MODERATE MANCHIN POINTS WAY FOR BIDEN’S AGENDA
Swing-vote Democrat pleas for bipartisanship on big-spending items.
Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat, West Virgina, flashed a warning sign for President Joe Biden’s infrastructure ambitions last week, renewing his pleas for fellow Democrats not to ram through a large spending bill without first working to compromise with Republicans who have panned the president’s plans.
In a divided Washington, the chances that such a compromise will materialise are slim — at least for a sprawling spending plan of up to US$4 trillion (124 trillion baht), as Mr Manchin, a pivotal swing vote in the Senate, and administration officials favour. Even so, Mr Manchin’s calls for bipartisanship were less an insurmountable obstacle for Democrats than a road map for Mr Biden if he wants his party’s tiny congressional majorities to deliver him another economic policy victory.
It involves reaching out to Republicans to explore possible areas of compromise while laying the groundwork to steer around them if no such deal materialises.
Mr Biden has already begun the outreach to Republicans, while senior Democrats in Congress are exploring a budget maneouvre that would allow the infrastructure bill to pass quickly with only Democratic votes. Both are aimed at increasing the pressure on Republicans to compromise — and, if they will not, giving Mr Manchin and other moderate Democrats whose backing Mr Biden needs the political cover to accept an all-Democratic plan.
“I’m going to bring Republicans to the White House,” Mr Biden said Wednesday. “I invite them to come. We’ll have good-faith negotiations. And any Republican who wants to get this done, I invite.”
A moment later, he urged Republicans to “listen to your constituents,” arguing that voters across America back infrastructure spending on the scale Mr Biden envisions — not the scaledback versions many Republicans have floated.
The comments reflected a huge caveat in Mr Biden’s willingness to negotiate that Republicans say could scuttle any deal: The president wants to be the one to set the terms of how large the problems are, and of whether the proposed solutions are sufficient.
Behind the scenes, his team is working to soften the ground for bipartisan work. Administration officials are considering carving off some parts of Mr Biden’s economic agenda into smaller pieces that could attract 10 or more Republican votes each, starting with a bill focused on supply chains and competition with China that the Senate is set to take up this week.
They have discussed postponing Mr Biden’s proposed tax increases on corporations, which Republicans oppose, if doing so would get Republicans on board with a spending bill. And they have considered financing the spending through any means acceptable to a critical mass of Republicans, including borrowing, as long as they do not raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 a year.
The negotiations appear, at first glance, like a slower-moving repeat of the cross-party dance that produced a nearly $1.9 trillion economic aid package this year. Mr Biden started with a large proposal.
Republicans countered with one a third its size. White House officials wrote them off as unserious, Senate Democrats stuck with the president, and the bill passed with every Republican voting in opposition.
This version will take longer, in part because Mr Manchin and other moderate Democrats want it that way. In the media, Mr Manchin, who could be the 50th vote Democrats need to pass a bill through the budget reconciliation process, has blared his message: First, try bipartisanship.
“Senate Democrats must avoid the temptation to abandon our Republican colleagues on important national issues,” Mr Manchin wrote in The Washington Post on Thursday. “Republicans, however, have a responsibility to stop saying no, and participate in finding real compromise with Democrats.”
Privately, many Democrats and Republicans say there is little chance that lawmakers could produce a bill as ambitious as Mr Manchin wants while also attracting at least 10 Republican votes in the Senate. Liberals and conservatives are trillions of dollars apart in their appetites for how much to spend and what to spend it on — and nowhere near one another on how or whether to pay for any of it.
Some Republicans are pushing for a bill that is a third the size of Mr Biden’s initial infrastructure plan, an echo of their position in the debate on the stimulus bill, while rejecting Mr Biden’s proposed tax increases on corporations.
At the same time, progressive Democrats are clamouring for the White House to go bigger, and would be unlikely to support a whittled-down plan tailored to win Republican backing.