It was the week that President Joe Biden and the Democratic majorities in Congress came face-to-face with reality.
And that reality is that their narrow congressional majorities are insufficient to pass all of Biden’s far-reaching domestic proposals, as meritorious as most of them are.
As the daily Washington political dope sheet Punchbowl put it: “It’s tough to pass FDR-sized programs without FDR-sized majorities.”
Biden himself delivered the message that compromises within their divided ranks are necessary. Speaking to House Democrats after a week of messy maneuvering, he said that, while he still favors his full $3.5 trillion proposal in expanded domestic programs, his talks with two moderate Democratic senators convinced him a smaller total is the only way it can pass.
That will require progressives to acquiesce in trimming, probably substantially, the budget reconciliation package, either scaling back or eliminating some items. Significantly, neither Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., or Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., two top progressive leaders, disputed that in television appearances Sunday.
At the same time, the impasse showed moderates that their effort to force action on the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill is a non-starter without agreement on the larger, more partisan reconciliation measure.
Now, both factions are regrouping to see how much of Biden’s program they can realistically pass, knowing the outcome is vital to their party’s immediate future and their one chance to make a major impact, perhaps for many years.
“If we fail to pass these two bills, people will not forgive us,” House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn said, reflecting the view of most Democrats that failure would send a signal they can’t govern that could only benefit the Republicans — and former President Donald Trump.
In some ways, last week’s House of Representatives drama provided a classic illustration of the adage that likens lawmaking to sausage-making and concluded, “you should never watch either one being made.”
But if the process looked unappealing, and the likelihood of ultimate success often seemed in question, the bottom line is that the week ended with a potential path forward, assuming the Democrats follow it.
It depends on whether the two warring factions can agree on a scaled-down version of domestic and environmental program expansions — and on how they cut it from the current total (at least $3.5 trillion) to the level Biden suggested was most likely, between $1.9 trillion to $2.3 trillion.
Many Democrats are reluctant to drop any parts of the bill, which funds measures on which they have campaigned for years — expanded day care support, universal pre-kindergarten, family and medical leave, expanded health coverage, energy tax credits, two-year community college. One option is to eliminate some items entirely. Another is to keep them all but shorten their time span, a classic congressional way to cut the costs of legislation. A third is to delay some until another, smaller reconciliation bill next year, though that would be difficult.
Decisions on health policy will be especially difficult. Sanders, chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, wants to expand Medicare to provide dental, vision and hearing insurance (estimated to cost $358 billion). Speaker Nancy Pelosi prefers to make Obamacare subsidies permanent ($200 billion). Clyburn hopes to extend Medicaid coverage to poor people in states like Texas and Florida, whose conservative state governments refused to join the primarily federally funded expansion in the Affordable Care Act ($300 billion).
Constraining everything are the narrow Democratic congressional margins. Their 220-212 House majority means they can afford to lose only three members on a partisan vote. The 50-50 Senate means they need every Democrat so Vice President Kamala Harris can break a tie in their favor.
When President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society programs passed in the 1960s, Democratic majorities were 68-32 in the Senate and 295-140 in the House. Their margins were even larger during Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
House Democratic moderates precipitated last week’s showdown by refusing in August to back the budget resolution, which sets the framework for the spending package, until Pelosi set a date to vote on the infrastructure bill, which passed the Senate with 19 Republican votes.
She scheduled it for last week. But then the progressives sprang into action, vowing to vote against it — though most support it — until both houses passed the larger package. They feared that, once the infrastructure bill passed, the larger bill might be blocked by moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and some House moderates who question its cost.
The House moderates are reflecting concern about next year’s midterm elections in their closely divided districts. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, one key moderate leader, got just 53% of the vote last year in his New Jersey district, compared with 83% for Jayapal, who chairs the Congressional Progressive Caucus, in her district.
What still bodes well for Biden is that, despite disagreements on the size of the proposed spending, virtually all Democrats favor expanding social programs and financing them with higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy.
But the need for unanimity and the resulting internal party tensions show it will still take some old-fashioned political muscle and compromise to get it all done.
(Carl P. Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.)
