Joe Manchin Is Really Dealing in Some Stunning Bafflegab Here
WASHINGTON—Things were rocketing right along on Thursday, at least in a relative sense, given the chewy cluster of fck that the past two weeks have been. The Senate and the House managed to cobble together a continuing resolution to keep the government from shutting down at midnight Thursday night. And there was continued, but nervous, speculation about the fate of the two infrastructure bills and who was going to torpedo which bill. Then, a little after 11 a.m., Politico’s inexhaustible congressional correspondent Burgess Everett got a scoop that scattered everything like dandelion frill in a hurricane.
Joe Manchin proposed a deal to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer this summer to limit the total cost of Democrats' sweeping spending bill to $1.5 trillion, according to a copy of the agreement obtained by POLITICO. Manchin also suggested beginning debate no earlier than Oct. 1. The West Virginia senator has been distributing the document to Democratic colleagues and leaders in recent days to underscore that he has outlined his red lines on President Joe Biden’s jobs and families plan. The one-page understanding is dated July 28, right before the Senate passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill that Manchin helped write and ahead of Senate passage of a budget setting up a spending bill as large as $3.5 trillion.
In the document, Manchin proposes raising the corporate tax rate to 25 percent, the top tax rate on income to 39.6 percent, raising the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent and says that any revenue from the bill “exceeding” $1.5 trillion will go to deficit reduction.
The reaction was instant and seismic. It shook Manchin away from his carefully barbered reluctance to name a figure on the Democratic reconciliation bill that he could live with, because we learned that he’d named it back in July. At a hastily gathered—and pleasantly unruly—news availability outside on the Capitol steps, Manchin explained himself in such a way as to guarantee he will not be on the Sanders family Christmas card list this year. Even if he and his people were responsible for pitching the story around, Manchin was plainly unnerved and unprepared for the impact of the revelation.
I brought the 1.5 was done from my heart what we can do and not jeopardize our economy. We have a lot of good things we can do. I’m willing to sit down with that $1.5 (trillion) and get our priorities in order and they can come back and do later. They can run on it later. There are a lot of ways to get to where they want to, but just not everything at one time…My top line has always been $1.5 (trillion) because I believe in my heart that what we can do, and the needs we have right now, and what we can afford to do without basically changing our whole society to an entitlement mentality.
No two bills should ever be linked so that the perfect is the enemy of the good. [Ed. Note: You know what else is the enemy of the good? The inadequate. We continue.] At the time of this agreement, I wasn’t in favor of this kind of bill at all. I wasn’t trying to be a fly in the ointment. I’ve never been a liberal in any way shape of the form. There’s no one even thought I was. I guess for them to get theirs, elect more liberals.
Scrambly syntax aside, Manchin is really dealing in some stunning bafflegab here. First of all, the progressives already cut their original ask in half, from $7 trillion to $3.5 trillion, and they did it without knowing that Manchin was cutting his own deal with the Senate Majority Leader. Second, if Manchin is looking for an election decided on the proposals and issues in the proposed $3.5 trillion package, he only has to leaf through all the issue papers produced by the Biden campaign from 2019 and 2020.
For their part, the reaction of the high-profile progressives in the House of Representatives was strategically muted. Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said only that she would still be willing to talk to Manchin. But there were more than a few of them with some hot anger just below the surface, and not just about the reduced price tag, but also because of a feeling that they’d been sandbagged. From The Hill:
“It will be changed,” Durbin said, adding of the $1.5 trillion figure: “I don’t know where that came from.” Other Democrats, while leaving the door open to negotiations, warned Thursday that they view scaling down their sweeping ambitions to fit under Manchin's price tag as a non-starter. “I think it’s problematic,” said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). “We’ll see where it goes.”
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) added, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) argued that Manchin’s position is where he’s been for months — Manchin said publicly in June that he could support something between $1 trillion and $2 trillion — but predicted it won’t be where Democrats end up.
As of end of business Thursday, business hadn’t ended. Speaker Nancy Pelosi still hoped to have a vote on the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill late Thursday night. The reconciliation bill was completely up in the air, although there was a feeling that the progressives might be willing to accept as a victory a reconciliation bill of any amount.
“We’ve obviously been having conversations about what priorities have to be invested in, and the level of investment that these priorities need,’” said Rep. Ilhan Omar. “For us, this conversation about individual numbers is not something we like to entertain, because we want to have investments in people’s lives and those investments will be in policies that serve people’s lives. And that’s where that conversations are.
“When we put this strategy forward, we knew we had the numbers to hold. We are still very much there. I have not lost a single person. I don’t see how this proceeds.”
Congress after hours awaits.
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