Why Republicans Shouldn’t Back Away from Infrastructure Negotiations
The Democrats have control of the White House and both chambers of Congress. But somehow, they’ve managed to put Republicans in a no-lose situation on infrastructure. It looks like the Republicans have bent over backward to get a deal done while the democrats have waffled and triangulated themselves into showing voters that they were the ones acting in bad faith.
What comes next is complicated.
On the one hand, Republicans could walk away and leave the Democrats to go it alone. The public wouldn’t fault them for doing so as the Democrats have shown themselves to be untrustworthy negotiation partners. And large parts of the unthinking base would support them just for owning the libs sake. I would venture that even Joe Manchin wouldn’t hold it against them after seeing how far they’ve gone to compromise only to have the rug pulled out from under them repeatedly.
But that strategy isn’t without downside risks. The chief political end of the bipartisan bill for Republicans has always been to take the popular, commonsense infrastructure proposals off the table so that what’s left in the Democrat’s go-it-alone bill is just the controversial bits. That creates a scenario where red-state Democrats like Manchin and Sinema but also John Tester and Maggie Hassan can support the bipartisan bill and oppose the reconciliation bill while saying they got important infrastructure priorities done and stood up to their own party on reckless, unrelated spending. A message that should play well in Montana, New Hampshire, Arizona, and West Virginia.
If Republicans walk away, those Democrats are put in the position of negotiating with the Left flank of the Democratic Party to get the physical infrastructure spending they believe is needed. In other words, rather than the moderate Democrats negotiating with Republicans to bring spending up, they’ll be negotiating with far-left Democrats to keep spending down. If you’re a fiscal conservative, one of those scenarios is manifoldly preferable to the other.