Biden Administration, Speaker Pelosi Have Their Hands Full With $3.5 Trillion Budget Resolution
Photo by The White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
August is shaping up to be a long month for the Biden Administration, and September might not be any easier with the brewing battle over the $3.5 trillion budget resolution.
From Punchbowl News:
Next week is a pivotal moment for President Joe Biden’s domestic agenda as the House prepares to vote on a $3.5 trillion budget resolution. Passing that measure — which passed the Senate on party line 50-49 vote Aug. 11 — will allow Democratic congressional leaders to start assembling a massive reconciliation bill this fall that includes big chunks of Biden’s American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan (some pro-Democratic groups are calling this the “American Jobs and Families Plan” now). Combined with the $1 trillion Senate bipartisan infrastructure bill, this would be an enormous legislative win for Biden and the Democrats, one that the president and party bosses hope saves their embattled Hill majorities in 2022.
The problem is that right now, there aren’t enough Democratic votes to pass the budget resolution. A serious split has emerged between House Democratic moderates and progressives on these proposals, one that threatens to imperil passage of both measures. See our interview with Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) below for more on this.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t backing down on her plan to bring the bipartisan infrastructure bill up for a vote only after the Senate passes the reconciliation bill, which will be sometime this fall. Moderates are demanding a vote on the infrastructure bill now, asserting they won’t vote for the budget resolution until infrastructure passes. They’re in a showdown now.
Pelosi doesn’t want to hear it. She is planning to bring up the rule for the budget resolution early next week. She has offered to have that rule spell out the floor debate for both measures as a concession to moderates. Moderates haven’t been moved by this offer.
Basically, Pelosi is daring moderates to vote against the budget resolution, and the rest of the House Democratic leadership is with her.
“It is essential that we show results,” Pelosi told other House Democratic leaders during a call on Monday night, according to a source familiar with the discussions “This is no time for amateur hour.” Pelosi is clearly trying to isolate Gottheimer and his crew and lay the blame at their feet.
Pelosi added: “For the first time America’s children have leverage. I will not surrender that leverage.”
Hat tip to our friend Heather Caygle of Politico, who tweeted about these Pelosi comments last night.
Yet with this intraparty battle brewing, the president and top White House officials are currently overwhelmed by the Afghanistan crisis.
That’s not surprising, considering the gravity of what’s transpiring in Kabul and throughout Afghanistan. But for Biden and his senior staff, the timing of this foreign policy disaster couldn’t occur at a worse time.
The White House already faces huge challenges as Covid surges across the country, and the migrant crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border continues to grow. Now throw in the Afghanistan debacle, as well as a potentially protracted battle on Capitol Hill over Biden’s agenda, the debt limit, government funding and what’s going to happen to the party in next year’s midterms. Biden’s August just keeps getting longer.
It has been standard operating procedure in congress for some time to legislate against deadlines — like the current August recess and the upcoming debt ceiling — to force votes through and corral disparate votes and get things passed. The theory is you stack up tough legislation and the leadership has various pressures both real and imagine to leverage their folks into line for the votes you want. In the same vein, the habit of lawmakers to put controversial bits of legislation inside gotta-have-it legislation has become the go-to move. The problem with that plan is when there are thin margins in the House, like there are right now, it doesn’t take very many voices to blow the whole thing up. Speaker Pelosi has the smallest majority she has ever had to work with in either of her stints with the gavel, and heading into a midterm election year plenty of folks are wondering if she will be sitting behind President Biden for the 2023 State of The Union. Chief among them are some of the more moderate and vulnerable members of her caucus who also wonder whether they will be in the audience for that 2023 SOTU.
While the Biden Administration has taken tremendous criticism for the currently ongoing Afghanistan evacuation, it is doubtful that would translate into domestic political trouble for the president as long as American personnel get out without bloodshed as we all hope. But a foreign policy embarrassment that leads into a potentially sputtering domestic agenda would make for a very rough fall indeed for the White House heading into an election year.
I think this is the one where they break her. Basically, they’ll say, “We’ll rubber stamp the Senate’s infrastructure bill in order to get that ‘in the bank’. But we won’t rubber stamp the Senate’s budget resolution, and we certainly won’t rubber stamp the budget bill. So rather than watching the months crawl by, and you have to negotiate with Manchin and Sinema, and we’re all only one oldster dying away from the whole budget thing collapsing, we insist on banking the infrastructure bill first.”Report
Could be. It’s a tough thing but the clique that’s arguing this is primarily trying to get the SALT deductions back on the table for their wealthy constituents which isn’t exactly a strong position to go to the mat over. The Senate votes are already banked, they can’t unvote for the infrastructure bill. Also the left wing is threatening to tank the infrastructure bill if Pelosi brings it up first. Still, I am not going to bet against the Speaker, she’s pulled it out before.Report
In light of the recent events in Afghanistan, President Biden should withdraw consideration of the reconciliation bill. It’s the one thing President Biden and the Demos can do to show that they are really grokking the scope of the Demo debacle in Afghanistan. It would certainly get the libs attention, in and out of Congress.
That, and we’re going to have to do some savvy diplomatic work to contain the negative fallout wrt our relationships with allies. Taiwan, in particular will need reassurances and military equipment to prevent the Chinese from invading. Joe Biden is ahead of schedule if he can keep one coherent thought in his head at a time. More than one is beyond hope.Report
I think that this is a great opportunity for Biden to push for Full Marijuana Legalization.Report
That’d be a good idea but isn’t it currently dead in the Senate?Report
I was just saying that because of recent events, I think Biden should do the thing that I’ve been arguing we should do since the early 90’s.Report
I think it would be prudent to ban stock-buybacks in solidarity with Afghan citizens who can’t buy stock at all while trying to get through checkpoints…Report
I only got it after I hit post. I are embarrassed.Report
Hee! Yeah they could give conservatives a pony too.
I somehow suspect that the Dems will push on with their domestic agenda- as they were elected to do.Report
Yeah, libs (or others for that matter) might think the connection between Afghanistan and the reconciliation bill is too tenuous to matter. But I don’t think so.
First and most obvious, the particular nature of this debacle is a consequence of the incompetence and lack of capacity of this particular Demo President.
Second, the optics, messaging and such. In objective terms, the cataclysmic failure of Demo foreign policy in terms of American national interest and human rights dwarfs any considerations about messaging. But in subjective terms, messaging matters a lot. And the messaging here is typical of many other failures of American political culture.
There is a horrible negative symbiosis between mainstream lib information conveyors and mainstream lib information consumers. The consumers desperately want reassurances of an odd kind against the American Right. They want to believe that, pertaining to policy issues, that intellectually speaking they are in the right, relative to typical mainstream conservatives. They also want to believe that conservatives are immoral in various ways, and that conservatives are or ought to be politically weak.
Furthermore, the demand for such information, or misinformation, doesn’t go down just because such things aren’t true. In fact, it goes up. Libs demand to be lied to.
This week in Afghanistan is a unique event, in that it is so dramatic that the usual damage control probably isn’t going to work. And it’s probably losing it’s practical value. We’re taking over anyway. What’s the point of the Baghdad Bob act?Report
First and most obvious, this debacle is primarily a consequence of the deceit and lies of the military and intelligence services which have been blowing smoke up the posteriors of successive administrations for 20 years. Presumably they presented their worst case prediction to Biden to try and dissuade him from taking away the sandbox they were playing in. It’s ironic that they turned out to be wildly, ludicrously optimistic about what they’d accomplished in Afghanistan even when presenting what they no doubt presumed was an exaggerated worst case scenario.
As for the rest of what you go on about, wow, it’s true every accusation is a confession. It definitely reads more like you’re describing the right which is so insistent on being lied to they even finance an entire separate media ecosystem expressly to lie to them and rip them off.
This week in Afghanistan is a unique event but probably was also an inevitable one. It probably wouldn’t have happened under Trump since, I imagine, the military would have succeeded in distracting him with shiny objects so he’d never have pulled the final trigger on withdrawal. Still it’s too bad it was such a mess- pity it being a mess was basked into the cake the moment the Republicans took us into that wasteland in the first place.
Absent, of course, is any connecting tissue explaining why the mess in Afghanistan would necessitate Biden and his party putting their domestic priorities on hold. Trump and the GOP rammed their deficit fueled giveaway to the plutocrats come what may. The Dems should most assuredly push forward with presenting their alternatives. To do any less would be political malpractice and a betrayal of their voters.Report
Like I wrote before, it looks tenuous for some people but it really ain’t.
Joe Biden can have one thought in his head at a time, at most. Right now, in the middle of the worst foreign policy disaster since 911/Iran hostages/Saigon/Pearl Harbor/whatever, our chief executive is spending his days at Camp David eating ice cream and watching television.
At this time, it is important to focus the attention of our Establishment towards our actual national interest, instead of 1/2/3/whatever trillion dollars worth of random lib grab bag crap.
In fact, in a bank shot way, I actually do expect this to happen. I don’t have any legitimate solid information, but if you asked me last week, I’d venture there would be a reconciliation bill of some sort become law. Now, I’d guess 50%+ probability there won’t be any.Report
Setting aside your baseless stuff about Biden’s capacity (first off he’s succeeding Donald fishin Trump, a man who’s documented idea of a day’s work is sitting and watching Fox news; second: he’s beaten the pants off the GOP so far, what does that say about the right?) the idea that Afghanistan is some towering disaster is both hyperbolic and overdetermined. If there’s some whole sale slaughter of westerners or American soldiers over the course of the ongoing evacuation, I think you could make a case that the withdrawal has become a disaster. Absent that, however, I imagine the electorate will have dismissed it from their minds within a month. As for comparing it to any of the debacles you listed that is laughable as, currently, no Americans have died and no significant strategic or tactical advantage has been lost. Indeed, withdrawal of America from George W’s ruinous big adventure puts America in a better position rather than a worse one. Afghanistan is about to become Russia, China and Iran’s problem, not ours. Good riddance.
The reconciliation bill is certainly going to be an interesting political exercise to watch. I’m surprised you were so bullish on its odds of passing to begin with. I’d have put odds of it passing around fifty to sixty percent well prior to Afghanistan and I think they’re in the same place now. Still, perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic. The GOP, even with their brains rotted out by Trumpism and faux libertarianism, were able to pull together to toss trillions away to their wealthy donors. I certainly think the Dems have better than even odds of pulling together to devote trillions to the masses. It’d be excellent contrast if they do.Report
Basically, the bullish case for reconciliation is there’s a huge variety of possibilities as to what the bill ends up being. Specifically, if Manchin and Sinema are on board, at least theoretically, then the topline number can be bid all the way down to zero, asymptotically speaking, and still be viable. If the final bill ends up being, say $700 billion of random lib appropriations, are the libs really going to vote against it? I don’t think so. Even if it’s smaller than they wanted, it’s still that much more than they had before.
Now, I suspect this is going to be overtaken by the events in Afghanistan. People are going to be looking to take a bite out of Biden’s ass and this looks to be the place to do it.Report
Yeah thing is reconciliation is all Democratic actors and their political fortunes, these days, rise and fall with the fortunes of the overall Party of which Biden is the most visible face. The idea they’d want to take a bite out of Biden is somewhat far fetched but the idea they’d want to do so even at a cost to their own political fortunes is remote.Report
Yeah that’s true for the most part, but it’s also true that that’s been baked into the cake for several months now and they still don’t have the votes, at least not yet.
Now while they were trying to thread that needle, a new thing comes along where the Demos and their senile leader at clearly at blame.
This reconciliation bill, or more accurately a reconciliation bill, may still go through, but my gut says it won’t. I don’t know how, there’s a lot of stuff in the air, but I suspect President Biden’s declining approval ratings will be big factor.Report
This average American couldn’t give a flying fish about Afghanistan. How anyone can consider that backwater to be of vital national interest is beyond me. It’ll be nice to have our government spending some of our hard earned tax dollars on ourselves instead of some Middle Eastern money pit.Report
Jeez I dunno, maybe because there are ~10K Americans who are in imminent danger of death by decapitation from the Taliban due to this particular chapter of Demo incompetence.Report
I dunno man. Polls still seem to be favoring withdrawal by around 10-12 points, and leading up to this week (and the explosion of propaganda) it was favored by something like 30-40 points. So we’ve changed from shockingly obvious slam-dunk politics to still solidly good politics. Of the number of things that could derail the D agenda I strongly doubt this is it.Report
I doubt. There was one poll, I forget which one it was, shows Biden at 46% already and under water. Doesn’t matter really, we’ll all find out soon enough.
Demo misinformation merchants are already desperately hoping to move the news cycle onto something else. I don’t think this will happen soon though, mainly because there are 5-10 thousand American civilians of whatever situation in Afghanistan now. Getting those people out, or watching them get killed by terrorists on television, is going to bring the attention of the American people back to Afghanistan, and the Demo failures instigating the events of the last week.Report
I’d say the only misinformation merchants are those in the neo-imperial blob trying to scapegoat everyone they can for their own lies and incompetence. It’s quite telling that for all the handwringing none of them mention that it’d take at least 100k troops and a bunch of flag covered coffins to get things even close to where they were when Trump started the draw down last year.
Also worth noting is that extracting ourselves from this has been the policy of the last 3 administrations. The American people are fickle and no one wants to watch what’s happening but I don’t see it changing the core lack of appetite for nation building/playing world policeman among the electorate. Anyway, as you say, time will tell.Report
There certainly have been those, but it is a mistake to say those have been the only ones. That just whitewashes the particular mendacity and distortions of the Demo misinformation artists in the service of the witless Demo President.
The idea that the Administration’s hands were tied by what they inherited from President Trump, that there was no alternative other than remaining in Afghanistan for another 20 years, that as of a week or a month ago, that the withdrawal of America from Afghanistan was going all peachy, these things weren’t just not true, they were obviously absurd to anyone paying any attention at all. Yet the Demo misinformation establishment is still trying to sell them to us.
I predict there won’t be a lot of customers for that.
It is especially blameworthy that the Administration obscures some important considerations which illustrate the horrifying level of President Biden’s obliviousness. Eg, that there hasn’t been a single American KIA in Afghanistan for a year and a half or so and very few in the years before that. That the President is ordering airborne divisions into Afghanistan now and as soon as they get there there will be more American troops in Afghanistan now than there was when Trump left office. That the American footprint in Afghanistan will be much bigger now to rescue Americans and Afghan friendlies than it was before. That it’s perfectly plausible to secure military aircraft and high-technology equipment away from terrorists, etc etc.
It’s important to emphasize the particular Demo failures of this debacle instead of indulging “both sides do it” faux evenhandednessReport
I would be willing to bet actual money that in the western states today — about 22% of the US population overall — there is a largely prevailing attitude of “F*ck Afghanistan. Show us how you’re going to fix the fire and water problems.”Report
And if Biden does, they will not care about Afghanistan.Report
Relatedly, Pelosi is in deep sh*t if her strategy on the infrastructure and budget bills is, “There’s more money for fire next season… but not this season.”Report
Because of the recent events in Afghanistan, all triggered by Trump’s cozying up to the Taliban, I think a third Trump impeachment is in order.Report
Adam Silverman over at Balloon Juice has a good piece up showing the surrender agreement negotiated by MIke Pompeo and Donald Trump, where America agreed to withdraw all their forces and free 5000 Taliban prisoners.
https://www.balloon-juice.com/2021/08/18/in-case-anyone-was-wondering-why-the-taliban-actually-were-able-to-retake-afghanistan-so-easily-it-is-because-the-trump-administration-agreed-the-us-would-unconditionally-surrender-to-them/
Throughout the document it repeatedly refers to the “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan which is not recognized by the United States and is known as the Taliban”. Not as catchy as the Artist Formerly Known As Prince, but works anyway.
As we now know, the moment the ink was on the surrender agreement, the Afghanistan politicians and military leaders began cutting their own surrender agreements, so the fix was in as long as a year ago.Report
They’re going to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, aren’t they?Report
A reconciliation bid this huge is far from a sure thing. Frankly it’s a damn hard thing, especially considering the makeup of the Senate. Then again I’d have guessed there was no way in hell they’d have a Senate approval with 19 Republican votes on a substantive infrastructure bill in hand. So, already, Pelosi, Reid and Biden have exceeded expectations.
Also Bernie has crafted a pretty wily opening bid; the old bugger seems to have a pretty good head for politics considering his answer to every political question was “First we’ll have a political revolution…” Anyhow, the opening number is eyepopping but a number of things I’ve read suggest the number is partially so large so there’s plenty for the moderates to chop off to “compromise” down to the actual number Bernie is after.
It’s still going to be a challenge. They have to basically get every Democrat in the House and the Senate to sign off on it in lock step. That’s why holding the bipartisan infrastructure bill in reserve to be passed in the House afterwards is so important- it’ll keep the centrists from being able to bolt.
It is a complicated political dance- way more ambitious and complicated than the ACA was and they had a Senate supermajority for that move. Then again a lot of illusions and norms have been vanquished since then too.
Can they pull it off? Reconciliation and the Infrastructure bill? I don’t know. I’d say even odds but bump it up to 60% based on Pelosi and Bidens performance so far.
Snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? What would that look like. I suppose it’d be reconciliation failing and the liberal wing burning the infrastructure bill in a fit of pique. That feels extremely unlikely to me. Obviously rhetoric is hot as heck right now but do I honestly think that, at the end of the day, the liberal caucus would actually vote the infrastructure bill down? I don’t. Something would have to be royally fished up for them to do that. Bear in mind that even if I’m right they’ll absolutely signal the opposite right until the last minute. This is a game of chicken with the centrist wing. Both sides are going to talk tough as all get out.Report
I think they’ll do it. They all want something to run on. My suspicion is that the rhetoric is just so everyone can get their soundbites in for their respective constituencies.Report
I tend to agree.Report
Well, and they have to do some optics cuts for Manchin, Sinema, and a few others so they can prance about showing their independence.
But given who drafted this, I suspect that stuff was added solely for a handful of Dems to complain about and get cut.Report
Looks like House Dems found some party discipline after all:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/08/24/politics/house-democrats-budget-resolution/index.htmlReport