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“Despite a long night of frantic negotiations, Democrats were unable late Thursday to reach an immediate deal to salvage President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion government overhaul… Tensions spiked late Wednesday when [Sen. Joe] Manchin sent out a fiery statement, decrying the broad spending as ‘fiscal insanity.’ [Sen. Kyrsten] Sinema was similarly working to stave off criticism and her office said claims that she has not been forthcoming are ‘false’ — though she has not publicly disclosed her views over what size package she wants and has declined to answer questions about her position.” AP News
The right praises Manchin and Sinema for pushing back against Democrats’ massive spending plans.
“This is no longer your parents’ Democratic party — or even your older brother’s party. Previous Democratic presidential nominees John Kerry, Barack Obama, and even Hillary Clinton each proposed federal spending expansions of between $1 trillion and $2 trillion over the subsequent decade. Those candidates also proposed roughly equivalent tax increases (with varying credibility) to at least give lip service to controlling the deficit…
“By contrast, candidate Joe Biden promised a staggering $11 trillion in new spending, combined with $3 trillion in new taxes. His agenda would increase the debt held by the public — $17 trillion before the pandemic — to $44 trillion a decade from now. And yet Biden was considered a centrist compared to the fantasyland spending sprees proposed by rival candidates Bernie Sanders ($97 trillion over the decade), and Elizabeth Warren ($40 trillion)… this is where today’s Democratic party stands. There is no longer any room for moderates, or even Obama-style liberals.”
Brian Riedl, New York Post
“Mr. Biden ran explicitly against Mr. Sanders’s socialism in the primaries. As the nominee he felt obliged to endorse a ‘unity’ agenda with Mr. Sanders. But that should have gone by the wayside with the small majorities in Congress. For reasons that are hard to understand, Mr. Biden came to believe he was FDR and could pass the Sanders agenda as his own…
“He has no mandate for the vast expansions of government he is proposing, and if Democrats somehow manage to pass even half of it, they’ll be crushed in 2022. This is the political message if you read between the lines of Mr. Manchin’s warnings.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Mr. Manchin has been clear for two solid months now. This pileup is solely the fault of a left that put its fingers in its ears, arrogantly relying on threats… The Democratic decision to plow ahead with this resolution—knowing that nearly every policy element and some $2 trillion in additional spending had already been rejected by a senator whose support was indispensable—would at any other time be described as mind-boggling ineptitude. Today, it is progressives’ standard operating procedure…
“Instead of negotiating, party leaders arrogantly bet that a two-month campaign of threats, bullying and pressure would cattle-prod Mr. Manchin into line. Mrs. Pelosi took hostage his bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure package, tying its fate to his willingness to roll over… Is reconciliation still possible? Yes. Might Mr. Manchin be moved to a higher number? Maybe. What is clear is that Bernie Sanders’s wild-eyed $3.5 trillion free-for-all is dead. It’s a black eye to the Biden administration, Mrs. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer, and it’s their own fault.”
Kimberley A. Strassel, Wall Street Journal
“‘What if — and hear me out here,’ writes Robert Reich, ‘we stopped letting two corporate Democrats singlehandedly block every single progressive policy we elected Democrats to pass?’ Okay, Robert. But how, exactly? The Democrats have 50 seats in the Senate. To pass a bill through reconciliation, the Democrats need 50 votes in the Senate. Two of the people who hold those 50 seats do not agree with the rest of the party on ‘every single progressive policy.’ If the other 48 senators do agree — which is far from clear — the Democratic Party will have 48 votes for its agenda, two short of what it needs…
“It is, of course, true that legislatures are slow and messy and, occasionally, irrational. But that is because the United States, too, is slow and messy and, occasionally, irrational. What [progressives] are ultimately complaining about is that their party does not have more seats in the federal legislature. And why doesn’t their party have more seats in the federal legislature? Well, because the American public did not give them more seats in the federal legislature…
“The reason we have a 50–50 Senate and a House of Representatives as closely divided as it has been in two decades is that the country is closely divided, too. That two senators are able to ‘block’ what one of the factions wants to do is merely another reflection of that division.”
Charles C. W. Cooke, National Review
The left criticizes Manchin and Sinema for standing in the way of the Democratic agenda.
The left criticizes Manchin and Sinema for standing in the way of the Democratic agenda.
“New spending of $3.5 trillion over a decade is modest — on the order of 1-2 percent of GDP… Total federal spending on defense consumption and investment in 2020 was $881 billion. Assuming that will be static over 10 years (and it won't be) gives us a 10-year figure of $8.8 trillion. That's almost certainly an underestimate, however, because Congress keeps compulsively stuffing more money into the Pentagon — the House just added $24 billion to the 2022 military budget though Biden didn't ask for it and we just ended a major war…
“Manchin voted for the one-year portion of that $8.8 trillion — and so much more. He was first elected to the Senate in 2010, giving us a full decade of defense budgets under his watch. If we take the figures for each year from 2011 to 2020, adjust them for inflation, and add them all together, we get a total of $7.6 trillion in 2012 dollars…
“For years, [Manchin] has been casually voting for bloated defense budgets many times the size of the Biden agenda. His squalling about overspending is dishonest nonsense, and he is utterly wrong about what America can afford.”
Ryan Cooper, The Week
“West Virginia faces enormous and long-standing challenges. It has the lowest income in the nation, and the sixth-highest poverty rate. Though the state’s economy has grown, it’s steadily fallen behind the rest of the country…
“By helping young, working-age West Virginians get an education, live a healthier life, and by easing the burdens of child care and elder care, Biden’s bill would help put the state on the path to attracting the industries that will allow it to catch up economically with the rest of the nation. If Manchin allows political considerations to prevent that from happening, he’s doing his state a deep disservice.”
Noah Smith, Bloomberg
“The Build Back Better plan is broadly popular with the American public, Data for Progress reports. Certain provisions, like the budget’s investment in home care, are even more popular than the overall plan, evidence that voters want something more robust than a highway bill. The popularity of the president’s agenda strikes down a key claim put forward, often by moderate Democrats and their defenders: that they’re limited by what their red-state voters want. It’s obvious that Manchin and Sinema are doing what they want to do, not what their voters want.”
Sarah Jones, New York Magazine
Some argue, “Manchin says $1.5 trillion. Sanders says $3.5. So split the difference… It’s absurd to pretend that a bill that expands government spending by $3.5 trillion over 10 years can’t be trimmed. It’s absurd even to call such trims ‘cuts.’…
“Nobody—or rather, nobody except congressional Republicans, who’ve removed themselves from this conversation—proposes to cut existing spending on childcare or health care or the environment. Nobody proposes even to cut routine annual growth in such spending. The argument is about not how to shrink the pie but rather how much bigger to make it…
“I’m not saying it’s a pleasant task… But a $2.5 billion reconciliation bill would still be a triumph for the Biden administration. It would bestow free community college; free preschool; more generous Pell grants; a Medicaid bailout for red states that their legislatures don’t deserve (but their poor folks do); significant financial incentives to eliminate power plants’ reliance on coal; more rigorous worker protections from labor-law violations; and many, many other blessings.”
Timothy Noah, New Republic
“Manchin represents a state that has very few wealthy people and disproportionately high poverty. He has the chance to design a social-policy agenda that would permanently transform the social safety net and give his constituents a chance at a middle-class life they never had. He ought to be taking the opportunity to advocate the broadest possible bill… But if he finds the taxes on the wealthy too much to bear, he can start by building a plan around a generous, permanent, and universal monthly child tax credit. That would not fulfill liberal ambitions, not by a long shot. But it would be a real legacy.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
