Biden Implores Democrats to Support His Transformative Agenda
“The House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week,” President Biden told lawmakers on Thursday.
“But as he prepared to land in Rome, Mr. Biden’s bet had not yet paid off. He had not ended months of intraparty squabbling that has dragged down his poll ratings, jeopardized Democratic candidates and raised deep doubts among Americans that his presidency can deliver on the promises of a vast social and economic agenda.
In the closed-door session on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told Democratic lawmakers that “when the president gets off that plane, we want him to have a vote of confidence from this Congress.”
Instead, for the second time in a month, Ms. Pelosi pulled back from plans on that vote after progressive Democrats objected again. They ignored the president’s entreaties, signaling their continued mistrust of moderate Democratic senators, whom they fear will not back Mr. Biden’s larger social spending bill when it finally comes to a vote.
Senators Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, moderate Democrats who had forced the original $3.5 trillion proposal to be halved. The two delivered halfhearted statements that pointedly did not promise that they would support the president’s new framework for a deal on the spending bill.
But White House officials concluded that it was time for Mr. Biden to put down his final marker, explicitly asking Democratic lawmakers for their support on a specific proposal. Having the president leave for a week on his trip without doing so would have left the process in limbo, administration officials said.
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But in a rebuke that played out over the next several hours, Democrats refused to immediately come together behind the leader of their party.
And Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema remained steadfast in their opposition to including parts of the progressive agenda — like free community college, a large Medicare expansion and tax rate hikes on the wealthy — in the president’s social policy legislation. They made clear that they would not be swayed by the refusal of the progressive members to vote for the infrastructure measure.
I haven't paid attention to the details of this, the three bills, the voting rights bill by far the most important, and yet weirdly made third on the priority list. I have been resigned that these bills were not going to pass in anywhere close to their original form. It was distressing-depressing to think about and I just didn't. The social safety net bill was more than halved to placate Manchinema. And yet.
The Democrats' strategy on these bills has always struck me as odd. Voting rights in third place. Why, again? Nancy's original line in the sand that the social safety net and infrastructure bills were joined at the hip. "I promise," she told the progressives. Erase that line and promise moderates a first vote on infrastructure. Ron Klain bucking up progressives to hold firm on the social bill, confident, apparently, that Manchinema would cave. Letting Manchin re-write the social bill gutting it of action on climate. Still didn't get his or Sinema's support! The president and Nancy drawing another line in the sand yesterday, "Pass this bill or this presidency is over" and then the president leaves on a foreign trip. Didn't want to leave it in "limbo". What? You left it in limbo. Manchinema called his bluff.
You know, Mitch McConnell said at the beginning of all of this, "Now we're going to see if the Democrats can govern." Democrats are showing that they can't.
