It may be now or never for Democrat’s big spending bill

Legislating is never easy, but this is getting ridiculous.

With negotiations involving congressional leaders, the White House and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., continuing on a daily basis, Democrats have now decided to push back a vote on Build Back Better, the centerpiece of President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda, until after the new year.

But the longer this drags out, the less likely the bill is to pass. Should it die, it would be an outright disaster, both for the millions of people who would be helped by the many programs in the bill and for the Democrats who have staked their party’s fortunes on it.

The party’s progressives and moderates disagree on many things and have from time to time been at each other’s throats. But this is something they agree on: If BBB doesn’t pass, they’re all in deep trouble. And they agree waiting only makes it less likely.

“The longer we wait, the harder it gets,” Rep. Suzan DelBene, D-Wash., the chair of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, told us.

Consider some of the high points of the last few months. Again and again, Democrats have made big moves toward passing BBB. Each time, they created a sense of serious momentum. And each time, that momentum seemed to dissipate as other issues intruded and Manchin or Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., raised new objections.

For instance, in late October, after consulting with all sides, Biden announced a framework for the legislation. It was a marker laid down by the president after incorporating the perspectives of the party’s various factions.

When that happened, both the moderate and progressive coalitions endorsed the framework, and statements of support poured forth from numerous environmental, progressive and liberal groups. A sense of possibility was palpable. Then, two weeks after that, BBB passed the House to cheers and celebration.

All that remained was to work out final details with Manchin and Sinema, and get the bill through the Senate. So we waited. And we’re still waiting.

Now that BBB has been punted into the new year, possibly even into the spring, Democrats of all stripes agree that waiting carries serious perils. Democrats have spent months touting the bill’s popular specifics, such as an extension of the expanded child tax credit, insulin prices capped at $35 a month, hearing benefits in Medicare for seniors and beefed-up Affordable Care Act coverage.

Now, with every week that goes by, Democrats are not delivering on these specifics. This could hurt progressive and front-line moderate Democrats alike, if the party’s image calcifies as ineffectual and unable to govern.

“The one thing we hear from folks across all purple districts is they want to see government work,” DelBene told us. “We need to get it done.”

Beyond this delay, it would obviously be even more politically disastrous for the bill to fail, since it would represent a string of broken promises.

The child tax credit shows the peril of this moment. The expanded benefits, which passed in the covid-19 rescue package earlier this year, send payments right into people’s bank accounts. An extension is part of BBB in its current form, but the last payment of 2021 already went out.

What if January comes and goes without another deposit? What if that drags on for months?

“The huge challenge is that we lose the momentum we’ve had on lifting children out of poverty,” DelBene told us. “It will pull the rug out from families that have started to really see the impact.”

What’s particularly ominous here is that the hard deadline of the expanded child tax credit expiring wasn’t enough to move Manchin. Once that hard deadline has passed, couldn’t it get easier for Manchin to do nothing? And couldn’t Democratic voters sink into a deeper funk?

That’s not the only way in which the ticking clock is the Democrats’ enemy. They’ve now decided to try to pass legislation securing the voting system first, on the reasonable grounds that the GOP war on democracy is a true national emergency. If that push succeeds, Manchin and Sinema could decide they’ve done all the major legislating they can tolerate.

Or even worse, if the attempt to pass voting legislation fails because Manchin and Sinema refuse to suspend the filibuster, of all things, and then BBB fails as well, the Democratic base could be even more demoralized heading into the midterm elections.