Reportedly, there’s a deal on an infrastructure bill, which may or may not have the votes to defeat a filibuster in the Senate and may not even have enough votes to clear the House and at any rate will be vetoed by President Joe Biden unless a different bill including other portions of his original proposal is passed and while no one knows what that bill would look like, if it does in fact pass it would almost certainly have to do so with only Democratic votes, which means it would have to go through the budget-reconciliation procedure in the Senate.
Got that?
As political scientist Matt Glassman said, “Regardless of who does it, when the legislative filibuster eventually gets blown up---and absent some major development, it'll be sooner rather than later---stuff like this whole two-bill reconciliation tandem bike negotiation episode is gonna look plain bananaland in retrospect.”
So let’s sort this deal through, and see why it’s not “bananaland” under the current rules. In fact, it’s a rather clever solution to a complicated problem, even though it involves a lot of hostage-taking.
1. Biden and pretty much every congressional Democrat want a very large infrastructure package, which would include funding for a sprawling hodgepodge of both traditional and less traditional stuff.
2. A handful of Democrats, including Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, care deeply about burnishing their reputations for bipartisanship.
3. Quite a few Republicans would like at least some of this spending to pass, including several who also want to prove their bipartisanship.
4. Most Republicans, whether they want infrastructure spending or not, have exactly the opposite goal. They very much do not want to be seen doing anything that looks even remotely bipartisan. If Biden is for it, they want to be against it.
Making everyone happy under these conditions was tricky, but it appears that this deal has come close. We’re to have two bills. One will be bipartisan, worked out in negotiations among the White House and a group of Democratic and Republican senators. It will include the kinds of projects that Republicans are happy to back and will be paid for without cutting spending that Democrats like or raising taxes that Republicans don’t like — in large part, this will be done by only pretending to pay for it (which economists find reasonable, given both the long-term payoffs of infrastructure and low interest rates). That bill will need 60 votes to defeat the filibuster.
A second bill will contain spending for all the other things that Biden proposed and Democrats want. It will be passed in the Senate under the reconciliation rules, which protect some bills from the filibuster. It has yet to be negotiated, but it will have to keep Manchin and Sinema on board, as well as the most liberal lawmakers in Congress. With no margin of error in the Senate and only a slim majority in the House, Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone.
Why not just cut a deal over the whole thing? Because the votes probably aren’t there. Only a handful of House Republicans would be willing to vote for any high-profile bipartisan bill, and anything that relatively moderate Republicans sign on to is going to lose at least some of the most liberal House Democrats. So even a compromise bill that could win 60 votes in the Senate (should it be possible) might well fail in the House.
The two-bill solution solves this problem by promising progressives that if they vote for the bipartisan plan, they’ll also get their priorities funded separately. Not everything they want — it has to get through Manchin and Sinema. But the idea is that Manchin and Sinema got what they really wanted Thursday, with a White House ceremony celebrating bipartisanship and compromise. As long as they care more about that than they do about the substance, it should all work out. Even if the bipartisan bill falls short (the group that negotiated the deal included only five Republican senators, which means they’ll need five more).
The good news late Thursday was that none of the five Republicans had backed away, even when Biden explicitly said that he would only sign the bipartisan bill if the reconciliation bill also passes. That suggests they had agreed to the two-bill plan, even though they won’t vote for the second part of it. It also suggests (as reporting indicates) that they trust Biden and the Democrats to use the second bill only for those items that were completely omitted from the compromise bill. After all, Republicans bargained down the totals spent on roads and bridges and so on in the bipartisan bill; they don’t want those numbers topped up when the second bill is drafted.
There are two paths to success from here. The first is the two-bill plan agreed to today. It’s possible that the five Republican negotiators have at least five allies prepared to support the first measure; that all 10 (or more) will stick with it as things move forward; and that Democrats will reach agreement on the second bill and hang together to vote for both. The other path? The bipartisan bill fails to get 60 votes in the Senate, but having made their point and received their credit, Manchin and Sinema negotiate a single bill they (and their most liberal colleagues) can live with, and pass it with only Democratic votes through reconciliation. Should that happen, it’s possible that the totals negotiated in the bipartisan deal could be revisited, although the swing votes would then have considerable leverage.
Or it could all fall apart. If the bipartisan deal fails to get 60 votes in the Senate, and if even one Democrat there refuses to move ahead with a Democrats-only single bill, then no deal will pass. Or if the liberals and moderates can’t agree on the reconciliation bill. Or … well, there are other things that can go wrong. My guess, though, is that this is the least likely outcome from where we are now.
Bloomberg
