It’s weird how all 4 are figleafs for republican power consolidation. Never works the other way.
I don’t see how the WH bungled negotiations with Manchin, what with all their efforts to appease / “meet him halfway” or whatever - the senator wouldn’t budge, plain and simple. He failed them.
If the White House expected a deal to be made “halfway” they woefully misunderstood the relative degree of bargaining power. It appears that Manchin was prepared to support a $1.75 trillion bill without an expanded child tax credit. That would have been a huge legislative win which they should have taken.
That’s probably what he was saying, but if they agreed to that, he just would have backed off from that.
It’s funny that the child tax credit was the deal breaker for him (if, indeed, it was) – I wonder where WV would show up in the list of states that benefit from that. Top ten? Top five?
[quote=“RitterSport, post:84, topic:953643, full:true”]
That’s probably what he was saying, but if they agreed to that, he just would have backed off from that.[/quote]
And you know this how?
Manchin has been quite open about his red lines. The White House seems to have thought they could ignore them and somehow pressure him into giving in and it backfired spectacularly. They will probably get another shot to salvage a deal and hopefully they will approach it with greater intelligence.
Manchin has put in a poor showing with the WH with his red lines being: baseless concerns about the BBB bill subsidizing electric cars for only the ultra-rich families; ditching fossil fuels too quickly that in turn will screw up the international supply chain; scaling back climate spending for the coal-bastard that he is (and which dems have accommodated for him on, in the past, anyway*), and quite reprensible rejection of expanded child tax credit. These are demerits that the WH was trying to talk him out of, not ignore, and the fact that the WH wasn’t able to make him come to his senses is entirely on Manchin’s toxic intractibility, and nothing at all to do with any percieved shortcomings on the WH’s part.
* damn - still trying to find out what the original allotment for climate spending was when it was orignally a $3.5 trillion bill. I believe climate spending’s been whittled down a measly $600 billion or so billion now.
The “measly” 600 billion dollar in climate funding would probably be the single biggest climate investment in world history. To give that and other important stuff up because you can’t also get the child tax credit which won’t happen anyway isn’t good strategy. I can only assume it was a negotiating tactic though there seems some real bad blood between the White House and Manchin and it’s not clear how seriously they will be able to re-negotiate now.
IIRC the dollar figure didn’t go down that much, but big programs like the Clean Energy Performance Program that were more comprehensive and had carrots and sticks were replaced with a patchwork of subsidies.