Democrats are freaking out about West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s Wall Street Journal op-ed calling for “a strategic pause” on President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan. “For the first time, Biden is staring at the plausible vision of a failed presidency,” laments New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait.
But Manchin is not trying to bring Biden down. As Chait points out earlier in his piece, shortly after Biden’s inauguration, Manchin promised, “We’re going to make Joe Biden successful.”
So if Manchin wants Biden to be successful, why is he jeopardizing Biden’s largest domestic policy initiative?
The short answer is that Manchin does not support Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan, he is desperate not to even have to vote on it, but he very much wants the bipartisan infrastructure bill he did vote for to pass.
He probably honestly believes that Biden would be a successful president if he got the bipartisan infrastructure bill passed and nothing else.
Progressives know Manchin wants to pass the infrastructure bill without moving on the $3.5 trillion spending bill, which is why they have tried so hard to link the two in both the House and Senate.
But House moderates achieved a key concession last month in exchange for their procedural votes to move the spending bill forward. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has agreed to schedule a vote on the Senate-passed infrastructure bill on Sept. 27.
If Manchin can just run out the clock till then, the House will vote on the infrastructure bill, and if it passes, it will go straight to Biden’s desk where he can sign it into law. At that point, the $3.5 trillion spending bill will die on the vine because centrist Democrats in both the House and Senate have no interest in even voting on, let alone passing, the bill.
So now progressive Democrats in the House and Senate are racing to get their bills written so they can be voted on before Sept. 27. In theory, they are supposed to vote on the bills by Sept. 15, and Senate and House committees are set to vote on these bills starting next week!
But considering that Democrats are just now releasing a list of possible tax hikes for the bill, it is pretty clear these bills are not written yet. And there is a ton of work to be done.
This isn’t like Biden’s first $1.9 trillion spending spree in which the big question was how much money Congress should give to each person. Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill has a bunch of complicated big-ticket items in it, including:
-Free paid leave
-Free child care
-Free pre-K
-Free community college
-Free dental, vision, and hearing for Medicare beneficiaries
-Free money for families with children
These are all huge spending programs whose total 10-year cost goes far beyond $3.5 trillion. So how are Democrats cramming them all into a $3.5 trillion bill? By cutting the years the spending for each program is authorized for.
For example, Biden’s free money for families with children plan costs $1.6 trillion over 10 years. That would take up almost half the $3.5 trillion total! That is why Biden has only asked for four years of the program to be funded.
This means the bill is already a fiscal farce. It uses 10 years of tax hikes to pay for less than five years of spending. But if Manchin is going to demand a lower spending number, which of these programs will be cut again? And by how much?
No wonder centrist Democrats don’t want to vote on the bill. The plan will also most likely contain over $500 billion in Medicare cuts in the form of drug price controls. Healthcare providers always circle the wagons to stop Medicare cuts.
Manchin is betting that these issues will not get resolved by Sept. 27, that a reconciliation bill won’t be passed by that date. Then the pressure will be on House progressives. Will they really deliver a huge defeat to Biden by voting down his bipartisan and wildly popular infrastructure bill?
Manchin is betting they won’t.
