Winter of discontent
Joe Manchin kills the Build Back Better Act, Joe Biden’s ambitious legislative package
Bits of it may live on, but Mr Biden ends the year with coal in his stocking
IT WAS A case of overpromising and not delivering at all. President Joe Biden and Democratic leaders in Congress vowed to pass the Build Back Better Act (BBB), the administration’s long-stalled signature legislation, by Christmas. Instead they spent December scrambling to salvage it from complete collapse. On December 19th, Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat from West Virginia and the crucial holdout vote, announced on television that after months of negotiation, “I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation… I’ve tried everything humanly possible; I can’t get there.” Whether this is a death knell for the president’s legislative agenda or just a serious setback is still to be litigated. But it is hardly the Christmas present Mr Biden wanted.
From the start, Mr Manchin has been clear about his litany of objections to BBB, a social-policy-cum-climate-change-cum-housing-cum-health-care bill that resisted easy summarising. The initial headline spending figure of $3.5trn over the next decade was too much for him. House Democrats trimmed the bill to $1.7trn before passing it in November (with little indication it would fare well in the Senate). The heart of the climate-change agenda, a tax that would have penalised insufficiently clean electricity producers, had already been ripped out at the request of Mr Manchin, who thought it too harsh on the coal industry (a crucial employer in his home state). His objections to the generosity of the paid family-leave programme and the availability of expanded child tax credits to non-working adults would probably have been rewarded with edits, too.
Before Mr Manchin pulled the plug, though, a new series of worries began to dog him. To keep the headline costs down but avoid making hard choices about which programmes to cut, Democrats had made liberal use of “sunset clauses”, in which funding for ambitious new initiatives such as universal preschool and child-care subsidies would expire in only six years. Mr Manchin feared that these would inevitably turn into permanent programmes, increasing the federal debt and accelerating inflation. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan economic modelling agency, estimated that if BBB’s temporary provisions were all made permanent, the national debt would climb by an additional $3trn. “They continue to camouflage the real cost of the intent behind this bill,” he said in a written statement released shortly after his television interview.
Mr Manchin’s announcement is a striking rebuke of Mr Biden’s legislative strategy. The opening bid for his omnibus legislation was maximalist—stuffed with the entirety of his campaign agenda, initially including, among other things, immigration reform. It was the progressive bill envisioned when Democrats were dreaming of a crushing defeat of Donald Trump and something close to a supermajority in the Senate. Instead, they won a relatively narrow presidential victory and control the Senate with the narrowest majority possible, giving veto power to conservative Democrats such as Mr Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Letting this bill be slowly whittled down over time had two consequences. It gave the public the overwhelming impression of legislative failure, overshadowing the administration’s accomplishment in passing a bipartisan infrastructure bill. And it enraged the progressive faction of the party (who were cajoled into passing the infrastructure bill on the guarantee of passage of BBB), from whom the recriminations have already begun. Having dreamt of Mr Biden as a latter-day Franklin Roosevelt, progressives have been slow to adjust to reality. Bernie Sanders, a leftist senator from Vermont, implied that Mr Manchin was siding with the fossil-fuel industry over the voters in his own state.
The White House will have little incentive to admit defeat. Instead, it may try to do yet another wholesale rewrite of BBB, jettisoning its current framework, in the hopes of saving face. Antagonising or demonising Mr Manchin would prove only momentarily cathartic. His vote will be needed on any legislation to come; and the president’s dismal approval ratings augur a loss of the Democratic Party’s congressional majority after the midterm elections in November 2022. Yet the White House’s immediate statement seemed intent on berating Mr Manchin into submission, citing a “breach of his commitments to the president and the senator’s colleagues.” Jen Psaki, the press secretary, also said Mr Manchin would have to explain to families why he did not lower the costs of their insulin and child-care and why he did not help more children out of poverty.
If something much humbler cannot be fashioned that still retains the moniker of BBB, parts of it may be parcelled off into other pieces of legislation. Democrats could try to extend the expanded child-tax credits passed as part of the president’s stimulus package, which seem to have dented child poverty significantly, in a standalone piece of legislation. Portions of the package that earlier seemed likely to pass without much notice—such as negotiating prescription-drug prices paid by the government—may now suffer in the limelight. The present climate-change provisions, still the most ambitious that America would have ever passed, are likely to endure another watering down.
For Mr Biden, this is the latest blow in a miserable streak of months. The Afghanistan-withdrawal debacle, the no-longer-ignorable surge in inflation, and the resurgent pandemic have all taken their toll on an administration that has lost its verve. Waiting in the wings is a Republican Party that has endured no reformation since a significant portion of it violently tried to overturn a democratic election. A catchphrase of Mr Biden’s campaign for the presidency was that he was trying to return Congress to normalcy and to restore “the soul of America”. Nearly one year into his administration, neither seems to have been accomplished.