WASHINGTON — Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., flashed a warning sign this week about President Joe Biden’s” infrastructure aspirations, renewing his pleas for fellow Democrats not to ram through a massive spending bill without first trying to negotiate with Republicans who plotted the president’s plans.
In a divided Washington, the odds that such a deal would materialize are slim—at least for a sprawling budget package of up to $4 trillion, as Manchin favors, a pivotal swing vote in the Senate, and government officials. Nevertheless, Manchin’s appeals for bipartisanship were less an insurmountable challenge for Democrats than a roadmap for Biden if he needs the tiny congressional majorities of his party to give him another economic-policy win.
It means reaching out to Republicans to discuss potential areas of compromise while setting the groundwork to guide them if no such agreement materializes.
Senior Democrats in Congress are considering a budget tactic that would allow the infrastructure bill to pass easily with just Democratic votes. Both seek to increase pressure on Republicans to compromise—and, if not, give Manchin and other moderate Democrats whose backing Biden needs the political cover to support an all-Democratic agenda.
“I’ll carry Republicans to the White House,” Biden said Wednesday. “I’m inviting them. We’ll have good-faith talks. And any Republican who wants this done, I welcome. “
A moment later, he encouraged Republicans to “listen to your constituents,” claiming that voters across America backed Biden’s scaled infrastructure spending—not many Republicans’ scaled-back versions floated.
The comments represented a major caveat in Biden’s willingness to compromise that Republicans warn they could scuttle any deal: the president wants to be the one setting the terms of how big the issues are, and if the options offered are appropriate.
His team works behind the scenes to smooth the ground for bipartisan work. Administrative officials are considering dividing sections of Biden’s economic agenda into smaller pieces that could draw 10 or more Republican votes each, beginning with a supply-chain-focused bill and rivalry with China that the Senate is due to take up next week. They debated postponing Biden’s planned corporate tax increases, which Republicans oppose if they would have Republicans on board with a spending bill. And they made funding spending by any means appropriate to a critical mass of Republicans, including borrowing, as long as they did not increase taxes on those making less than $400,000 a year.
Negotiations appear at first glance as a slower-moving repeat of the cross-party dance that delivered this year’s nearly $1.9 trillion economic aid package. Biden made a big proposal. Republicans outnumbered Democrats by one-third. White House officials dismissed them as frivolous, Senate Democrats sided with the president, and every Republican vote in opposition was cast in favor of the bill.
This version will take longer, partly because Manchin and other moderate Democrats want that. In interviews and an influential op-ed piece this week, Manchin, who may be the fifty-fifth vote Democrats need to push a bill through the budget reconciliation mechanism, blacked out his message: first, try bipartisanship.
“Senate Democrats must resist the temptation on critical national issues to leave our Republican colleagues,” Manchin wrote in Thursday’s Washington Post. “Republicans, however, have a duty to avoid saying no and engage in finding genuine agreement with Democrats.”
Privately, many Democrats and Republicans believe there is little hope that legislators will deliver a bill as ambitious as Manchin wants while attracting at least ten Republican votes in the Senate. Liberals and conservatives are trillions of dollars apart in their greed about how much to invest and what to spend on—and nowhere near each other as to how or not to pay for one.
Some Republicans are calling for a bill that is a third of Biden’s initial infrastructure package, echoing their stance in the stimulus bill debate, while opposing Biden’s proposed corporate tax increases. At the same time, democratic Democrats are challenging the White House to go bigger, and a whittled-down proposal designed to gain Republican backing is unlikely to help.
Congressional Democrats believe the resistance of Republicans to spending on the order Biden—and even Manchin—calls for, combined with popular opposition to most tax increases, leaves no hope of common ground.
“They won’t pay for it,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md. “The sooner everybody knows that Republicans won’t help these measures, the better. But I’m OK with people trying for a while, as long as the clock doesn’t run out. “
Republican senators, singing their experience on the pandemic aid bill, replied to Biden’s bipartisan gestures by releasing a cold statement saying that the last time he made a public appeal to working together, “the administration roundly rejected our efforts as completely insufficient to explain its go-it-alone policy.”
In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., pushed the administration to negotiate an infrastructure measure that would represent around 30% of the proposed $2.25 trillion before turning to budget reconciliation for any further spending increases.
“My advice to the White House was, take that bipartisan win, do it in a more conventional form of infrastructure, and if you want to force the rest of the package on Republicans in Congress and the country, you can definitely do that,” Blunt said.
Importantly, Republicans have little interest in corporate tax increases that would effectively reverse their most notable Trump-era legislative accomplishment. Neither do business associations, which in the past helped broker some bipartisan agreements on economic issues but lost some influence as nationalist impulses swept both parties.
Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky, the minority leader, called the tax plan “an attempt to rewrite the 2017 tax bill,” approved by budget reconciliation without Democratic votes.
The Trump tax law “was mainly responsible for the fact that we had the best 50-year economy in February 2020,” McConnell said. “But they’ll tear it down.”
Nevertheless, business lobbyists and some lawmakers remain optimistic that Manchin’s appeal could provoke Biden and congressional leaders into an infrastructure mini-compromises. Such deals could include large spending on R & D for new industries, such as advanced batteries, in the supply chain bill, which bears bipartisan support in the Senate. They could also include investing a couple hundred billion dollars on highways and other surface projects. That could fulfill at least some of Manchin’s quest for bipartisanship, and allow both parties to assert victory.
Some Democrats are concerned that such compromises will sap momentum for the rest of Biden’s agenda, which includes upcoming educational, childcare, and other initiatives. Others argue the opposite: some deals will give voters momentum to Biden and his party and fuel a big spending bill, financed by tax increases, later this year with only Democratic votes.
Manchin | Don’t forget to follow us on Twitter @njtimesofficial. To get latest updates
