Biden knows the fate of the spending plan will show the extent of his power – and define his legacy | Joe biden

In the coming weeks, Biden and the Democrats on Capitol Hill will attempt to push the president’s multibillion-dollar economic vision through Congress and into law. With a narrow window of action, they will have almost no margin for error.

If they fail, the party will face voters in 2022 with little to show for two years in congressional control.

If successful, Democrats will secure a pivotal legislative victory, echoing Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

“I think this is a potentially important moment of change,” Biden said last week. “Now is the time for us to get workers back into the economy.“

He spoke a day after House Democrats finished crafting a massive bill they hope they can get through Congress. Pursuing a perilous two-track approach, they tie a $ 1 billion bipartisan infrastructure deal to a $ 3.5 billion party line set that contains Democratic political priorities.

The infrastructure bill was passed by the Senate last month with unusual bipartisan support. Democrats are trying to secure their spending budget with the help of a special process, reconciliation, which will protect it from being blocked by Republicans in the Senate.

Achieving this will require the vote of all Senate Democrats 50-50 and nearly all House Democrats. This gives each member enormous leverage.

Two Democratic senators opposed the size of the social spending plan, which would spend $ 3.5 billion over a decade to expand health care and child care and tackle the climate crisis. In the House, an arrangement between moderate and progressive parties has been equated with “mutually assured destruction”.

The fragile alliance is set to face its first test on September 27, when the House is expected to vote on the bipartisan $ 1 billion bill to fund roads, broadband and other infrastructure projects. Progressives have vowed to derail the measure if they don’t receive rock-solid assurance that the mammoth bill will also reach Biden’s office.

The legislative battle will challenge Biden, both as the leader of a factious party and as a seasoned negotiator in Congress. Last week, as Congress faced a dizzying array of fiscal and legislative deadlines to avoid a government shutdown and debt default, he signaled he was ready to go further.

The president held “productive” meetings with the two senators affected by the policy package, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. He later called on Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

Then on Sunday, as if to perfectly illustrate the treacherous ground on which Biden must tread, the Axios website reported that Manchin wanted the spending bill to be put on hold until the new year.

Jonathan Alter, author of books on FDR, Obama and more recently Jimmy Carter, said that after 36 years of concluding Senate deals and eight leading legislative negotiations as Barack Obama’s vice president, Biden was particularly qualified to play his new role. The difference is, it’s his presidential legacy at stake.

“The only real power a US president has, as the great political scientist Richard Neustadt once said, is the power to persuade,” Alter said. “Over the next few weeks we will discover its power.”

“What it means to be a parent”

The intensity of the debate largely reflects the ambition of the spending proposal. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator overseeing the package as chairman of the budget committee, called it “the most significant legislation since the 1930s and the FDR and the New Deal.”

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Karl Rove, once George Bush’s chief strategist, warned Republicans that the legislation would create a “cradle-to-grave welfare state.”

The plan would affect almost every aspect of life. It contains major initiatives on child care, welfare, education, health, immigration, labor and climate change, funded largely by tax increases on businesses and Americans. the most rich.

Biden argued that democracy itself is at stake. Spending and infrastructure bills, he said, offer a generational opportunity to demonstrate that “American democracy can deliver” better than autocracies like the United States. China.

Progressives were encouraged by Biden’s apparent rebuke of the free market and limited government practices that have prevailed since the days of Ronald Reagan.

Suzanne Khan, director general of research and policy at the Roosevelt Institute, a think tank that advocates for progressive economic policy, said the legislation under consideration could be “truly transformative” for millions of people .

“Universal pre-K, the child tax credit, free community college – these are all visible policies that are really changing the economics of what it means to be a parent in the United States,” she said.

But some economists, nearly all Republicans, and even a few Democrats are worried about pumping billions of dollars into the economy months after a coronavirus relief program does the same.

Michael Strain, an economist with a right-wing think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, warned that the spending program could undermine the economic recovery.

“If you push the economy too hard and raise consumer prices, you are actually doing low-income households a disservice by reducing the purchasing power of their income,” he said. “From that point of view, I think the reconciliation package will be counterproductive. “

Last week, Biden said job growth and other economic gains were largely due to the federal relief bill, which has been credited with reducing poverty during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. . But Biden argued that more was needed to remove the structural barriers that held many back, especially women and people of color.

In a speech last week, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said affordable child care was “as essential as infrastructure or energy.”

The first woman to lead the Treasury in its 232-year history said she “didn’t know if I would be here, in this job today, if I didn’t have a great babysitter there. is 40 years old “.

The activists are trying to gain support. Polls show the spending plan is popular, including among independents and a notable number of Republicans. During August, a coalition of progressive groups set out to sell the plan. They were surprised to find little organized opposition.

“People want these reforms,” ​​said Stephanie Cutter, advisor to Building Back Together, an outside group promoting Biden’s agenda.

“They want jobs, they want better roads and better bridges, they want safer drinking water, they want lower child care costs, paid time off, lower taxes for the classroom.” mean. All of these things will have an impact – for the better – on middle class families and they want these things. This is why they are so popular and this is why they are so difficult to fight.

“A good policy is a good policy”

Nevertheless, the fight will be fierce. Deep-pocketed business groups are willing to spend millions to oppose tax code changes as Republicans attack Democrats’ spending plans.