Manchin said to have reached deal with Dems on climate
West Virginia senator who killed previous attempts OKs bill that also lowers costs for health care, decreases deficit
WASHINGTON — Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., on Wednesday reached a deal with Democratic leaders on a spending package that aims to lower health care costs, combat climate change and reduce the federal deficit, marking a massive potential breakthrough for President Joe Biden’s long-stalled economic agenda.
The new agreement, brokered between Manchin and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., opens the door for party lawmakers to try to advance the measure in the coming weeks. It caps off months of fierce debate, delay and acrimony, a level of infighting that some Democrats saw as detrimental to their political fate ahead of this fall’s critical elections.
Under the deal, Schumer secured Manchin’s support for roughly
$433 billion in new spending, most of which is focused on climate change and clean energy production — the largest such investment in U.S. history. The Democrats coupled the spending with provisions that aim to lower health care costs for Americans, chiefly by allowing Medicare to begin negotiating the price of select prescription drugs on behalf of seniors.
To pay for the package, Manchin and Schumer also settled on a flurry of changes to tax law that would raise $739 billion over the next decade — enough to offset the cost of the bill while securing more than $300 billion for cutting the deficit, a priority for Manchin. Democrats sourced the funds from a series of changes to tax law, including a new minimum tax on corporations and fresh investments in the Internal Revenue Service that will help it pursue tax cheats.
Taken together, the package represents more than some Democrats once thought they might win from Manchin, who repeatedly has raised fiscal concerns with his own party’s ambitions. Only two weeks earlier, the moderate from West Virginia, a coalheavy state, signaled his opposition to new climate investments out of concern that spending increases — funded in part by tax hikes — could harm the economy and worsen inflation.
But the new agreement still totals significantly less than Democrats had hoped to achieve through the more sweeping, roughly $2 trillion initiative known as the Build Back Better Act. Manchin scuttled his party’s proposed overhaul to the country’s health care, education, climate, immigration and tax laws last December, angering Democrats, who passed a version of the bill in the House.
Biden described the legislation as “historic,” stressing in a statement: “This is the action the American people have been waiting for.” The White House had issued its own ultimatum earlier this month, stressing that if Congress didn’t act on climate change, then Biden would issue executive orders to address the issue.
With an agreement in hand, Schumer soon set about briefing members of his party on the bill, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. It came as a surprise to many Democratic lawmakers, illustrating the tumultuous and secretive negotiations between Schumer and Manchin, which have spanned months.
From here, Schumer aims to finalize the proposal and advance it through the process known as reconciliation. The tactic allows Democrats to band together and move their spending bill through the narrowly divided Senate using their 50 votes and Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking power, sidestepping Republicans’ opposition and filibuster. Then, the fate of the president’s agenda falls on the House, where Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., similarly has a razor-thin majority.