President Joe Biden’s economic agenda may rest on whether centrist Democrats are looking for an out so they do not have to vote for the social welfare and climate spending bill they are hoping to pass on a partisan basis.
If centrists want to get to yes, last-minute agreements will likely save the nearly $2 trillion legislation much like it did the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, handing the president, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi another much-needed victory.
But if Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and other centrists are looking for a reason to break with their party on the big spending bill, Wednesday’s inflation numbers gave them yet another.
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“By all accounts, the threat posed by record inflation to the American people is not ‘transitory’ and is instead getting worse,” Manchin tweeted in response to the Labor Department’s report. “From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day.”
The 6.2% spike in consumer prices for the year ending in October could enhance concerns that excessive federal spending is already overheating the economy before Democrats advance Biden’s reconciliation measure. It is not, however, the only factor giving wary centrist lawmakers pause.
Republicans swept the statewide offices in Virginia and made gains in the Legislature despite the fact Biden won the commonwealth by 10 points a year ago. The GOP also came close to upsetting Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and ousted the state Senate president, a Democrat, with a lightly funded challenger.
These election results appear to confirm a raft of polling showing the president and the administration are unpopular. A USA Today/Suffolk University poll found Biden with a 38% job approval rating. Vice President Kamala Harris was even worse off at 28%. And Republicans led in the generic congressional ballot.
Next year’s midterm elections were always likely to be a struggle for Democrats. The president’s party has lost seats in all but two midterm elections since 1938. Republicans gained 52 House seats and their first majority in 40 years in 1994, former President Bill Clinton’s first midterm election. They picked up 63 House seats and another majority during former President Barack Obama’s in 2010.
Democrats don’t need losses on that scale for Republicans to regain the majority next year. They hold just 222 seats in the House and the Senate is split 50-50, with Democratic control hinging on Harris’s tiebreaking vote. In each of the previous elections, centrists were among the hardest hit. The 2022 contests figure to be no different because these Democrats tend to be the ones representing the reddest states and most competitive districts.
Demonstrations of independence from Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi could save some of these Democrats, though it is not always enough. There is little evidence that the nearly $2 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden already signed into law after it was passed exclusively with Democratic votes through the reconciliation process helped the party at the polls.
Manchin is more popular in West Virginia than Biden is. The same is true for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the other centrist holdout in the upper chamber, in Arizona. They have little incentive to capitulate to Biden unless they want to help his presidency succeed.
Liberals worried that once the bipartisan infrastructure bill was passed, this would prove true of the party’s centrists as a whole. But in the House, the surviving Blue Dogs agreed to vote on the bigger spending bill pending a Congressional Budget Office score.
The CBO analysis could easily provide centrists with yet another reason to balk at Build Back Better, given some indications that the price tag will be scored as bigger than advertised. The most liberal Democrats in the House have always feared that whatever the CBO found, centrists would move the goalposts and find another reason to vote no. The same accusation has been leveled against Manchin and Sinema in the Senate, though Biden has attempted to assure Democrats they will both be there with them in the end.
If this proves true, the centrists may already have all the ammunition they need to sink the bill. Unlike with infrastructure, no Republican defections are expected. Democrats can afford to lose no more than three votes in the House and zero in the Senate.
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But the centrists are generally longtime Democrats who support Biden. They may reason they need to vote with their party for his presidency to be a success. Biden has told them as much, explaining what he thinks the stakes are. Democrats will be less likely to pass major legislation in an election year and may not have their majorities after that.
Biden has already cut the top-line number of the spending bill in half in an effort to swing centrists behind it. Its fate, and his, remains in their hands.
