WASHINGTON, Nov. 9 (BUS) – Rarely are congressional leaders asked to do so much, and so little, as they are in turning President Joe Biden’s grand domestic vision into law.
Getting to Roosevelt-style accomplishments with ever-smaller Democratic majorities was politically messy at best, daunting at worst, and on the verge of becoming even more difficult for a president and his party.
After fresh approval of Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure bill, Democrats are reviving his largest $1.75 trillion package to expand health, child and elderly care and climate change programs. Eager to show voters the outcome of last week’s dismal election results, party leaders in Congress will try to push the massive bill away from the powerful Republican opposition into an ambitious, albeit fraught, project that transcends almost anything else in recent American history, The Associated Press (AP) reports .
“There is no good precedent for what Democrats are trying to do, and I wouldn’t really be surprised to see them fail,” said Francis Lee, co-chair of Princeton University’s Department of Politics.
I can’t think of anything similar. I mean, I can think of some big bills, but nothing that big.”
Not only is the package gigantic—even at half its original $3.5 trillion size—Biden’s 2,135-page proposal consists of so many far-reaching policies and programs that even lawmakers who support the framework have struggled to explain it all. .
Democrats are trying to pass the big Biden bill on their own, relying on their fragile control of Congress to bypass opposition in ways that Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson and other contemporary presidents have not had to contend with.
Congress hasn’t been this narrowly divided in 20 years, with a Democratic margin of just a few seats in the House and a rare 50-50 Senate. This led to the emergence of new centers of political power. Progressives, centrists, and even a single senator’s center of power — Joe Manchin of West Virginia or Kirsten Sinema of Arizona — wield significant influence to dictate the terms of the deal and the vote schedule.
While Friday night’s infrastructure bill had Republican support in both the House and earlier in the Senate, a rare bipartisan agreement, that would not be the case moving forward with the “Building Back Better Act” that echoes Biden’s campaign promises. presidential.
The question is: Can I get all these votes? “This is a process,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Saturday as he celebrated the passage of one bill, acknowledging the challenge in the coming days and weeks.
“She didn’t believe we could do any of it. ‘I don’t blame you,'” he told the press as well as the American voters who watched it.
Roosevelt launched his New Deal early in his first term amid the Great Depression, and his landslide election swollen Democrats’ control of Congress to more than 300 members early in his presidency. Johnson’s Great Society bills benefited from a similarly large Democratic majority in Congress. It had nearly 300 Democratic House members in 1965.
And unlike today, the two previous administrations managed to get cross-supported Republicans from the minority party for some aspects of their agenda.
“We no longer have landslides,” said Sarah Bender, a political science professor and congressional expert at George Washington University. “So the demand for the government to step in to do something was a little bit greater than what is here today.”
While even Republican Ronald Reagan got help from Democrats for a balanced budget bill in 1981, inward-looking partisanship today divides the country along geographic, cultural, and political lines, leaving modern administrations to take their approach to action on their own.
Barack Obama turned the Affordable Care Act into a law on partisan votes by much larger margins — at one point the Democrats had 60 senators — which initially allowed his party to weather Republican obstruction. Despite this, the final passage of the bill, which became known as Obamacare, relied on a similar budget compromise process to evade disruption to that used by Biden.
Donald Trump failed to repeal Obama when Republicans controlled Congress in his first year as president, but the party has been working through GOP tax changes with the same budget process for a majority only on a partisan vote at the end of 2017.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is determined to push ahead with just a few votes to spare Biden’s big bill once lawmakers return next Monday.
“We must, as John Lewis said, ‘keep our eyes on the prize,'” Pelosi wrote, citing the late congresswoman and civil rights leader, in a letter late Sunday to her colleagues.
Indeed, the House Democrats have been reluctant to do so, while the progressives have been willing to offer at least a little ground.
The terrain of the Senate is more dangerous. Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is the first party leader in nearly two decades to run a 50-50 split in an entirely different era now that is producing dissidents along the lines of themselves and without cross-voting.
Manchin will almost certainly still exercise his power to try to strip what he doesn’t like, from climate change provisions to a paid family leave program. And in the equally divided chamber, any senator can make demands before the vote. Others will certainly do so.
Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday revived his attack on Biden’s bill as a wave of “reckless tax and spending.” He said Biden was not elected with a mandate for his proposals.
“I don’t think the American people are interested in seeing this go any further,” McConnell said at a station in Kentucky.
If Democrats are able to push Biden’s bill to pass it would be a major achievement, said Lee, a professor of political science at Princeton University. And if they don’t, there will be “a lot of tension and anger” from the party’s base of supporters.
Finally, “people have to realize that what they’re trying to do is really high-level business.”
RAE