Biden Can’t Quite Close the Deal—with His Own Party

On Thursday, before flying off to Rome for a week of international summitry, Joe Biden began the day by telling his closest allies on Capitol Hill that nothing less than the fate of his Administration hung in the balance. “I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my Presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week,” he told a closed-door meeting of House Democrats. The White House had just unveiled what it said was a “framework” agreement for a $1.75-trillion budget bill packed with big-ticket social spending on everything from universal pre-K to climate change. It was time, Biden insisted, to vote. Democrats gave him a standing ovation. What was not clear was whether and when they would give him the vote. No matter Biden’s urgency, it seems that Congress still operates under the never-do-today-what-you-can-put-off-until-tomorrow rule.

Many Democrats went ahead and claimed victory anyway, on the basis of Biden’s announcement. Former President Barack Obama put out a statement calling the framework “a giant leap forward.” The Natural Resources Defense Council cheered “historic progress when we need it most.” The White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, sought to reassure progressives upset about the jettisoning of priorities such as paid family leave and lower prescription-drug prices, by touting the bill in a tweet as “twice as big, in real dollars, as the New Deal was.” But it became obvious almost immediately that there was a more immediate challenge for the White House: the deal was not entirely done when Biden had announced it. With his Presidency hanging in the balance, it turned out, Biden had chosen to risk a public unveiling ceremony for an agreement that his party had not yet actually signed on to. Is this what winning looks like in this age of the 50–50 Senate?

For months, Biden has been stuck negotiating with fellow-Democrats over the details of the bill. The negotiations remained so uncertain that, even as Biden headed to the House to make his pitch, the Senate Majority Whip, Dick Durbin, was telling reporters that he wasn’t sure Democratic senators would support the deal because they still didn’t know what was in it. “No, I wish I could say yes, but there’s a great deal of uncertainty within the caucus as to what’s contained in the deal,” Durbin said. Biden, nonetheless, tried to project an air of unrattled confidence in his Build Back Better bill, whose generic name conceals a wealth of possible meanings. “Everybody’s on board,” the President told reporters as he arrived on Capitol Hill. “Today’s a good day.” But as the day ended it was not entirely clear that either statement was accurate.

Biden needed Democratic unity in both chambers not only to support the social-spending bill but to finally allow the House to vote on a nearly trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate earlier this year with the support of nineteen Republicans. The House vote has been held up since then because his party’s progressives refused to proceed with it until they got an agreement on the bigger social-spending package. At the House Democrats’ meeting Thursday morning, Speaker Nancy Pelosi told the caucus that they should take the infrastructure vote that very afternoon rather than “embarrass” Biden by forcing him to show up in Europe empty-handed.

The problem, as it has been for months, is that absolute party unanimity is almost impossible to achieve, and yet that unanimity is necessary for a Democratic President without congressional majorities large enough to enact transformational legislation. Kyrsten Sinema, one of the two Democratic holdouts in the Senate, released a statement soon after Biden’s, praising the “significant progress,” which was not the robust endorsement that the White House had been hoping for. “I look forward to getting this done,” she added. Whatever that means. The statement from Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat and the other Senate holdout, was also less than unequivocal. “This is all in the hands of the House right now,” he said. “I’ve worked in good faith, and I look forward to continuing to work in good faith. And that is all I have to say today.” This, needless to say, did not go over well among House Democrats. Representative Dan Kildee, of Michigan, complained that it was just more “hieroglyphics” from Manchinema—or was that Sinemanchin? Either way, the statements weren’t enough to get progressives to relinquish their hold on the infrastructure bill. One leading progressive, Rashida Tlaib, asked whether she would vote to pass the infrastructure bill, said that she wasn’t just a no, she was a “hell no.” So was much of the rest of the hundred-member-strong Progressive Caucus. By midday Thursday, the framework agreement was looking less and less like an agreement and more and more like a squeeze play to finally get the deal done.

On Thursday afternoon, Pelosi spoke to reporters after the House Rules Committee released the 2,465-page text of the budget bill that progressives had been demanding to see. The Speaker was no longer mentioning a vote before Biden’s plane landed in Rome. “We’re on a path to get this done,” Pelosi said. “We’ll see what consensus emerges from that, but we’re really very much on a path. . . . We’re on a path to get this all done.” Pelosi was then asked whether she trusted the word of Manchin and Sinema enough to move ahead with both bills. “I trust the President of the United States,” Pelosi replied. As she left the press conference, Pelosi was asked one more time: Are you holding an infrastructure vote today? She did not answer.

By next week, this could be just another forgotten congressional dumpster fire. The agonizingly slow negotiations on Biden’s agenda over the last few months are not the first time and will not be the last that the legislative sausage-making process has left legislators feeling, as Representative Debbie Dingell put it, “sick to your stomach.” Biden and Pelosi are betting on some basic principles of politics to help smooth it all over. They are betting that the memories of the enervating process, like a painful childbirth, will fade with time. They are betting that delivering something is better than delivering nothing. And they are betting that the mechanics of passing the legislation are much less significant than the politically popular proposals, such as raising taxes on wealthy corporations and child-care tax credits, contained within the bills. The House progressives quickly put out a statement saying that, while they were balking at having an infrastructure vote on Thursday, they were, in fact, committed to supporting both that bill and the bigger social-spending bill—whenever they do come to the floor. Winning tends to erase the pain of getting there.

But what I keep coming back to is that Biden has struggled so much—and had to put so much of his personal prestige and political capital on the line—for a deal he can’t quite close with his own party. These are Democrats he is negotiating with. No Republicans—or Russians or Chinese, for that matter—were involved in the making of the deal, to the extent that there is a deal. And why, exactly, was it such a heavy lift that it took so long to get to the pretty inevitable top-line number? A month ago, the big breakthrough was the revelation that Manchin was for a $1.5-trillion bill and that Biden and the Democratic leadership wanted to get to approximately two trillion dollars. It did not take a negotiating genius to figure out that they were going to end up at $1.75 trillion. This is what practically broke Washington? You can’t blame that one on Donald Trump.

In 2020, Biden campaigned as a dealmaker—not a Trump, I-could-sell-you-the-Brooklyn-Bridge-type dealmaker, but an actual Washington-insider-who-can-make-this-town-work-again-type dealmaker. This is why the stakes for him now are so high. It’s become a basic test of his ability to deliver.

In a speech from the White House before he left for Europe, Biden made a final appeal that was more or less a plea to his party to pivot—at last—to governing. “No one got everything they wanted, including me,” he said, of the framework, “but that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus, and that’s what I ran on.” It is also, he added, “the only way to get big things done in a democracy.”

Biden, as I write this, is flying on Air Force One to Europe, on only his second trip abroad as President. He faces skeptical Europeans, who are still peeved about the messy American withdrawal from Afghanistan, and skeptical Chinese, with whom he must try to negotiate so that the COP26 climate-change gathering in Glasgow does not result in the abject failure many are predicting. But there is little doubt that Biden’s ability to lead in the world is directly tied to his ability to lead at home. Failure on one front is failure on both. So the question remains: “Are we going to vote and demonstrate that we can govern,” as Representative Elissa Slotkin put it, “or not?”