Having lost control of the Senate, conservatives are now forced to watch Sen. Joe Manchin closely. In a 50-50 Senate, the West Virginia Democrat will decide which parts of President Biden’s agenda can become law. And in the coming weeks, he’ll be put to his first test of just how serious he is about wanting to work with Republicans.
With Republicans out of power during the first two years of the Obama administration, conservatives rested their hopes on so-called centrists such as Ben Nelson in the Senate and self-described pro-lifers such as Bart Stupak in the House. But the Right was disappointed in the end. All it took was a corrupt bargain, which quickly became known as the “Cornhusker Kickback” and a toothless executive order on public funding for abortions for these “centrists” to fold like cheap suitcases and vote for Obamacare.
Though Democrats face a 50-50 Senate with Vice President Kamala Harris as the tiebreaking vote, they still want to pass a sweeping left-wing agenda, and so they are flirting with blowing up the filibuster to do it.
Manchin told the Washington Examiner’s Salena Zito that “under no circumstances” would he break a tie allowing Democrats to nuke the filibuster formally. It’s a position he reiterated after Democratic wins in Georgia allowed them to take control of the Senate.
But now comes the test. Biden has indicated he has nothing more than symbolic interest in working with Republicans on a COVID-19 relief package. He met a group of 10 Republicans proposing a more narrowly targeted but still robust $618 billion bill on top of the trillions already spent combating the pandemic’s economic effects.
Biden would be perfectly happy if Republicans chose to hop aboard, but he has no interest in bipartisanship unless it is on his terms. He insists that the package be $1.9 trillion, when even Democratic economists say such a splurge is unnecessary and could spur inflation. That vast expenditure would be excessive when debt is already the highest it has been as a share of the economy since World War II.
Manchin is trying to have it both ways, claiming he would be OK with the high price tag but also that he wants any bill to be bipartisan.
“If it’s $1.9 trillion, so be it,” Manchin recently said to MSNBC. “If it’s a little smaller than that, and we find a targeted need … that’s what we’re going to do. But I want it to be bipartisan. If they think we’re going to throw all caution to the wind and just shove it down people’s throats, that’s not going to happen.”
Manchin is unlikely to get a vote on a bipartisan bill. And it is highly doubtful that 10 Republicans, enough to defeat a filibuster, are going to agree to a bill anywhere near $1.9 trillion. And Biden probably won’t agree to anything substantially less. So, at some point, Manchin will have to decide whether to blow up bipartisanship to side with his party or hold out for a deal with Republicans, even if it means risking a stunning early defeat for Biden.
Manchin faces an even more significant question than that over the size of the package. Assuming Democrats go it alone, they will have to use the parliamentary maneuver known as reconciliation, which allows passage of legislation with a simple majority if its provisions are directly budget related — in other words, taxes and spending. This is how Republicans were able to pass the 2017 tax law despite lockstep Democratic opposition.
Were Manchin to support using reconciliation to pass the massive COVID-19 spending bill without Republican support, it would breach his pledge to be bipartisan, but it would not substantially break with modern precedent for the use of reconciliation.
But were Democrats to push ahead with some of the extraneous liberal items on their wish list items, which are in the bill, such as raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, it would be an escalation. The Senate parliamentarian decides what can and cannot be included in a reconciliation bill. During the Trump administration, Sen. Mitch McConnell resisted pressure from conservatives to overrule the parliamentarian’s judgments. This hamstrung the GOP’s ability to negotiate a compromise on repealing Obamacare because they could only make changes to its tax and spending components and could not touch its vast regulatory infrastructure.
Were Manchin to go along with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s probable effort to overrule the parliamentarian, it would in effect be no different than voting to nuke the filibuster. It would mean Democrats could pass reconciliation bills in coming years, pushing the entire agenda of the Left, on a strict, 50-vote-plus Harris party line without a single Republican.
If Manchin intends to remain true to his word, he will resist this dangerous step.
