Congressional Democrats can’t quite cobble together the votes to pass a mammoth $3.5 trillion-plus social spending bill, which for now means the political system is working to reject dangerous radicalism.
The few remaining Democrats who at least claim to lean to the center are in a game of legislative chicken with the more numerous left wing of the party, with the would-be centrists wanting to pass a separate $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill before being asked to commit to a final social spending package. The extreme Left wants just the opposite, saying they will block the infrastructure bill until they have a commitment on social spending.
As every Republican in both legislative chambers opposes the social spending bill — for good reason — Democrats must provide every vote necessary to pass it. With not a single vote to spare in the Senate and only three votes to spare in the House, that means almost the entire Democratic caucuses in both chambers must be on board.
On the Sunday talk shows, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and radical Rep. Pramila Jayapal of Washington state both acknowledged, either explicitly (Jayapal) or in effect (Pelosi), that the votes aren’t there yet. Pelosi said it is “self-evident” that the final social spending number will be something less than the $3.5 trillion target.
The would-be centrists should hold out. They should not agree to anything even approaching that number, whether they can claim (using smoke and mirrors) that it is “paid for” by tax hikes or not. With the United States already facing dangerously high debt, the highest in U.S. peacetime history, nothing close to $3.5 trillion is remotely affordable — and, frankly, neither is the $1.2 trillion for the misnamed infrastructure bill, less than one-third of which is actually slated for traditional brick-and-mortar infrastructure projects.
None of this should be happening. Joe Biden was elected president under the pretense of being a “moderate,” one who would respect all sides of the political debate and work for consensus. Even then, he barely won an electoral vote majority: If only 22,000 votes in three states had flipped, the election would have been thrown to the House of Representatives, where former President Donald Trump would have been reelected. Combined with the 50-50 tie in the Senate and the bare, four-seat majority in the House, Biden faces a very evenly divided country. In such a situation, anybody with “moderate” leanings and a desire for consensus absolutely would not push for a package anywhere near as radical as the social spending bill. Instead, he would build consensus for the infrastructure bill, which a number of Republican senators support, and then argue for bigger congressional majorities in the 2022 elections in order to pass the social spending leviathan.
As of yet, there is not a single thing Biden has done as president which can be called remotely “moderate” or “centrist.” Instead, across the board, he has either followed or sometimes led his party’s left wing to push the most radical agenda in U.S. history.
It is a good thing that the few remaining would-be centrists are balking at all this. The lack of Democratic agreement indicated by Pelosi and Jayapal is a boon for the entire country. If the center doesn’t hold, something nearly as bad as anarchy will be loosed upon the U.S. political and economic world.
