Don’t pop the bubbly yet

Passing major legislation in this Congress in this America is like running the marathon with pole vaulting required at steepening intervals every half-mile.

Lest you get a hankering to celebrate the remarkable matter of the U.S. Senate’s passing a bipartisan in- frastructure bill of a little more than a trillion dollars—with 19 Republican senators joining Democrats—don’t forget that there is another chamber and that there is this other bill, part companion and part danger.

While the Senate’s narrow governing coalition requires moderation, empowering Democrats like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema who can get along with the smattering of center-inclined Republicans, the House’s governing Democratic majority is a scant eight votes, which requires that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her buddies on the extreme left be attended to.

Compromise has been easier in the Senate even with the 60-vote filibuster threshold.

These nullifying extremes—and that’s just in the Democratic Party— don’t exist in a vacuum. Everyone with a seat in Congress is there because people—be they in the Bronx or a West Virginia coal town—voted to put them there and expect their interests to be advanced.

Along the way of this infrastructure marathon:

■ Republicans have had to deal with Donald Trump issuing statements that only fake Republicans would agree with Democrats and that he’ll gin up primary opponents for any who do. That 19 of the Senate 50 Republicans weren’t afraid passes for a great breakthrough.

■ Democrats have had to endure Ocasio-Cortez disparaging what she calls “mods,” meaning moderates who work on bipartisan compromises, and saying it was moderates doing bipartisanship who gave us the bank bailout. You know the one, when the global economy was collapsing, a situation literally requiring that somebody do something even it wasn’t right.

■ We had to pause while a debate about taxing cryptocurrency somehow got into the mix.

■ We had to endure U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, a Trumpian extremist, offering an amendment to divert some of the money to finishing the border wall and saying on one of those networks to the right of Fox that the bill was a “gateway to socialism” mainly because it included climate-change spending that she said amounted to Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.

So, let me tell you about Blackburn’s gateway to socialism based on climate spending: Other than electric car-charging stations, the climate-related provisions of the Senate’s infrastructure compromise mainly were put there through the leadership of a conservative Republican senator from Louisiana, Bill Cassidy.

Louisiana has significant flood problems amid a rising sea level. So Cassidy joined the bipartisan group and pushed for inclusion in the trillion-plus what he called “climate change resilience.” That refers to construction to control flooding, programs to fight and prevent wildfires, and initiatives to relocate people who are in harm’s way due to problems like floods and fires.

Flood control, firefighting, getting people out of danger—these are not socialist concepts, though your good socialists probably favor trying to save people from drowning and incineration, just as your good capitalists do.

To call roads, bridges, transportation stations, broadband, car-charging stations, flood control and firefighting “socialism” is to pander to the raging uninformed and misinformed, which is maybe a third of us.

So, assuming the Senate passes the infrastructure bill, it will go the House where Speaker Nancy Pelosi is an outof-touch liberal in her own right, but one capable of pragmatism except for her tiny eight-vote margin of control and thus the importance of those on the extreme left to it.

Pelosi says she won’t move on the infrastructure bill until the Senate sends over a $3.5 trillion social spending bill that the two aforementioned moderate Democrats, Manchin and Sinema, join Republicans in finding too big.

Moderate House Democrats are leaning on Pelosi to call a vote on infrastructure alone, and let a few Republicans vote with them if the liberal Democrats won’t, never mind the other bill. And liberal House Democrats are leaning on Pelosi to say you’d better not do that unless you want us to blame you for destroying the progressive ideal as presumably provided by the bigger bill.

Meantime, a columnist named Max Boot in The Washington Post wrote smartly Tuesday that Republicans have crashed so far to the right that the center is there for Democratic taking if they’ll just do it. I believe that means passing the infrastructure bill and not overplaying a weak hand by passing the social spending bill.

So, while this Senate success will be met with applause, as it should be, just know that the applause is coming about the eight-mile mark and this competition is over 26.2 miles with higher pole-vault bars ahead.