Build Back Better: Will it get past Manchin?

House Democrats have delivered on “a key pillar of President Biden’s domestic agenda,” said Clare Foran in CNN.com. The House passed the Build Back Better bill last week on a 220-213 vote despite unanimous GOP opposition. The sweeping, $1.9 trillion bill delivers “on long-standing Democratic priorities,” providing universal preK, extending a child tax credit that pays most parents up to $300 a month per child, increasing Pell Grants for needy college students, expanding Medicare to pay for some home care for seniors, and allotting $550 billion to address climate change. It offsets costs with a 15 percent minimum tax on large corporations, a tax surcharge on the wealthiest Americans, and an IRS funding increase projected to yield at least $207 billion in revenues. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the bill would cost $160 billion over 10 years—a number acceptable to centrist Democrats in the House. The bill is “transformative,” exulted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. “It’s bigger than anything we’ve ever done.”

“Democrats should wait to break out the champagne,” said Grace Segers in NewRepublic.com. The bill “now faces a complicated path forward” in the 50-50 Senate. With blanket GOP opposition assured, it needs every Democratic vote. That puts the spotlight on Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W. Va.), “who has remained skeptical about the bill and its price tag.” Manchin is very likely to scuttle a provision for four weeks of federally funded family leave, and his concerns about exacerbating inflation might mean “that even more programs may be removed.” After the inevitable tweaks, the bill will have to return to the House, where Pelosi can afford only three defections.

Pelosi says she’s confident of Senate passage, said Carl Hulse in The New York Times, and if she’s right, it’s a massive triumph for the speaker. Laboring to “unite the feuding liberal and moderate factions in her caucus,” she kept the bill alive as it repeatedly “teetered on the brink of collapse.” In the end, she “found a way to win when it appeared she could lose.” The scaleddown version is a far cry from $3.2 billion bill progressives initially proposed, said Matt Lewis in TheDailyBeast.com. Still, even after the cuts insisted on by Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, it amounts to “the most sweeping social spending policy bill in U.S. history.” Senate passage probably won’t turn around Biden’s “sagging approval numbers,” but “a win is a win.”