Biden walks a tightrope with GOP, progressives
If you follow the news about President Joe Biden’s investment plans, you might think that his agenda is destined to be derailed by acrimony between the parties — and among Democrats themselves. But Sen. Bernie Sanders, chairman of the Budget Committee and a leader of the party’s progressive wing, suggests that everyone might usefully calm down about the prospects of enacting a big program.
“It has to be done,” Sanders told me, “and I’m confident that it will be done.”
The trick is to move the debate to what he, Biden and Democrats of various stripes want to accomplish, and the independent senator from Vermont ticked off a formidable list in an interview last week. It included the child tax credit, universal pre-k, child care, paid family and medical leave, action on climate change, Medicare improvements and affordable higher education.
“The media has been focusing on process, focusing on conflict, along with other stuff,” Sanders said. “I don’t know if there’s anybody in America who knows what the hell we are trying to do.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell is doing all he can to keep things that way. He wants the conversation to be all about whether a bipartisan infrastructure agreement Biden reached with a group of Republicans and moderate Democrats is linked to the passage of a bigger, Democrats-only “reconciliation” bill. Mcconnell is trying to bury the first bill by turning the second bill into a form of dangerous overreach.
Sanders is relaxed about this, too. “Mcconnell is a very good politician and he understands that what we are trying to do through this reconciliation bill is meet the needs of the American people,” Sanders said. “And that poll after poll shows that it is extremely popular. So as a good politician, he is trying to do everything he can to see that the Democrats don’t pass something.”
Talking to Sanders is instructive because his standing as a leader of the left often gets in the way of understanding another aspect of his approach to politics: He’s operational. He wants to get stuff done. So does the rest of the party’s progressive wing.
They aren’t invested in bipartisanship the way Biden is. But they’ll back his approach to a first, cross-party infrastructure bill — Sanders says he, too, wants to finance “roads and bridges and broadband, public transit and water and wastewater and all of that stuff” — as long as they can see it as a vehicle for getting more done in a Democrats-only bill.
This speaks to the intricate balancing act that Biden is engaged in. The two political parties include many factions, and an administration official pointed to three that will be central to Biden’s success: “available Republicans, moderate Democrats, and more liberal Democrats.”
The administration believes that many Senate Republicans — and even, perhaps, a dozen or more House Republicans — are “available” to vote for the bipartisan bill because it contains measures valuable to the states and districts they represent. These include not only roads, bridges and expanded access to broadband but also spending on “coastal resilience” in the wake of hurricanes and flooding. This matters in many Republican states, including Mississippi, Louisiana, South Carolina and Alabama.
Mcconnell’s counter, as Sanders suggests, is to keep pushing the debate away from such specifics and to argue that Republicans who vote for the carefully negotiated bipartisan bill will become enablers of Biden’s broader agenda that appeals to progressives. Everything Biden says or does to reassure progressives will be used against him with Republicans.
This is what happened when Biden said at the unveiling of the physical infrastructure bill that he wouldn’t sign it without also being able to approve his broader investments. The president pulled back, and he is now on notice about the narrowness of the path he has to walk.
The coming weeks will be noisy. Progressives will be battling for their priorities, including the child tax credit and additional investments to fight climate change. Fixing a broken unemployment insurance system and expanding Medicaid in states that refused the Obamacare expansions also have a large claim on Democrats’ attention.
But the party has an advantage in negotiating bills that can satisfy its various wings: The Senate Budget Committee that Sanders leads and its House counterpart, under Rep. John Yarmuth, D-KY., include representation across the party’s philosophical spectrum. As a result, the compromises Sanders and Yarmuth hammer out in their committees are likely to reflect opinion in the party as a whole.
And all the party’s factions have a powerful reason to get to yes: If they blow up Biden’s program, they will blow up their chances of holding the House and Senate. This alone should keep them focused, as Sanders would say, on “what the hell” they are trying to do.