Think outside the box people….
Matthew Yglesias makes a very good point that will be where things go moving forward for President Biden’s Build Back Better package that WILL eventually be passed into law…
Senator Manchin is fine with a $1.75 Trillion package…
He is NOT with a package that had ballooned up to $3 Trillion….
I FIRMLY believe that as I have said here before….
Joe Manchin IS doing Biden and Democrats a favor by digging in his heels….
He is NOT alone in trying to cut down the spending package for political benefit for swing district Democratic House members and even some Senator’s and of course allowing President Biden to finally get his package done…
Democrats and progressives are lucky to have Manchin in that job. It is not his fault that progressives couldn’t persuade the voters of Maine or Florida or North Carolina that their agenda was worth supporting in a way that would have made him irrelevant.
I also think that Manchin’s stated objections to the House Build Back Better draft are perfectly consistent with the Senate passing an excellent piece of legislation. The back-and-forth between him and the White House suggests some deeper and more profound breakdown, but that is a problem for a psychotherapist. All I can really do at this point is take everyone at their word. So here’s how I see it:
- Months ago, Democratic leaders (over what we now know to have been Joe Manchin’s explicit wishes) unveiled a $3.5 trillion package chock full of all kinds of stuff.
- Moderates balked, and the White House (trying to come closer to Manchin) announced support for a framework closer to $1.75 trillion.
- House leadership, not wanting to actually cut half the stuff from the $3.5 trillion package, instead brought the headline price down largely by scheduling lots of programs to phase-in and phase-out on a weird schedule.
The recent breakdown is that Manchin said no to that idea. He will back $1.75 trillion in spending, which is a lot. But he wants it to actually be $1.75 trillion in spending.
Progressives can be mad about this, but the fact is that $1.75 trillion in spending without phase-out gimmicks is better on the merits than what House leadership put together. Manchin is not ruining anything by pointing this out. He is making life harder for his colleagues in the sense that they will have to pick winners and losers. But it’s much better to do six good programs than to half-ass a dozen of them. And the reality is that $1.75 trillion is a lot of money; you can do a lot of good stuff for $1.75 trillion….
Note…
Remember…
To get legislation passed?
Ya have to buy votes with amendment add on’s…
Too many COULD sink the boat…..