Ok… I’ve made some threads about this type of thing before, and got good feedback that progressives should take what they can get, and I think most of them in congress did just that. I responded to this in another thread:
My question is, how are the progressives getting equal blame? It’s been compromise after compromise with with them on this bill.
Didn’t they promise to pass both bills at the same time? Doesn’t the first bill flip the infrastructure cost on us?
I blame* Democrats as a party, weakest link in the chain and all that jazz. I don’t see how one can place all the blame on the progressive wing.
~Max
* If they fail to deliver on promises to themselves and the public. Democratic infighting does not affect how wrong things are on the Republican side, or the faults of the electorate which elected them.
I would primarily blame leadership, and I think there are long-range and short-range causes of what’s going on. My biases are way towards the progressive side, and I could see how someone who was more moderate than me (and who has a higher opinion of our political system in general) would blame them for what’s going on although I don’t.
The way our system works basically invites a ton of hardball negotiation tactics. Both the house and the senate have to agree before a bill gets sent to the president and they each have their own procedures. So if you can get the other chamber to pass something first you get to twist it around to your liking and make them compromise down to meet you. Of course if both chambers act with free reign to do this in perpetuity, nothing would ever get done.
You also have the fact that “the squad” is a new animal for the Democrats to contend with. In the past the left wing of the party tended to play nice with leadership in two ways: They tended not to primary senior Democrats in safe seats (which is very important because the leadership figures in a FPTP system need to be stashed in the safe, heavy blue or red seats), and in congress (esp. the House) they wouldn’t put up fights on major legislation once the chips were down.
The infrastructure/build back better fight is a fight where the progressives early on said this would be different from the past and they were going to be willing to defy leadership when the chips were down. They said early on that they were going to hold up the bipartisan infrastructure bill to make sure they got their priorities in reconciliation. Now this is the kind of hardball negotiation tactic I’m talking about and I think you could argue that “they started it”.
We basically now know from that point that leadership gave conflicting messages to both sides. They backed the two-track approach, but at the same time Schumer privately worked out some kind of arrangement with Manchin that gave him the green light to delay reconciliation negotiations and hold out with his demands on the price tag and everything else and Pelosi agreed with House moderates that the bipartisan bill would get through the house before October. Once it came time to pay the piper, both the moderates and the progressives held to what they thought they’d been promised. I think the way congressional leadership handled this basically led both wings of the party to dig in their heels because they’re now fighting for things that they’ve been given the green light to fight for.
I think that leadership has a combination of issues here: I think they didn’t take the progressives seriously and thought that in September/October they would fold like they have in the past. The other thing is that with progressives being willing to primary people like Schumer leadership doesn’t want to be seen stamping out a progressive revolt - they’d rather have the progressives come around first. I also think that once you allow anyone to use delaying tactics, everyone is going to use them. Once two sides are already willing to use hardball tactics, folding to a stalling game is just asking the other side to do that every time in the future.
Leadership clearly doesn’t want to do this, but they needed to set an agenda earlier rather than have the most extreme ends of the party fight it out. And Biden needed to both get involved a lot earlier and spend more time working things out with congress. Without the president getting involved there’s effectively no reason for people to avoid running out the clock, and even now that he has got involved without much of a policy vision we’re seeing a mad dash to renegotiate nearly the entire bill.
What bill?
The Senate passed the infrastructure bill 69-30.
There are enough Republicans in the House who would vote for it, that it would most assuredly pass. It’s the progressives who are digging in their heels and refusing to vote for it.
There was a thread on this recently, and I have to say I changed my mind on who is ultimately to blame. Basically, from what was said in the other thread, progressives and moderates had previously agreed on the rough outline of both bills (infrastructure and social spending bill), but that moderates (and now I think it’s just one moderate) who got cold feet. I had seen them as separate things, so it seems to me at the time that it was progressives that were holding up the infrastructure bill so they could pressure moderates into voting on the social spending bill, but that turned out to be untrue. At this point, it doesn’t seem that progressives are to blame for holding things up, but instead it’s one moderate who either got cold feet or is using his leverage as the final, necessary vote to attempt to change the second bill to their liking…or, it’s a combination of the two.
At any rate, that’s what I got out of the other thread. I have to admit, US politics repels me to the extent that I hardly follow what’s going on in my own country anymore.
Two moderate Democratic Senators, really: Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
It’s easy, if simplistic, to express frustration and anger at the progressive Democrats, but very little is actually on them. If we’d been able to elect 52 or 53 Dems (and independents of course) Manchin and Sinema could carry on however much they liked, and the Dems would have passed the legislation ages ago. But we elected the barest majority possible, so these two can hold up the show and there’s nothing to done about it other than to gut the bills as they dictate. It’s a hell of a lot better than having McConnell as majority leader.
Personally, I think McConnell’s unstated strategy has been to drag his heels in the hope that one Dem will die, resign, switch parties, and he’ll be all-powerful again overnight.
I don’t understand the progressive opposition to passing the bipartisan bill without the reconciliation bill. They could have given Biden an easy win on the bipartisan bill and then work on the larger bill The voters would have seen something positive being done and been a little more patient.
I blame the progressives for not taking the easy win on the bipartisan bill and I blame the two knucklehead “moderates” in the Senate for being bad faith negotiators in the reconciliation bill.
I’m going to disagree here. If one wing of the part wants A, B, C, D, and E and one only wants A and B, there are really two possible outcomes: you end up with A and B, or you end up with A, B, and C, and possibly D. For the first wing to get the preferred second outcome, they have to exert some leverage and at least make it look like they’re willing to give up A and B if the second wing doesn’t give a little on the other three. That’s what we’re seeing now.
If it’s put up for a vote and it fails for lack of progressive support, then I’ll blame the progressives. If it’s not put on the floor for a vote, I’ll blame the leadership.
This endless strategic maneuvering is getting nowhere. Let’s have a vote and see what happens.
I have really mixed feelings, despite what I said in the other thread to @XT.
On the one hand, there’s a negotiation tactic that I really dislike as a tactic. If we both want pizza for dinner, but you want to get ice cream for dessert and I want to get cake, IMO we should go ahead and get the pizza and then negotiate on dessert. Compromise should start by finding as much stuff as possible to agree on, and then work on the areas of disagreement.
But this is a general principle. As another principle, I really dislike it when progressives give up negotiating tactics that the other side keeps, because it means progressives act like The Good Place and give up everything.
As long as the “no pizza until we agree on dessert” strategy is a core strategy used by moderates and conservatives, I can’t really object too strongly to progressives also using it. And boy howdy does the other side use it.
We had the progressives let the perfect be the enemy of the good thread, and I think that’s what happened. It’s as if someone who is hungry rejected an offer for McDonalds (being offered by Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema), Outback (being offered by mainstream Democrats) and insisting on the bone in tomahawk ribeye from Ruth’s Chris with “compromise” meaning that they’re willing to settle for the New York strip from Ruth’s Chris. Unfortunately by rejecting McDonalds and Outback, by default that means they decided on none of the above because the money for Ruth’s Chris just wasn’t there.
That’s pretty much my take on it.
Yes, Manchin and Simena are pissing me off, royally. I think they should want these bills to pass. I really wish they felt differently.
But they are not voting for these bills because they disagree with them and don’t want the stuff in them to pass. As frustrating as this is, it’s a different kind of frustrating than the frustration I have with the people that agree with everything in these bills and want the initiatives contained in them to happen, yet are refusing to vote for them because they want more.
This thread started because I said in another thread that the progressives and blue dogs have combined to prevent any bill from passing and @MyFootsZZZ wanted to know why I gave equal blame. The last couple posts here pretty much explain what I meant. I don’t know if they deserve equal blame but the progressives presumably are certainly not opposed to the weak bill, but won’t vote for it. The blue dogs are actually opposed to the strong bill and won’t vote for that. Who is more to blame? They both are is my answer. And I read the results of the election two days ago as saying that the people blame the Democratic party. Incidentally, Bernie Sanders really knows how to be a constructive progressive. Needless to add that I have nothing but contempt for the House Republicans who won’t support the bill their senate confreres allowed to pass.
I largely blame leadership as @DeadTreasSecretaries mentions. Quibbling over the details misses the key point–it is the job of Democratic leadership to get their party lined up for their bills in the legislature, leadership clearly thought they could rush the bills through and be done by September or early October at the latest, without having resolved many of the core issues between the moderates and the progressives.
Leadership, including Biden, set the party up to get egg on its face an eat a “public failure” hit, because they set public expectations of passing the legislation by a certain date when they simply were not actually in agreement on the legislation. Far more horse trading and deal making needed to have occurred behind closed doors before expectations were ever set with hard confirmed “Deadline Dates”, which every time they are missed makes people trust Democratic governance less. Better leadership avoids a lot of the trouble here–it likely doesn’t avoid the reality that it was just going to take time and a lot of horse trading to get this legislation passed.
I don’t blame progressives or moderate line members–they are doing their jobs, they are representing their constituencies and advocating their interests.
It would be nice if the D’s showed a unified front. Would make for a very good image going forward. I would credit that to the leadership.
But then again that seems to go against their modus operandi of being the party of open debate and such. But then why would leadership dream of asking their own rank and file to vote on the single most important bill of the year with less than 72 hours to review hundreds of pages of final language? (unless I misread politics columns earlier this week)
~Max
Because if the bipartisan bill is passed first, there will be no reconciliation bill. Ever.
One bill is a simple vote away from becoming law. The other is almost certainly going to be gutted in the senate, if it even makes it out alive. The argument that if we can’t have one then we’ll deny everyone the other is childish and vindictive.
The problem isn’t that we’re disagreeing about what to have for dessert, it’s that one side doesn’t want dessert at all, and would be perfectly happy to just have the pizza. The only way to get any dessert at all (even if we have to settle for just ice cream) is to hold the pizza hostage.
Of course, the real solution is to stop taking these people out to dinner, and find someone else to take to dinner.
So, as a pragmatic matter, I think the Dems need to pass what they can, and then do their damndest to replace Manchin and Sinema with people who actually want some kind of dessert (and maybe even want cake). So long as the Dems are stuck with both a razor thin margin and these two assholes, they won’t get anything done.