Lincoln Mitchell, who teaches in the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, writes at CNN, Manchin and Sinema are hurting their party more than any Republican ever could:
After a failed, all-day scramble to get the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill passed on Thursday, President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda is in jeopardy for the moment. Not so much because of the unavoidable strong Republican opposition but because of a few congressional Democrats who refuse to support the legislation unless it is adjusted to their precise liking. Now, it’s been reported that there is a new $2.1 trillion compromise being floated around in Washington, but the division is so clear that the new figure may not be enough to get the needed votes.
In some respects, this may seem like a normal part of the legislative process, but it is no longer that simple.
Democrat Senators from West Virginia and Arizona, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have balked at the $3.5 trillion social infrastructure bill that would combat climate change and expand the child tax credit and Medicare’s coverage, among other provisions. They assert that it is too much money. Manchin has recently indicated he would like to see the price tag cut at least in half to something closer to $1.5 trillion. This may sound like an attempt at a good faith negotiation, but it is something else. Manchin said he informed President Biden about his number and added he’s “never been a liberal in any way, shape or form.”
However, the best opportunity to shape this package came months ago when Senate leadership and the White House agreed on the $3.5 trillion figure, down from the $6 trillion initially proposed by the Biden administration. The bill was pared down over opposition from the Democratic Party’s left flank. During that process, the Democratic leadership was very respectful of the concerns of the party’s more conservative members.
Even if Manchin and Sinema’s concerns are taken at face value, part of being a competent legislator is recognizing when the compromise has been made and it is time to support it. Similarly, being in a political party means sometimes doing what is best for the party even if you do not entirely agree — and this is one of those times. After all, in this case many progressive Democrats have agreed to support a budget bill that is about half of what was originally proposed. Manchin and Sinema want to reopen the negotiations to pry more concessions out of the left — and appear to be threatening significant damage to their party if they are not allowed to do that.
In Washington, once the President and the leaders of his party in both houses support something, members should get behind it if the vote is close. This does not mean that there cannot be more negotiations, but the party should pass the proposal.
[T]he Democratic Party leadership agrees, the deal was cut between Biden and the legislative leaders and the compromises were made, now the votes need to be there. Biden, Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi are all essentially in the center of the Democratic Party and therefore are consistently pressured by the party’s progressive and conservative flanks. This is natural and probably healthy, but it also underscores the extent to which anything that they can all agree upon reflects a broad consensus within the party.
Failure to pass this legislation will damage an already vulnerable President Biden and deprive the Democratic Party of a major accomplishment it can present to the voters in both the 2022 and 2024 elections. In other words, any Democrat who does not support this deal, protestations about fiscal responsibility or pressing the pause button notwithstanding, is playing directly into GOP hands.
At this point in the process, the questions are no longer about compromise, what Manchin and Sinema need to support the bill or abstract concerns about fiscal prudence. Now the question for Manchin and Sinema is whether they want to be with Biden and Schumer or with McConnell and Trump. That language is stark, but walking away from a deal that Democratic leadership has already made when they agreed on the $3.5 trillion number will hand the GOP a big victory that will badly weaken the Democrats in Congress while also making Biden’s path to reelection more difficult.
The United States does not have a parliamentary system where legislative leaders wield enormous power and can discipline members who go astray. Similarly, individual members of Congress are generally political entrepreneurs with their own donor bases, political views and relationships to constituencies. This is certainly true of Manchin and Sinema.
However, Washington needs some party cohesion to function. At this moment, with the leadership of the Democratic Party strongly behind a battery of legislation that is absolutely central to the President’s agenda, as well as in their eyes the future of the country, any legislator who claims to be a Democrat must put personal concerns aside and support the bill. Manchin and Sinema may enjoy the attention they have been receiving recently, but if they don’t go along with the leadership now they will have done more to bring down Biden and the Democratic majority in Congress than Sen. McConnell and Rep. Kevin McCarthy ever could.
It is a time for choosing. Whose side are these Democratic divas on?
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Politico describes the evil machinations of Manchin, the coal baron who wants to keep receiving federal subsidies for coal. “Manchin proposed $1.5T top-line number to Schumer this summer”, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/09/30/manchin-proposed-15t-topline-number-to-schumer-this-summer-514803
(excerpt)
[A]s chair of the Senate Energy Committee, the coal state Democrat asks that his panel have sole jurisdiction over any clean energy standard and requests “innovation not elimination” of energy sources. He’s also demanding support for technologies that capture emissions from power plants and store them underground, known as carbon capture and sequestration.
Further, he wants assurances that fossil fuel subsidies won’t be repealed if tax credits for wind and solar power are included in the bill and asks that if tax credits are extended to electric vehicles, they also include hydrogen-powered vehicles.
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So Manchin is willing to let life on this planet perish from climate change because he and his son get their wealth from federal coal subsidies. This is NOT the kind of individual who should be chairing the Senate Energy Committee.
Paul Waldman explains it to our Troll Boy. “What if everything we [the media] think about centrists and ideologues is wrong?”, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/10/01/what-if-everything-we-think-about-centrists-ideologues-is-wrong/
The savvy [sic] journalist’s view of politics is based in part on the assumption that ideologues are problematic — they’re inflexible, they’re impractical, they care more about purity than that most noble of objectives, Getting Things Done.
Centrists and moderates, on the other hand, supposedly understand the real world and are willing to work with others to solve problems. Which is why, for instance, a bipartisan group of House centrists named themselves the Problem Solvers Caucus.
But what if all those ideas are backward? What if it’s the ideologues who are able to get things done, and it’s the centrists who stand in the way of solving problems while they knuckle under to special interests who don’t have the welfare of the country at heart?
The current Democratic attempt to pass President Biden’s agenda is demonstrating just that.
First, we have a basic imbalance: Progressives in the House and Senate are eager, even desperate, to see the infrastructure bill and Build Back Better social policy bill pass Congress. As people with strong beliefs about policy, they’re highly motivated to make progress, even partial progress, on issues they care about.
And even when all their demands aren’t met — the final reconciliation bill will likely be less than half the size of what they hoped for — they’ll still vote for it. Joe Biden wasn’t their preferred candidate in 2020, but they worked tirelessly to get him elected, and now they’re laboring to pass his agenda.
The centrists, on the other hand, might want to see the bills pass, but for them, failure is an option. They’re much less likely to have run for Congress because they were passionate about policy issues and social problems (not that ideologues don’t have ambition; every politician does). But if the end result is that the whole thing goes down in flames, they’ll be able to live with that.
That’s because from where centrists sit, the status quo is not so bad. Yes, there are things to be concerned about and problems to be solved, but it’s nothing that gets their blood boiling.
That’s why progressives haven’t been able to get the centrists, especially Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), to say specifically what they want the Build Back Better bill to contain and what they won’t accept, which makes negotiation awfully difficult.
That general lack of urgency about addressing issues may be one reason that the Problem Solvers Caucus, which was formed in 2017, can’t say it has actually solved any problems. On their website, these lawmakers tout a few areas of agreement among themselves, but they haven’t managed to use their alleged problem-solving prowess to push any legislation to passage.
Which brings us to another characteristic of centrists that they don’t share with ideologues: They’re much more susceptible to influence by special interests, whose primary goal is often to keep change from happening.
While a lack of ideological rigidity is often portrayed as a virtue, it’s also just the kind of open-mindedness corporate lobbyists are looking for. Those lobbyists don’t need Sinema to be deeply, passionately devoted to, say, the idea that pharmaceutical companies should be free to charge Medicare whatever prices they like. They don’t need Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) to sincerely believe there is no higher calling than making tax laws friendly to his private equity donors. It’s precisely because the centrists don’t have strong beliefs that they can be influenced.
[In] theory, you can envision a moderate ideologue, someone whose beliefs are close to the center of our current ideological spectrum and who works with fierce determination to put those beliefs into action. But the current Democratic centrists are not that. They’re marked by their absence of firm policy beliefs, other than the conviction that whatever liberals want, it’s too much.
And the more serious the country’s challenges are, the more we need legislators for whom the status quo is unacceptable, who actually care about whether bills pass and progress is made on urgent problems.
Obviously, if your side is out of power, the other party’s status quo centrists are your friends, because they’re likely to stand in the way of changes you don’t like. But either way, the idea that the centrists are the ones who get things done is plainly wrong. And never more so than right now.
To answer the question posed in the heading of this post, Sinema and Manchin are representing the people who elected them, which by the way includes the Democrats in their respective states who voted in the primary to make them Democrat candidates for US senate. It should also be noted, that neither of them campaigned as progressives. And in the case of Manchin, he made it quite clear that he was not a liberal.
Sinema and Manchin should be applauded for being true to the promises they made to the voters. Isn’t that democratic with a capital and small D?
Actually, Sinema is taking a position directly opposite of what she ran campaign ads on in 2018 for Medicare to negotiate drug prices to lower the cost of prescription drugs. Now she is “Pharma Girl,” taking Big Pharma’s money and blocking this highly popular proposal with everyone across the political spectrum. Joe Manchin is blocking the climate change remediation and clean energy proposals because he and his son are coal barons. So they are both self-interested politicians in it for the money, which is why Troll Boy is defending Democratic politicians -it’s something to which you relate.
Sinema seems to have emerged from her bubble of silence to gaslight the American people.
https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/02/sinema-vote-delay-democrats-statement-514965
Sinema slams Democratic leadership on infrastructure vote delay
In a statement, the Arizona Democrat warned that delaying the vote only reduced trust within the party
By MARIANNE LEVINE
10/02/2021 02:14 PM EDT
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema skewered Democratic leadership on Saturday for delaying a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package, calling the decision “inexcusable” and “deeply disappointing.”
In a statement, the Arizona Democrat warned that delaying the vote only reduced trust within the party.
“Democratic leaders have made conflicting promises that could not all be kept — and have, at times, pretended that differences of opinion within our party did not exist, even when those disagreements were repeatedly made clear directly and publicly,” Sinema said.
Sinema and Manchin have both made clear that they do not support Democrats’ $3.5 trillion top line for the social spending package, prompting Biden to tell House Democrats during a visit to the Hill Friday that the price tag would likely range from $1.9 trillion and $2.3 trillion. Biden also told the caucus that the infrastructure package wouldn’t go through without the social spending bill.
“What Americans have seen instead is an ineffective stunt to gain leverage over a separate proposal,” Sinema said. “I do not trade my vote for political favors — I vote based only on what is best for my state and the country. I have never, and would never, agree to any bargain that would hold one piece of legislation hostage to another.”
Awww, Princess has a pouty because Democrats did not pay the ransom she demanded for her hostage taking of the Biden agenda. Somebody needs a time out.