Misconceptions around Biden plan

Perhaps President Joe Biden’s ambitious domestic program will suffer death by a thousand misconceptions. But as soon as you look at it that way, you’ll see why congressional Democrats are more likely to embrace the large measure of social reform they promised in last year’s election.

This is because the single largest misconception is that Democrats have a political death wish. Such gloom, encouraged by the torrent of threats and counterthreats now emanating from the party’s various factions, confuses the inevitable struggles within a highly diverse political coalition for a party-wide blindness to costs of failure.

“If we were in Europe, we’d be 30 different political parties,” Rep. Jim McGovern, DMass., told me, with just a touch of exaggeration. But McGovern, who chairs the Rules Committee, believes his colleagues understand the bottomline truth: “If we can’t deliver on this, God help us in the next election.”

Still, the ugly process and the relentless focus on the bill’s current $3.5 trillion price tag are taking a toll and feeding other misunderstandings. Only rarely is it pointed out that this is spent out over 10 years and thus amounts to just 1.2 percent of the economy. Worse, the focus on a single abstract total means little attention to what the Build Back Better initiatives would actually do — for children, families, education, health care, housing and climate.

“When Democrats allow a debate to be only about a number,” Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., a leading moderate, said in an interview, “it’s like talking about a Christmas party and only discussing the hangover.”

Substantively, added Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., starting the discussion this way gets things exactly backward.

Democrats will eventually have to agree on an overall spending level to work out what fits.

Thus, Biden has been pressing Sen. Joe Manchin III, D-W. Va., and other more conservative Democrats to be specific about what they do and don’t want in a final package.

At his news conference on Friday, Biden said this was a central theme in his meetings with congressional Democrats this past week. “Forget a number,” Biden told them. “What do you think we should be doing?” He added that when some of his interlocutors listed all their priorities, they discovered that “it adds up to a number higher than they said they were for.”

And no, the entire cost will not just be thrown onto the national debt. A frustrated Biden pointed out that if all the revenue increases he has proposed were enacted, “it is zero price tag on the debt.”

Here’s one more misconception: the idea that all middle-ofthe-road Democrats are of the same mind. In fact, most House Democrats, including many moderates, agree with the original goal of passing the Senate’s bipartisan physical infrastructure bill in tandem with the larger Build Back Better bill.

There will be much teethgnashing over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s pledge of a vote on the Senate bill by Monday. It’s an artificial deadline, and there is no way a full agreement on the rest of Biden’s plan can be reached in time to meet it.

Meanwhile, it’s foolish to imagine that more progressive House Democrats will give up their only leverage, which is to hold back their votes for the smaller bill until they know Senate Democrats are fully onboard with the broader one.

Rep. Pramila Jayapal, DWash., the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, noted in an interview that the bigger bill still under negotiation includes “the majority of the president’s agenda and what we ran on in 2020.”

“We were promised the two would move together, and we’re just enforcing the agreement we made,” Jayapal said. Which happens to be true. It may ultimately fall to Biden to persuade the House Democrats eager for a quick vote on the bipartisan bill to show some short-term patience in the interest of longer-term success.

In my ideal world, we would spend more than $3.5 trillion, given how much needs to be done to give low- and middleincome Americans what Biden called “a little breathing room.”

But in the world as it exists, compromise is likely to require something smaller. That’s OK. What would not be OK: for Democrats to walk away from the best opportunity they have had in at least two generations to repair and reconstruct our nation’s social contract. Despite all their grousing, I think they know that.