The Perilous Fate of the Build Back Better Bill
Their recent disappointing results in Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial elections sent a wave of panic through the ranks of Democratic politicians and prompted the White House and House Democratic leaders to abandon their previously announced plan to delay passage of the “bipartisan” Infrastructure bill until the Senate had passed the President’s Build Back Better bill (aka the “Reconciliation Bill”). (See, “Restoring Faith in Democracy?” for the background of these two bills). Instead, they decided that the House should immediately proceed with the adoption of both bills even though the provisions of the Build Back Better bill were still being negotiated in the Senate. That plan, however, also had to be abandoned due to the refusal of a small group of House Moderates to vote in favor of the Build Back Better bill until they had received the analysis of the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) as to the bill’s projected impact of the nation’s deficit. This setback did not alter the White House’s determination that the House should nevertheless proceed with its passage of the Infrastructure bill to prove that Democrats were capable of getting things done.
This decision understandably upset the members of the House Progressive caucus who had every reason to believe that proceeding with the Infrastructure bill alone would remove the only obstacle preventing Senators Manchin and Sinema from further gutting the Build Back Better bill. Those two senators had already caused the proposed expenditures included in that bill to be reduced from $3.5 trillion to $1.85 trillion. Thus, what started out as a day in which House Democrats had intended to pass both bills quickly evolved into a day of intraparty wrangling that lasted well into the night.
To overcome this impasse an attempt was made to have the recalcitrant Moderates accept the analyses of the non-partisan Joint Committee on Taxation and of the White House which showed that the revenues to be generated by the Build Back Better bill would cover its costs. This proposal, however, was rejected by the Moderates who insisted on assurance from the CBO. With the House Moderates holding firm, attention turned to persuading the 96 House Progressives to proceed with the passage of the Infrastructure bill. To this end, President Biden delayed his planned weekend trip to Delaware and spent the entire afternoon on the phone with the members of the House Progressive caucus. Over the course of the afternoon the number of Progressives willing to proceed grew, but not to a level sufficient to secure the passage of the Infrastructure bill.
By the late afternoon, Congressman James Clyburn reported that the members of the House Black caucus had a suggestion for breaking the deadlock. They proposed that House Moderates should commit to vote in favor of the Build Back Better bill at a later date. This prompted Representative Josh Gottenheimer, one of the balking Moderates, to begin drafting the text of such an agreement. Over the course of the next several hours, with President Biden acting as mediator, the terms of the agreement were negotiated to the satisfaction of all but two of the Moderates and all but six of the Progressives. This was deemed sufficient to proceed.
The resulting agreement called for the Build Back Better bill be voted upon no later than the end of this week. Because the Progressives were not satisfied with vague assurances from their Moderate colleagues they insisted that the Moderates demonstrate their good faith by supporting a vote on a procedural motion delineating the terms to be included in the bill and the procedures to be followed by the House in adopting it. The Progressives’ concerns went beyond simply seeking evidence of the good faith of their Moderate colleagues. They wanted to prevent the Moderates from later disavowing their commitment by claiming that the terms of the bill varied from their understanding.
Furthermore, even though the Build Back Better bill had at this point been discussed for months by Senate Democrats and the White House behind closed doors, the public still had little awareness of what was actually included in it. This was essential because the senate had been unable to reach a consensus about the bill’s contents. As a result, press reports about the bill had focused almost exclusively on the magnitude of the bill’s proposed expenditures. That problem was compounded by the bill’s nebulous name. By enumerating the actual programs to be encompassed by the bill in this motion, the Progressives would not only eliminate areas of potential future opposition but would also place before the public the nature of the programs they were seeking to enact.
The list of those programs set forth in the procedural motion is both long and far-reaching and includes the following:
- $500 billion in clean energy tax credits to combat climate change;
- Four weeks of parental sick or caregiving leave;
- Extended subsidies under the Affordable Care Act designed to expand the Act’s coverage;
- Expansion of Medicare benefits to include hearing devices as well as caps on certain beneficiary co-pays;
- A year’s extension of the Child Tax Credit Program which has lifted three million children out of poverty;
- Universal pre-school for all 3- and 4-year-olds; and
- An increase in the state and local tax deduction on federal income tax filings.
While House Moderates are now seemingly committed to supporting these programs, not all Senate Democrats have endorsed them. For example, Senator Sanders has already announced that he will not support raising the state and local tax deduction. The objections of Senators Manchin and Sinema are undoubtedly more far-reaching notwithstanding Senator Manchin’s recent assurances that a final agreement on the bill’s contents is near.
The six Progressive hold-outs to the compromise plan included Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Illan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib (commonly referred to as “the Squad”). They were obviously concerned by the fact that the commitments of their Moderate colleagues were conditional upon the CBO’s analysis. In addition, waiting for the CBO’s approval was clearly more of an excuse than a reason for the Moderates’ unwillingness to provide unqualified assurances of their support for the bill. This was clear from the fact that they all were willing to vote in favor of the Infrastructure bill which the CBO had previously concluded would result in a $256 billion increase in the nation’s deficit.
The members of the Squad were also concerned that the assurances of House Moderates and the White House might still be inadequate to secure Senators Manchin and Sinema’s support for the bill which they considered to be of paramount importance. Indeed, it was only the refusal of the House Progressives to proceed with the passage of the Infrastructure bill that had actually caused these two senators to even begin to discuss the terms of the Build Back Better bill. Without the House Progressives’ continued opposition to the enactment of the Infrastructure bill, there would be no assurance that Senators Manchin and Sinema would not continue to eviscerate the provisions of the Build Back Better bill. In the final analysis, though, the Squad’s continued opposition to the Infrastructure bill was largely symbolic as there were more than enough Republican votes for the Infrastructure bill to secure its passage without their support.
The unwillingness of the two House Moderate Democrats to commit to the passage of the Build Back Better bill, however, poses a more serious potential problem as no Republican members of the House are likely to vote for the Build Back Better bill’s enactment. Without the support of these two hold-outs, House Democrats will only have a single vote majority when the bill is ultimately called for a vote. Moreover, the terms of the final bill are likely to change further, giving one or more of the remaining Moderates an excuse to disavow their agreement to support the bill. Adding to these concerns, no vote on the bill will even occur before the end of this week and much could happen in the interim to further delay or derail the bill’s passage.
When the Infrastructure bill was finally called for a vote, thirteen House Republicans voted in favor of its passage. Their votes earned them a host of threats from members of their own party who have announced that they intend to support candidates to oppose them in the primary elections to be held next year. In addition, at least one House Republican has called for these members to be stripped of their Committee assignments. This is a good measure of just how highly Republicans value party unity. The infrastructure bill, while cobbled together by a bipartisan group of ten Senators, was largely the product of the group’s Republican members as the Democratic members of the drafting group continuously yielded to the demands of their Republican counterparts. This was partially out of a desire to prove that it was possible for the two parties to work together, but also because they may have been operating under the questionable belief that what was not included in the “bipartisan” Infrastructure bill could be included in the Build Back Better bill slated to be enacted via the budget reconciliation process without the necessity of Republican votes. These events prompted me to submit the following letter to the editors of The New York Times.
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Frozen in Obstructionism
This weekend the Republican attack dogs in the House wasted no time in threatening the thirteen members of their caucus who voted in favor of the Infrastructure bill. Their myopic focus on denying President Biden any legislative victory apparently blinded them to the very real possibility that they could have turned the bill’s enactment into a Republican legislative victory if all of their colleagues had supported the bill. After all, not all of the House Democrats were supporting it and its terms had largely been dictated by the five Republican Senators on the Gang of Ten that had drafted the legislation. More importantly, the bill only included those infrastructure improvements which Senate Republicans had supported and was wholly devoid of any new taxes imposed on corporations or their wealthy individual donors. In addition, the Republican senators on the drafting committee had also prevented the bill from including increases in the IRS’s budget that might have enabled the federal government to pursue wealthy tax cheats.
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The CBO’s assessment of the amount of tax and other revenues to be generated by the provisions of the Build Back Better bill is taking on outsize importance as Senator Manchin, in addition to the Democratic House Moderates, has also said that he does not want to act on the Build Back Better bill until the CBO has rendered its report. It should be noted that American politicians have a long history of overestimating the amount of revenue that will be generated to pay for their legislation’s expenditures. They typically contend that the programs they are approving will increase investment and/or employment which, in turn, will result in additional tax revenues. (Remember how the Reagan, Bush and Trump tax cuts were going to pay for themselves—see, “The Myth of Republican Economic Managerial Superiority” for how they turned out). This means that, contrary to the assertions of President Biden and Speaker Pelosi, the CBO’s report on the Build Back Better bill is almost certain to conclude that the bill’s projected revenues will not fully cover its expenditures. If that is the case it would provide Senator Manchin, as well as the House Moderate Democrats, with an excuse not to support the bill’s enactment.
Of course, Senator Manchin’s purported reliance on the CBO report is no less hypocritical than that of the recalcitrant House Moderate Democrats as he not only voted for the deficit-expanding Infrastructure bill, he was a member of the Gang of Ten that negotiated it. In addition, any shortfall in the funding of the Build Back Better bill is largely the result of Senator Manchin’s own opposition to the billionaires tax proposed by Senators Warren and Sinema which could have eliminated any such revenue shortfall. Senator Manchin opposed that tax even though no resident of his state would have been subject to it. It would thus appear that his definition of constituents not only includes, but essentially is limited to, his political donors. This reality was recently underscored by a report on CNBC that billionaire Ken Langone has offered to hold a fundraiser for Manchin as a result of Senator Manchin’s efforts to shrink President Biden’s agenda.
From the very outset Senator Manchin has been trying to defer consideration of the Build Back Better bill, and his past calls to wait for the CBO’s analysis of the bill can only be realistically viewed as just another excuse for continuing to delay, if not scuttle, its adoption. Presumably because of the blatantly hypocritical nature of his professed intention to rely on the CBO’s analysis, he has more recently been expressing his opposition to the Build Back Better bill in terms of its impact on inflation. Even this concern is more of an excuse than a reason for not supporting the bill as Paul Krugman pointed out in a recent article where he argued that current concerns over runaway inflation are largely overblown. In the face of such entrenched opposition, any optimism expressed by Speaker Pelosi and the White House for a quick passage of this bill must be viewed with skepticism.
This week, The Hill reported that Senator McConnell is urging Senators Manchin and Sinema to “sink” the Build Back Better bill. While it’s understandable that Senator McConnell would like nothing better than to prevent the bill’s enactment, there’s a chance that encouraging Senators Manchin and Sinema to do so could prove counter-productive as neither of them is likely to be eager to be regarded as taking their instructions from McConnell.
In any event, it seems clear that enactment of the Build Back Better bill will not occur prior to Thanksgiving. Indeed, it may not even be passed in the House by then and passage in the Senate, if ever, could be delayed for days or even weeks thereafter. In addition, the current price tag of $1.85 trillion is also likely to shrink further and a few of the bill’s key programs are likely to be jettisoned, all to the consternation of Progressive Democrats. In the final analysis, both the White House and the Progressive Democrats will take what they can get and agree to pass it with whatever changes that Senators Manchin and Sinema insist upon. Just when and how this matter is resolved will be a good measure of President Biden’s leadership abilities.