In House and Senate, Pelosi gets Democrats to play ball
WASHINGTON — On a Wednesday night in September, while President Joe Biden backslapped in the Republican dugout during the annual congressional baseball game, Speaker Nancy Pelosi sat nearby, sober-faced and wagging her finger while speaking into her cellphone, toiling to salvage her party’s top legislative priority as it teetered on the brink of collapse.
On the other end of the line was Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a crucial swing vote on Biden’s sweeping social policy bill, and Pelosi, seated in the VIP section behind the dugout at Nationals Park, was trying to persuade him to embrace $2.1 trillion in spending and climate change provisions she considered essential for the legislation.
In a moment captured by C-SPAN cameras that went viral, Pelosi appeared to grow agitated as Manchin, according to sources apprised of the call, told her that he could not accept more than $1.5 trillion — and was prepared to provide a document clearly laying out his parameters for the package, bench marks that House Democrats had been clamoring to see.
The call reflected how Pelosi’s pivotal role in shepherding Biden’s agenda on Capitol
Hill has reached far beyond the House that is her primary responsibility and into the Senate, where she has engaged in quiet and little-noticed talks with key lawmakers who have the power to kill the package or propel it into law. Her efforts — fraught with challenges and littered with near-death experiences for the bill — finally paid off Friday with House passage of the $2.2 trillion social policy and climate change package.
Along the way, Pelosi, who is known for delivering legislative victories in tough circumstances, was forced repeatedly to pull back from a floor showdown on the bill as she labored to unite the feuding liberal and moderate factions in her caucus. A crucial but less-seen part of her task was sounding out and cajoling a pair of Democratic holdouts in the Senate, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who were opposed to major elements of Biden’s plan and had the power to upend whatever delicate deal Pelosi was able to strike.
It was only after her call with Manchin at the baseball game that Pelosi discovered that the West Virginian’s demands were contained in a sort of makeshift contract he had delivered to Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. and the majority leader, in late July. The document, which was signed by both men, had been kept secret — including from her — for months.
“I would have liked to have known that,” Pelosi said Friday, recounting how she felt blindsided. “However, it was what it was.”
Manchin’s insistence on holding down the cost of the package threw a wrench into Pelosi’s plan to quickly advance the monumental social policy bill, sending it instead through a series of tortuous twists and turns until Friday morning, when she finally managed to pass it.
She is still not done, with the Senate now getting a chance to reshape the measure in the hope of eventually sending it back for final House approval and Biden’s signature. Manchin is still demanding major changes, such as the jettisoning of a new fourweek paid family and medical leave program that Pelosi has made a top priority. But in the weeks since their call, Manchin has privately expressed an openness to embracing a costlier plan than the one he initially insisted upon, and the speaker now says she is confident that the measure approved by the House will reemerge from the Senate mostly intact.
“They may want to hone or sharpen this or that, and that’s a negotiation,” Pelosi said of the Senate. “But 90-some percent of that bill is what it is.”
Initial approval of the legislation in the House was a considerable achievement in itself, considering unanimous Republican opposition and the deep Democratic divisions over the package. And it came despite whispers in the corridors of the Capitol that lawmakers no longer feared Pelosi as much as they had in the past, since she is believed to be nearing the end of her tenure.
In the end, as she did with the financial bailout in 2008, the Obama-era stimulus plan in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010, among others, Pelosi found a way to win when it appeared she could lose. This time, she did so with a bill that contains history-making initiatives for the environment and substantial health care, child care, family leave and educational programs that she and her Democratic colleagues have sought for decades.