Dems have leverage on infrastructure deal

WASHINGTON — In a crucial moment for Democrats, party leaders are hunting for a sweet spot that would satisfy their rival moderate and progressive wings on legislation to finance President Joe Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda of bolstering the economy and helping families.

With virtually no votes to spare and saber rattling by both Democratic factions, leaders are finding their search for middle ground arduous — even though the president’s push for infrastructure projects and familycentered initiatives is his top domestic priority.

With Sen. Joe Manchin, DW.Va., winning the spotlight this year for pulling his party rightward by issuing demands on crucial issues, plenty of centrists and liberals are now using that same playbook. In a procession of meetings with White House officials and congressional budget writers, progressives have insisted that the emerging measures be big and aggressive, while moderates want them to be far more modest.

“We’re all Joe Manchin right now,” said House Budget Committee Chairman John Yarmuth of Kentucky.

The leverage every Democrat has flows from simple arithmetic. Expecting unanimous Republican opposition to much of Biden’s package, they need total unity in the 50-50 Senate — plus Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote — and can lose only a very few House votes.

With trillions in spending at their disposal, Democratic leaders have plenty of options for designing programs that appeal to lawmakers’ hometown interests to win votes. More broadly, however, the intraparty fight pits two ideologies against each other — progressives’ eagerness to help needy families, moderates seeking to do so but with fiscal constraints — and their differences are real.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders,

I-Vt., recently floated an enormous $6 trillion proposal for infrastructure, climate change, health care and other programs that many progressives love. It goes well beyond Biden’s vision of spending roughly $4 trillion on similar projects. Manchin has said he wants to pare it back further, a view many moderate Democrats endorse but that progressives say would eviscerate the president’s agenda.

Sanders is now immersed in talks with his panel’s Democrats on finding a compromise on spending and offsetting revenues.

The party is hoping he can craft a budget resolution — the first step in Congress’ creaky process for churning out spending and tax bills — that Democrats can push through the Senate and House this month. Lawmakers would likely work on detailed bills actually providing the funds and revenue this fall.

Lawmakers, aides and lobbyists say Sanders is running into resistance from moderates and will be lucky to come close to even Biden’s $4 trillion. And while moderates and progressives have generally refrained from sniping and publicly drawing lines in the sand, they’re not bashful about voicing their views.

Democrats control the House 220-211 with four vacancies and can lose no more than four of their votes to pass bills. That number will shrink to just three after a Texas runoff late this month in which both remaining candidates are Republicans.