Even in Glasgow, Scotland, Joe Biden cannot escape his woes. Joe Manchin, the linchpin of the 50-50 deadlocked Senate, blew up the president’s plans to pass both the “hard” infrastructure bill awaiting a House vote and the newly introduced reconciliation bill. While Biden struggles to stay awake at the COP26 climate conference, the West Virginia Democrat said in certain terms he’s won’t even consider the reconciliation bill without a CBO score.
“To be clear, I will not support the reconciliation legislation without knowing how the bill would impact our debt and our economy and our country,” Manchin said during a Monday press conference. “We won’t know that until we work through the text.”
Manchin has expounded at length over his concerns about the $1.75 trillion bill’s inflationary and budgetary ramifications. Despite the White House’s weird insistence the bill “costs zero dollars,” few serious economists would believe that even a nominally deficit-neutral bill would wind up being so given its taxation of wealth generation and reckless cash infusion into the economy.
But here’s the real tell for Manchin’s headspace right now: The CBO scored the hard infrastructure bill and determined it would add over a quarter of a trillion dollars to projected deficits. Manchin not only voted for the bill anyway, but he also demanded House progressives push the BIF forward without waiting on the reconciliation bill. So, if the CBO score didn’t matter to Manchin for the first bill, what’s to make us believe it will matter for the second?
The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t. If Manchin wanted a version of the reconciliation bill to pass, he would have remained silent until the House sent it to the Senate for revisions. But Manchin doesn’t just oppose the bill. He opposes the entire “framework” of cradle-to-grave entitlements designed to reengineer society.
“I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward,” Manchin said. “But I’m equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.”
Doesn’t that kind of give the game away?
