To grossly over-simplify: the earth is going to be a smoking hellscape because Joe Manchin has a problem with the child tax credit provisions of BBB. So why not break out the global warming parts into a stand-alone bill? And do the same for all the other components?
If nothing else, this would get the Republicans on record for their opposition for each aspect.
Manchin can’t support BBB because 74 percent of the people in his state oppose it, and he wants to keep his job. Whether there is something a bit progressive he would support under another name, well, yes, a 15 percent minimum billionaire’s tax.
I must be missing something. Isn’t Sinema just as much a no vote as Manchin?
Because losing over and over would hurt the Democrats a bit.
I don’t think there was time, nor would this be allowed for a reconciliation bill. I think only one reconciliation bill can be passed each year, so multiple bills wouldn’t have worked.
One assumes that there were parts of the bill that Manchin was open to or even glowingly favorable towards. If not for those, they never would have had anything to haggle over to begin with.
It’s almost certain that you could take just the things that Manchin supports and pass those. Quite likely, you’d get a supermajority of the Senate to back it, a la the Infrastructure Bill. (Though, maybe not - see last paragraph.)
You can say that we’re not getting any of it because of Manchin. You could also say that we’re not getting any of it because of the progressives.
If you’re hearing most of the blame fall on the Manchin, it’s because you’re hanging around among liberals. But, the real way to look at it is that political leaning should - by nature - fall on a bell curve. Each party is made of two smaller skew curves that fit under that one, under the two tails, making up probably about 2/3rds of the population.
The third in the smaller bell on the left are angry. No one else is. 2/3rds are just fine or actively happy with Manchin. That’s a 2:1 ratio of support vs opposition to Joe Manchin.
Not only that, the people in the two smaller bells are both crazy. These are the people who will vote for Donald Trump and Edwin Edwards and complain that the other side is all corrupt and dishonest, and swear up and down with clear blue eyes that they’d never hire a disreputable crook to lead them.
Manchin may well be a corrupt bastard who works for Big Oil. I couldn’t say one way or the other. I’m not going to endorse the guy or claim him as part of my team. That would be crazy and I ain’t part of that crowd. Maybe if I lived in his district, I’d try to get a more solid answer on that one. But I strongly suspect that if you went with Manchin’s version of every bill for the next few years, the US would become a better place and get some basic, meat and potatoes, fundamental work done, and stories like that the Senate can’t function in a bipartisan manner, and that it’s impossible to pass anything without a filibuster would both take a hard hit. …Or, at least, that’s what Manchin and Sinema both seem to be driving for.
The crazies need that story to continue more than they want to pass the good parts of this package. You’re not getting anything good because if cooperation and compromise prove to be useful and good, then the crazies will lose 200 years of devoted work convincing you that you need to get more involved, enraged, and partisan. For their power, and ability to get into office and hold office - when 2/3rds of the government is opposed to them - that illusion is far more important than doing the good work.
The shared enemy of the crazies on both sides is the reasonable man, who just wants to do the good work. Gerrymandering and all other political machinations work mostly against the reasonable citizen, not against the other team.
Technically, they can pass up to three reconciliation bills per fiscal year – one on taxes, one on spending and one on debt. So theoretically they could pass the child tax credit and any other tax components in one bill, and the spending components together in another. But no, there’s no reason why this would make either easier to pass.
Possible, but not almost certain.
Manchin’s red lines are not quite the same as Kyrsten Sinema’s. Compared to Manchin, Sinema is less willing to consider tax increases on the rich, and more willing to spend on climate…
Besides – being seen as having gone along with Biden’s basic agenda is politically quite risky for either one. Manchin doesn’t want that look because it would cause his currently favorable approval ratings, in West Virginia polling, to tank. Sinema doesn’t want the loyal Democrat look because she wants to be able to win re-election, as a centrist, after losing, or not running in, a Democratic primary.
Build Back Better is going to pass–but only after they have chopped it down in size.
OP, one big issue in splitting it is the Senate filibuster. Because of the Senate filibuster you need 60 votes to pass legislation (an exception being the reconciliation bill).
Right now the feeling among progressives is that splitting off infrastructure was a mistake–because Manchin wanted infrastructure so he would have had to vote for Build Back America social and climate programs to get infrastructure passed.
That’s what they are saying, but he would not have had to do that. Look at West Virginia polling. That’s why he’s unwilling to be seen as endorsing the bulk of Biden’s agenda. There is no extortion, by progressive Democrats, that could change it.
As for Sinema, look at this web page with her priorities:
Not one word there has to be changed if she declares herself an independent, or even a Republican, tomorrow.
Reality is that there is no effective mechanism, to enforce party loyalty, once a Democrat is reliant on Republican votes.
As I understand it, congress people will vote for a bill that has things they like, and give in the things they don’t like in order to get the things they like.
If Sinema thinks she is going to win re-election as either an independent or a Republican in the current hyper-partisan environment she is huffing glue. I can see how Manchin’s choices could be based on reasonable political calculations, but Sinema’s just seem suicidal to me. Arizona is not West Virginia. She’s pretty much guaranteed to face a serious primary challenge, which will weaken her for the general even if she wins.
USAToday opinion piece by Jill Lawrence, who was all in favor of massive do-everything Democratic bills like Build Back Better, but has now decided that a slower incremental approach (some might say a slippery slope?) might be more palatable:
She gives examples of other social legislation and other examples of large programs that were created incrementally:
(ETA: Article may be paywalled, maybe if you’ve already ready your quota of free articles? My Safari browser, which I run with JavaScript disabled, opened it.)
To grossly over-simplify: that’s what happened with the bipartisan infrastructure bill. So say the Democrats leadership picked their top 3 out of the BBB bill - perhaps universal preschool, increased support for elderly care, and lower prescription drug costs; each of those 3 was budgeted for 10 years, and there was an additional revenue component to offset the spending. Manchin and Simena would vote for a narrow bill like that and even some moderate Republicans might join in. But would the progressive wing of the Democratic party be willing to accept a limited spending bill? They’re not quite all-or-nothing, but they seem to be most-of-what-we-want-or-nothing. So the reason why the OP’s idea won’t work isn’t the Republicans, it’s the internal Democratic Party politics.
But suppose the Democratic Party disfunction could be worked around, and the idea from the OP was tried out. The White House’s BBB framework has 22 broad policy items that they’d like enacted. The Build Back Better Framework | The White House
Could they pass each or any of those items as individual acts? I think the problem is that the Republicans would see an opportunity to humiliate the Biden administration by causing every bill to fail. I don’t think the US public would weigh each piece of legislation on its merits, and evaluate their Congressmen’s votes based on their support of each individual bill. Instead, they’d see a failure to enact the large numbers of legislative as White House incompetence, and punish the Democratic Party in the 2022 elections for that incompetence.
Here’s what I would do. I understand that a large part of the bill consists of earmarks. Take out every project for Arizona and West Virginia and offer them to Maine and Alaska in return for their votes. Play hardball.
To my knowledge, BBB contains no earmarks.
As the Democrats have (re)learned, the Senate parliamentarian has a great deal of power over reconciliation bills. The Republicans went through the same painful process over Trump’s tax cuts. This article is a bit old, but it illustrates the process.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/03/politics/immigration-build-back-better-parliamentarian/index.html
The poster is assuming Manchin was and is negotiating in good faith, as people who go live on Fox News to say they cannot support the bill usually do.
The bill will require bipartisan support. Biden will have to make it more acceptable to some Republicans. I do not know the mechanics of this apart from spending less. Obviously Biden already had to pare down a much larger bill which contained a lot of stuff unacceptable to somebody.
Infrastructure bills are generally popular with both parties. This one should be too.
Dressing up in costumes, playing silly games
Hiding out in tree-tops, shouting out rude names.
The Senate Parliamentarian is only as powerful as the Senate allows her to be. She can only advise the Presiding Officer regarding whether a motion or provision is compliant with reconciliation rules – the Presiding Officer can (and has at times in the past) rule contrary to her advice. And a ruling by the Presiding Officer in line with the Parliamentarian’s advice could be overturned by a simple majority of the Senate.
I’m confused as to which bill you are talking about. I thought maybe this was a much earlier post, but it seems just from last week. The infrastructure bill has already passed with bipartisan support (IIRC, Biden signed it in mid-November). Build Back Better phase…well, 2 I guess…the Reconciliation bill… is what’s on the table now and it’s not an infrastructure bill (it does have some ‘human’ infrastructure stuff in it), but one aimed at a bunch of other things (jobs, families, CO2 mitigation and green energy initiatives, healthcare, environmental justice, and 'equitable economic opportunity, etc). So, yeah, this one is going to be tough to get Republicans on board with it even if they cut the costs, as most of this just isn’t stuff they would be that interested in doing…unlike the infrastructure bill which was something both sides could at least nominally agree on.
The terminology is confusing since originally it was consolidated. I am using the term infrastructure loosely - I realize the senate passed a basic portion but consider Build Back Better to contain several things affecting infrastructure even if it has a smaller focus than the first tranche. Remember, jobs have always been the driving force behind infrastructure bills, and green energy is also deeply tied into how energy is needed and used.
Still, I accept your point I could have been clearer.
No worries, just making sure we are talking about the same thing. 
It kind of gets to what the OP is asking, though, as they DID break this thing up into multiple parts. Perhaps they should have chunked it out even more, though I’m not sure how they would further parse it to get through the things the various parties feel are the critically important pieces.