Joe Biden’s presidency is in full-scale collapse. Whether it’s his crashing approval ratings, the vaccine mandate going down in flames, or the kibosh being put on the Build Back Better agenda, the last several weeks have not been kind.
During Biden’s recent presser, he was asked about his litany of failures and what the next step would be. That led him to introduce a “plan B” in which he’d break up his agenda into “chunks” and pass them that way.
“I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now and come back and fight for the rest later,” Biden told reporters.
“There’s two really big components that I feel strongly about that I’m not sure I can get in the package. One is the child care tax credit and the other is help for the cost of community colleges.”
To start, that’s not how reconciliation works. The bites at the apple are limited, which is something Nancy Pelosi pointed out — though she didn’t name the president for obvious reasons. Democrats can’t break Build Back Better up into six or seven smaller bills and pass them one by one unless they have Republican support, and there’s no scenario where that’s forthcoming in an election year.
Biden was the one who said yesterday they’d divide it up
“I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now, come back and fight for the rest later,” https://t.co/IPLnNLD24A— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) January 20, 2022
But if the logistics of Biden’s proposal weren’t unworkable enough, Joe Manchin came flying in off the top rope and immediately shut down the idea. By doing this, he made it even more complicated by declaring that his earlier proposal, which was a compromise between progressives and Manchin, wasn’t even possible.
That “worst week ever” is quickly turning into the “worst month ever.”
I just caught up with Manchin who has set an extremely high standard for passing the ‘chunks’ of Build Back better plan.
He simply wants to see the first issues of inflation, covid, as well as national debt, addressed.
He also stated that they would be “starting from scratch” and that the December offer was not on the table.
— Manu Raju (@mkraju) January 20, 2022
What stuck out to me here was that Manchin’s demands before he’ll deal with Build Back Better are unattainable, at least prior to the 2022 election. It is unlikely that the White House will be able to fix inflation in this year’s election. COVID and the nation’s debt will continue to plague us. It will be a problem we will have to solve for generations. And that’s assuming any politicians even take up the task, something most have been loathe to do.
You’ve probably picked up on where I’m going with this by now — Manchin is clearly running out the clock at this point. He is aware that Republicans control both the House of Representatives and the Senate by the end of next year. He just keeps throwing up more obstacles every time Democrats give in to his demands. It’s too obvious to ignore that he keeps pulling the rug out from under his own party.
Democrats would gladly take his compromise package at this point, but he’s pulled it off the table completely. Clearly, if Manchin wanted to pass something, there’d be a deal by now. He knows that what’s in his best for him is for nothing to get done.
These are the consequences of Democrats publicly trashing Manchin & Kyrsten Sinema over the past several months. Some went as far to accuse them if racism. Manchin might give them some money in an alternate universe where both the White House et the progressive flacks are civil. However, he doesn’t feel the need to now. Not electorally.
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