By Rich Lowry
Friday, July 2, 2021
So far, the bipartisan infrastructure deal is going
through the normal life cycle of such proposals — alive, dead, revived,
uncertain.
For Republicans, the best answer should be dead.
They have nothing to gain by blessing a portion of
President Joe Biden’s spending plans, when an ungodly amount of money is going
to go out the door regardless of whether they vote for a chunk of it or not.
The conventional wisdom is that the Senate has to prove
that it can work, and the test of its functioning is how much of Biden’s
spending Republicans endorse.
This is a distorted view of the Senate’s role, which
shouldn’t be to get on board a historic spending spree for which Biden won no
mandate and which isn’t justified by conditions in the country (it’s not true,
for instance, that the nation’s infrastructure is crumbling).
Besides, if bipartisan spending is the test, the Senate
just a few weeks ago passed a $200 billion China competition bill by a 68-32
vote. It used to be that $200 billion constituted a lot of money, but now it
doesn’t rate, not when there’s $6 trillion on the table.
The infrastructure deal lurched from gloriously alive to
dead when Biden explicitly linked its passage to the simultaneous passage of a
reconciliation bill with the rest of the Democratic Party’s spending priorities
in it.
Then, it revived again when Biden walked this back and
promised a dual track for the two bills.
The fierce Republican insistence on these two tracks
doesn’t make much sense and amounts to asking Democrats to allow a decent
interval before going ahead with the rest of their spending — Democrats are
going to try to pass a reconciliation whether the bipartisan deal passes or
not.
In other words, at the end of the day, there’s only one
track.
The calculation of Republicans supporting the deal is
that a significant bipartisan package can take some of the heat off Senators
Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in their resistance to eliminating the
filibuster.
A deal that passes and is signed into law will certainly
be a feather in their caps, but it’s hard to believe they’d change their minds
on the filibuster if the deal fell apart.
They are both so extensively and adamantly on the record
in favor of the filibuster that a climb-down would be politically embarrassing
and perilous.
Republicans supporting the deal also think that it will make
passing the subsequent reconciliation bill harder. First, the parts of
infrastructure that have the widest support — roads and bridges — will be in
the deal and not in the reconciliation bill. Second, the unwelcome tax
increases excluded from the bipartisan deal will be in the
reconciliation bill.
This isn’t a crazy calculation, although it’s not clearly
correct either. The higher the top-line number is for the reconciliation bill,
the harder it will be to pass. By allowing Democrats to cleave off some
spending into a bipartisan deal, the overall number for the reconciliation bill
gets smaller. In other words, the bipartisan deal could make the partisan
reconciliation easier, rather than harder, to pass.
It’s not as though Biden is fiscally prudent on all other
fronts except in this one area which he considers a particularly important
national investment with unmistakable returns. No, he’s universally profligate.
His reckless spending on all fronts (except defense) makes it more imperative
for Republicans to stake out a position in four-square opposition.
The bipartisan deal is hardly exemplary legislation, by
the way. It resorts to all the usual Beltway gimmicks to create the pretense
that it’s paid for, when it’s basically as irresponsible as the rest of the
Biden spending.
Bipartisanship has its uses, but so does partisanship.
Joe Biden wants to be known for his FDR- and LBJ-like government spending,
believing that it is the key to political success and to an enduring legacy.
Fine. Let him and his party own it.
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