Bipartisanship not likely to become habit
WASHINGTON — The bipartisan infrastructure bill the Senate passed Tuesday is a big deal, but let’s say it upfront: Not everything that’s bipartisan is good, and not everything that’s good is bipartisan.
Bipartisanship should be a method, not a fetish.
Nor should the bill’s remarkable margin — 69 to 30, with 19 Republicans joining all the Democrats in voting yes — be hailed as a sign that all is well. If the Senate’s muchabused filibuster remains unchanged, Republicans are certain to block political reform (as they showed in the early hours of Wednesday when they prevented consideration of a voting rights bill) and millions of Americans will have their right to vote impeded.
These caveats should serve as a check on Washington’s habit of leaping to unwarranted self-congratulation. But they do not diminish the significance of Tuesday’s achievement for President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.
At a philosophical level, it is a sign of a new day that Republicans broke with their anti-government austerity habit — it’s especially pronounced when a Democrat is president — to support $1.2 trillion in longterm investments. True, there is nothing radical about roads, bridges, public transit and broadband. And to get GOP votes Biden agreed to knock out a lot of spending for schools, housing and climate.
But remember that President Donald Trump talked nonstop about infrastructure and got nothing. This is not a snide talking point about his announcing one “infrastructure week” after another, to no effect. It’s a reflection of how low infrastructure ranked among congressional Republicans’ priorities during the Trump years — far behind tax cuts and judges.
Getting the GOP to acknowledge that public spending can lay the foundation for private prosperity matters for the longer trajectory of the country’s political debate. Biden accented this after the bill passed.
“America has often had the greatest prosperity and made the most progress,” he said, “when we invest in America itself.”
It didn’t hurt that much of big business agreed, and lobbied accordingly. And, yes, some Republican senators — Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rob Portman of Ohio and Susan Collins of Maine among them — remember when politicians agreed that building stuff is good.
But Biden and Schumer also understood the complicated dynamics of their own party. For middle-of-the-road Democrats such as Sens. Mark Warner of Virginia, Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, it matters to be able to say that they have gotten things done with Republicans. Moderate House Democrats in tough swing districts feel the same way.
More progressive Democrats were skeptical of the bipartisan deal and all the concessions that passage required.
The two-track strategy gives each side what it needs: the “hard” infrastructure bill and a separate $3.5 trillion package that would spend far more to battle climate change while also expanding Medicare and investing in programs to help families and children.
The party’s moderates are open to the bigger, Democrats-only bill — it advanced early Wednesday morning when the Senate adopted a budget resolution on a partyline vote, 50 to 49 — because the bipartisan measure came first in the Senate.
Progressives are expected to vote for the smaller bill, if in some cases reluctantly, as long as moderate Senate Democrats join in providing the votes the larger one needs.
And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-calif.), who has been central to all the strategizing, has leverage to hold back the bipartisan bill until she knows the Senate will give her progressive members what they need — and what she and many of her committee chairs want.
The process will be messy. But the Democrats of 2021, moderate and progressive alike, are a practical group hardened by past tribulations and aware that failing to pass a version of Biden’s overall program would be politically lethal. So the difficult, and at times angry, bargaining to come should not be mistaken for a desire to torpedo either of the bills, both of which are popular.
Michael Donilon, a senior adviser to the president, underscored in an interview after Tuesday’s vote that the purpose of both bills —encompassing roads, bridges, transit and water in the first; child care, day care and elder care in the second — is anything but abstract. They address issues “central to people’s lives,” he said.
Biden made this point by name-checking plumbers, pipe fitters and electrical workers in his victory speech. He never loses track of whom he needs to talk to.
As for bipartisanship, it may be overrated, but a promise to achieve it has always been part of Biden’s brand. So his lieutenants have reason to see the cross-party support for the infrastructure bill as valuable in itself.
“It doesn’t mean it can be done all the time,” Donilon said. “It doesn’t mean it can be done most of the time. But when it can be done, it’s a very positive message.”
That’s true. We just shouldn’t pretend bipartisanship will become a habit.