Infrastructure Folly
There’s a lot of stuff in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that I don’t love. And there’s almost nothing in the Democrat’s go-it-alone “human infrastructure” reconciliation proposal that I think worthwhile. As one would expect in anno domini 2021, the latter has elicited wails from the right-of-center media that can only be described as banshee-adjacent in their complete irrationality.
I criticized Biden when he suggested that his signing the bipartisan bill was contingent on passage of the reconciliation package. Republicans had negotiated the compromise in good faith. What Biden did was change the terms of the deal after it had already been agreed to. Republicans were right to balk at the show of bad faith and it nearly blew up the deal altogether.
Republicans knew that the Democrats would try and pass the parts that were left out of the bill via reconciliation but they never agreed to be pawns in Biden’s negotiation with the left flank of his party. The whole point of the compromise was to pass what everyone could agree on and leave the Democrats to go it alone on the rest. Biden’s transgression wasn’t in supporting the reconciliation proposal, it was in betraying that understanding.
The Republican response to Democrats trying to jam through “human infrastructure” should be simple: “good luck!”
There’s nothing inherently illegitimate about taking the measurers that didn’t make it through the negotiations and trying to pass them by reconciliation. Elections have consequences and the Democrats won the election. (If you’re looking for someone to blame for that, I suggest beginning your search in South Florida.) Even though they hold only the slimmest possible majority, they are still entitled to pursue their agenda.
The fact that the provisions didn’t make it into the compromise plan means that the margin of support for them is slim and that lock-step support from senate Democrats isn’t guaranteed. And Republicans are well within their rights to oppose the proposal by whatever means they choose. Including prevailing on Manchin and Sinema with all the suasion they can muster.
But retroactively making their support for the compromise bill contingent on the failure of the reconciliation proposal would be the same kind of bad-faith, post hoc negotiating for which they rightly castigated Biden.
Politics ain’t beanbag. You win some fights and you lose some fights. But we ought to endeavor to fight fair.