at least right now the chances don’t look good.

This is a real dilemma for the Democrats. If Manchin and the Republicans succeed in blocking enough constructive legislation, the Trumpistas could be back in control of one or both Houses of Congress in 2023.

Getting the H.R.1 - For the People Act of 2021 passed is critical If Manchin blocks that, he's voting to end democracy and to support the Republican insurrectionists. And that can't go through the Senate subject to the filibuster as it stands now. The problem the Democrats have had with conservative Dems like Manchin and others like him in the past is that they were willing to offer them benefits from going along with the rest of the party. But they have been too reluctant to make them pay a price for not doing so.

Progressive outliers like Bernie Sanders, of course, were regarded by the Democratic establishment in a different way.

COVID relief bill and the state of Democratic reform prospects

The COVID relief bill really is an important, beneficial piece of legislation. It's been passed by the House and the Senate and blessed by President Joe Manchin, so now it goes to reconciliation and presumably will soon become law.

Paul Krugman talks about the very good economics of the relief bill: "while the American Rescue Plan is mainly disaster relief rather than conventional stimulus, it’s a big proposal that will, in fact, provide a lot of economic stimulus." (The macro equivalent of war? Substack 02/27/2021) Obviously, we won' know the final form of the bill until it actually passes.

But the COVID relief plan is a very good contrast to Obama's initial stimulus package in 2009, which economists like Krugman were frantically warning was only about half the size it needed to be. Then Obama negotiated with Republicans and agreed to put more of it into less-stimulative tax cuts. Then the Republicans voted against it anyway. Biden at least seems to have really learned from that experience about how to deal with bad-faith Republican negotiators.

And Biden didn't spend the transition period promoting a Grand Bargain where the Republicans would agree to raise taxes and the Democrats would agree to cut Social Security and Medicare like Obama did in 2008-9. And so far, we haven't heard any talk from this administration about a new Boles-Simpson Let Grandma-Eat-Catfood Commission, which was nothing but a huge political gift to the Republicans going into the 2010 midterms.

By the way, Biden campaigned in 2020 on lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 60, the opposite of what Obama's fortunately stillborn Grand Bargain would have done.

Krugman also wants to see a good Keynesian pedal-to-the-metal approach on the infrastructure/climate crisis program. (How (not) to pay for building back better 03/07/2021)

The Republicans are currently so full-in on culture themes, like defending the nobility of, uh, Neanderthals (?!?), that they mostly haven't been using their normal "Debt! Deficit! Aaaaa--iiieeee! economic arguments very much so far. But Krugman is offering preemptive refutations, anyway.

Will Bunch points out that the Republicans in solidly opposing a minimum wage increase handed the Democrats what should be a potent issue to use against them. (How the GOP blew its chance at a 2022 working-class coalition in just 10 hours, 43 minutes Philadelphia Inquirer 03/08/2021)

But he also warns about the weakness of the Democratic performance on the issue:

Yes, there were moments when the Democrats — still no more of an “organized political party” than when Will Rogers told that joke a century ago — looked determined to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, confronted with a bill that, with the arguable exception of Obamacare in 2010, does more for the U.S. middle class than any legislation since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society since the mid-1960s. The macho posturing of West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — for whom getting on the Sunday talk shows matters more than his state’s high rate of poverty — nearly toppled the bill, and the Democrats’ blind spot on the $15 minimum wage is deeply disappointing to leftists who voted for Biden last November.

Still, he's optimistic about the implications of the trend of the Democrats' current performance, including the narrow Senate victory on the COVID relief bill:

But in the end, the Democrats’ resolve and unity among its one-vote Senate majority was a stunning victory for a new American political reality in the 2020s. It involves forging an all-new definition of “bipartisanship” around hardball politics for measures that are supported by majorities of citizens, rather than negotiating with a Republican Party that continues to rally behind a Big Lie around nonexistent voter fraud and the 2020 election that threatens our democracy.

Bunch also points out that without Democrats in the Senate being willing to at least partially set aside the filibuster rule, an urgently needed voting rights bill to counter the current nationwide Republican drive to restrict minority voting. "If Republicans win in the 2022 midterms not by the power of their ideas but by picking who gets to cast a vote, the rest of the Biden/Democratic agenda will be dead, and that won’t be the worst of it for the American Experiment." (Why Biden needs a prime-time, Oval Office speech to declare war on voter suppression Philadelphia Inquirer 03/08/2021)

Getting this passed means that Harris and all 50 Senate Dems have to somehow set aside the filibuster for the new voting rights bill. Every vote in the Senate to keep the filibuster in force on this bill is a vote for Republican white-supremacist voter suppression. And all the Senators, even the most dimwitted ones like Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, are very clear about that.

If President Joe Manchin or other ConsevervaDems succeed in killing the voting rights bill by voting to keep the filibuster applying to that bill, they will be doing enormous damage not only to the Democratic Party but to the democratic system itself.

The press loves to focus on who is in which high school clique ...

My terrible, trolly opinion that I'm only sharing because I want to piss off Twitter is that, if a senator from a state that Trump won by 40 points votes yes on a bill that does 90 percent of what you hoped it would do, that senator is not your enemy and is, in fact, your friend.

— Ian Millhiser (@imillhiser) March 7, 2021

But getting that voting rights bill passed is critical, no matter how much it gives the pundits a Big Sad to see ConservaDems like President Manchin be called on the carpet over it.

Making Senate deals with President Joe Manchin

Igor Bobic wrote what reads an awful lot like a best-sweetner piece mainly about Chuck Schumer's supposedly magnificant leadership in passing the COVID relief bill: Chuck Schumer Holds The Line Huffpost 03/06/2021.

Schumer is the Senate Majority Leader and he definitely deserves credit for getting an important piece of legislation passed.

This part about how he dealt with ConservaDem Joe Manchin's grandstanding is intriguing:

Friday’s chaos in the Senate ... threatened to turn into an even bigger embarrassment. After voting began on amendments to the $1.9 trillion bill, it quickly became apparent that Democrats weren’t all aligned on the issue of extending enhanced unemployment benefits, which are due to expire March 14.

Manchin was considering voting for a Republican amendment that would have ended the benefits in July, far sooner than Democrats had initially proposed. Had he done so, House Democrats (whom party leaders hope will quickly pass the bill next week) may have objected, putting the entire package in jeopardy.

“We told him if Portman’s bill passed, it would be dead,” Schumer said. “It took him about three or four hours to realize that and when he did, he came back and said ‘OK, let’s work this out.’”

In the end, after nine hours of closed-door negotiations and the longest open Senate vote in modern history, Democrats were able to get Manchin back on board. The bill will provide a $300 weekly federal unemployment benefit through Sept. 6 and forgive taxes on up to $10,200 in 2020 unemployment income for households that made less than $150,000.

I suppose this could be read to mean that Democrats have no choice but to agree to everything that President Joe Manchin wants. It could be, but that's not actually what it says.

A good Clintonite reading of this would be that progressives or Democrats less conservative than Joe Manchin should never push against back against any of his demands. But If we read the Huffpost article as basically stenography for Chuck Schumer, the following would be my own speculation on what the backroom dealing was about.

Biden and Harris were agreed from the start that they would trade away the $15 minimum wage part of the COVID bill. Labor and grassroots activists pushed back on them trying to hide behind the non-binding recommendation of the non-elected parliamentarian who basically nobody outside of the Capitol had heard of before a few days ago. So they worked out a deal to put it to a floor vote (also via a parliamentary vote whose nuances mattered to precisely no one). That let Manchin and seven other conservative Democratic Senators who hate working people vote against it as a standalone issue.

Then Manchin pushed his luck, so Schumer and Biden told him, look you prick, you got to be a hero to your donors by voting down the minimum wage increase that we didn't actually want to pass anyway. But we're tired of your crap now. So if you vote to kill this bill, that's on you, Joey boy. And oh by the way, don't be surprised if West Virginia gets put on the bottom of the priority list for every single infrastructure project for the next couple of years if you screw us on this one. (Hey, I'm trying to give Biden and Schumer maximum credit here!)

Biden and Schumer would be happy for everyone to think that anti-labor Democrats like Manchin are the only ones they need to appease in these deals. But Schumer is up for re-election in 2022, and he would presumably prefer to avoid a primary challenge, and those have become kind of A Thing lately. And it does seem like he's been making more of an effort these last few months to sound like an actual Democrat than he did before.

See also:

Martin Pengelly, Joe Manchin's stimulus stand exposes dangerous fissures in Democratic ranks Guardian 03/07/2021

Meg Cunningham, Biden will not have to cater to my agenda: Sen. Joe Manchin ABC News 03/07/2021

Sarah Wire, After a surprise snag, Democrats agree to move ahead on COVID-19 relief bill Los Angeles Times 03/058/2021