I always expected Senator Joe Manchin to budge off his hard cap of $1.5 trillion in spending for the Build Back Better budget reconciliation bill, and he’s now making mouth-noises that will permit something in the range of $1.9 to $2.2 trillion. I think everyone will settle in that range, and it should be enough to enact a truly Rooseveltian level of transformative change.
But that’s not what could still sink the whole effort. Manchin has some policy no-gos and a policy demand that progressives are going to have real difficulties accepting. He’s against implementing a carbon tax, but that could be a key way of making the numbers work. After all, Manchin doesn’t want to borrow the money for this bill and it has to be funded somehow. Then there’s this:
Another major difference is Manchin’s insistence that natural gas be eligible for grants under the $150 billion Clean Electricity Performance Program, a core component of the reconciliation bill’s attempt to combat climate change.
On the whole, Manchin has the keys to environmental policy as the chairman of the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee, and he’s not going to allow green policies that are adequate to our climate change challenges.
Yet, the biggest hurdle is probably the Hyde Amendment.
One major sticking point is his insistence that the reconciliation bill include the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits using federal funds for abortion expenses.
[Sen. Elizabeth] Warren has criticized the Hyde Amendment as disproportionately affecting low-income women since it prohibits Medicaid from funding abortion.
That’s a problem because if Manchin insists on this point, the progressives may not provide the votes needed to pass the bill in the House. .
Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.), chair of the progressive caucus, said Sunday that she will not support Democrats’ massive social-spending package if it includes the Hyde Amendment, a stipulation that prohibits taxpayer money from funding abortions.
But the difficult truth is that Manchin has an absolute veto. Technically, every Democratic senator has an absolute veto, but Manchin is the one most willing to walk away from the Build Back Better agenda. You can have lower child care, health care, education, housing and prescription drug costs but Manchin says that’s a package deal that comes with the Hyde Amendment.
Anyway you look at it, this bill is going to come up short of what we’d like. The price of getting it done will absolutely include some stomach-churning compromises and there will be both issues and constituencies that have very real grievances.
I can’t stand here and tell people that they have to support a bill that sells them short or leaves them out, but it really is pretty important that the Democrats don’t come out of this empty-handed.
Pass the infrastructure bill. Tell people if they want Democratic policies, well, they’re just going to have to go and vote for Democrats, otherwise we’re going to be stuck with Republicans like Mitch McConnell and Republicans-light like Manchin.
As I said in a previous post, the topline is not important to me because you can finagle and massage the numbers to sound higher or lower as necessary (change time frame of when things come in and don’t, what counts as spending and what counts as tax cuts/increases, etc). What is important is implementation structure, and if he insists on a means test of $50k or work requirements for the child tax credit I’m going to have to insist on walking away from everything. That should be the hard line. He can have his means test on some income level, but $50k threshold is simply too low and it’s going to raise the salience to people currently getting it who would then have it taken away. With work requirements you’re going to miss the bottom 10% of the population (already a problem since they have to tell the IRS they’re not filers, so we are already missing a significant number of poor people). With income churns year over year, people who should have gotten it will be left out, and those who get it but shouldn’t will be surprised with a tax bill at the beginning of the next year. Stop the bullshit and just emulate what other countries have already done, successfully.
At the end of the day, we need to pass the best bill(s) possible. Period. The goal is to help as many people as possible and improve things as much as possible. No bill is not better than an imperfect bill. We might not have any chance to pass anything in the next 2 to 6 years. This isn’t a game.
I noticed there is talk of one or both of these nice folks moving over to the Republican thug party. That will end it all for Bidens agenda, and likely bring back Trump in 2024 who will then pass some of the Biden agenda.
There’s been talk of that all along, but that’s all it is, just talk, It ain’t gonna happen. And why would Trump pass some of the Biden agenda? Did he pass any of the Obama agenda? It seems to me he put a lot of effort into rolling it back as much as he could.
ho hum, there’s a debt ceiling to,deal with— Bummer. But let’s just wait until the day before before it tips off the scales before we do anything, right. We can play some games and try to shame the republicans. Oh goody.
The Hyde Amendment is already the law of the land. What is the point of requiring the BBB to include a law that already exists?