Pardon me for stating the obvious: We’ve been down this road before. The Build Back Better plan is teetering above an abyss, looking down upon two unappetizing outcomes. The first is that the onetime $3.5 trillion experiment in social democracy will devolve into merely whatever Sen. Joe Manchin (D,-W.Va.) and running mate Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) want it to be; the second is that it will come to nothing at all and be flushed down the legislative commode like so many other lost liberal dreams.
Since the Democrats have staked everything in 2022 on passing something —they can’t just say, “We’ve accomplished nothing; vote for us anyway — it’s likely the former will be the case. That’s little to cheer about after years of setting forth an ambitious, precedent-setting agenda. Manchin and Sinema have done their worst, and it shows. Build Back Better is emerging from Joe Biden’s treasured “negotiations” an empty shell of its former self. Call it Build Back a Little Bit. Negotiations, a pointless exercise under the present circumstances, have become an end in themselves, a nostalgic reminder to the president of how things used to work in another, more cooperative and cordial time.
The preeminent Washington Democrats, Biden, Schumer and Pelosi, continue to believe they’re still living in that time. As the saying goes, Democrats have shown up for a gun fight carrying pen knives; they think they are engaged in a restrained exchange of views, whereas the other side knows it’s at war.
The special problem for Democrats is that the other side includes members of their own party, not just Republicans. Manchin and Sinema are not progressives; they’re barely Democrats — DINOs in the current phraseology. Manchin is a flat-out conservative, a representative of his state’s corporate energy interests, who remains Democratic on paper from some combination of emotional reflex, personal history and political convenience. His key to success has been to conflate the interests of Republican coal-mine owners and natural-gas producers with those of erstwhile Democratic union members, persuading the latter their welfare and that of their bosses are identical and he represents both.
For her part, Sinema, who represents only herself, is essentially an independent centrist in keeping with Arizona’s evolving purplish political makeup (composed one-third each of Democrats, Republicans and independents), but someone with distinct pro-corporate leanings. In addition, she, more so than Manchin (who does have certain firm beliefs), is a rank opportunist who places career, image and ego ahead of all other considerations. Her evident calculation is that independents will reward her “bipartisan” stance, while Democrats, having nowhere else to go, will grumble and stay on board.
The conundrum for Democrats is that it’s déjà vu all over again. Desperate to be a big-tent party in order to control government, they constantly tolerate and seek to accommodate outliers who don’t share the dominant party philosophy or positions. This means, in turn, that Democrats rarely produce clean, consistent legislation, but rather an endless succession of wretched compromises.
The classic example, of course, is the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, a piece of handiwork that pleases no one. In this case, the culprits, going back to 2010, were party conservatives Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), who killed the ACA’s proposed public option. This flaw was supposed to be rectified; 11 years later, we’re still waiting.
To date, Manchin and Sinema are surpassing their predecessors. As things stand, the Build Back Better legislation stumbling toward the finish line resembles for the most part a reduced child-care act encompassing subsidized daycare and temporarily extended child tax credits (both means-tested), and pre-kindergarten provisions (universally applied).
Most everything else of consequence has been eliminated, or scaled back considerably like the overall safety-net program itself, which was first reduced from the $6 trillion in spending over 10 years initially envisioned by Bernie Sanders and the progressives to the $3.5 trillion endorsed by the Biden administration and now, in the latest talks, to the $1.75 trillion presumed acceptable to budget grinches Manchin and Sinema. Senate Budget Chairman Sanders must be wondering at this point why he agreed to be front man for the amazing disappearing Democratic program.
As of this writing, gone are any Medicare expansions (except hearing benefits), including coverage for eyeglasses and dentistry, and a lowering of the eligibility age to 60; a public option for Obamacare; paid family leave; free community college; a Climate Corps, a clean-energy grants program to expand renewables and curb greenhouse gases; and mandatory Medicare-pharmaceutical industry negotiations to reduce drug prices for seniors
This last policy fiasco will leave Americans paying 250% more on average for prescription drugs than citizens of other economically advanced countries, according to the RAND Corporation.
Worst of all, the latest press reports suggest that the Biden administration has totally caved in on revoking the unpopular 2017 Trump tax cuts and withdrawn plans to eliminate Big Oil’s multiple tax breaks as a disincentive to fossil-fuel use. Kyrsten Sinema, the main force behind the surrender on revenues, is totally opposed to raising broad-based individual and corporate taxes, even on the virtually untaxed 1%.
Instead, the shrunken spending reconciliation bill will apparently be paid for with selective nickel-and-dime assessments, such as a small income-tax surcharge on double-digit multimillion-dollar incomes and a minimum tax on corporate profits. Sinema, more anti-tax than famously tax-phobic Joe Manchin, has emerged as a one-woman wrecking crew, throwing the entire Democratic program into chaos and making her party a public joke heading into 2022.
In a way, this development should have been seen coming. Joe Biden, along with Schumer and Pelosi, is part of an ineffectual leadership team unwilling to use sanctions against recalcitrant centrists, but willing to compromise everything. If not for Bernie Sanders’ constant prodding, they wouldn’t be as far along legislatively as they are. The president, who appears to believe he’s back in the 1980s, leads only by entreaty, suggestion and indirection. Lyndon Johnson would have had Kyrsten Sinema hanging upside down in a Senate cloakroom by now.
Postscript: A last-minute deal did improve the picture somewhat in terms of drug-price negotiations, concerning which Sinema was the major obstacle. The Arizona flip-flopper finally agreed to allow Medicare to negotiate the cost of a small handful of outrageously expensive specialty drugs and to cap (at $2,000) annual out-of-pocket expenses for seniors facing potentially catastrophic bills.
Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2021
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