By Charles C. W. Cooke
Thursday, November 04, 2021
The Associated Press reports that, unchastised by Tuesday night’s rout,
Nancy Pelosi plans to ready the House of Representatives for a “debate and vote
on a revised draft of President Joe Biden’s now-$1.85 trillion domestic policy
package.” The decision, the AP suggests, is intended to “show voters the party
can deliver on its priorities.”
That’s one way of putting it, certainly. Another might
be: Nancy Pelosi hopes to appease the progressive wing of her caucus by sending
her most vulnerable members unarmed into the Somme.
Substantively, what Pelosi is proposing is bonkers. For a
start, there is no “Build Back Better” bill. It remains what it has always
been: a slogan, in search of a topline, in search of an agenda. There is only
one thing on which the Democratic Party is agreed, and that is that the United
States should spend at least two trillion more dollars over the next decade
than it had planned to before Joe Biden won. On what? Well, that depends. Some
want tax cuts for the rich. Some want to send checks to Americans who have
kids. Some want a bunch of new permanent programs. Some want
climate-change-mitigation measures. Some want a second New Deal. At various
points during the last few months, all of these things have been in the bill in
one form or another, and, at various points, they’ve been taken out again.
There is a reason that we have not had a “national debate” over the “Biden
agenda,” and that reason is that, beyond its cost, there is nothing concrete to
debate.
The result has been the creation of a protean piece of
vaporware that nobody in Congress seems much to like, and that the American
people seem increasingly to loathe. Since Tuesday’s elections, the
institutional Democratic Party has rallied stupidly around the idea that, in order
to stave off further electoral losses, it must show voters that it can “get
things done” — as if the average American citizen favors action for its own
sake. But, of course, it must do no such thing. Reflecting upon this fallacy, Abigail
Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, noted yesterday that “nobody
elected [Biden] to be F.D.R., they elected him to be normal and stop the
chaos,” while Representative Kathleen Rice, her colleague from New York, seemed
baffled by the whole thing. “I don’t understand some of my more progressive
colleagues saying [that Tuesday] night now shows us that what we need to do is
get both of these bills done and shove even more progressive stuff in,” Rice
said.
Rice is correct. And yet, inexplicably, “shove even more
progressive stuff in” is precisely what Nancy Pelosi has chosen to do in
response. Yesterday morning, despite knowing full well that Joe Manchin is
implacably opposed to it, House Democrats added a previously removed
paid-leave provision back into the bill, and thereby increased,
rather than decreased, the electoral risk it poses to swing-district denizens
such as Spanberger and Rice. Why? Well, because the less aligned the House and
the Senate become, the more likely it is that the House passes a bill that dies
a slow death in the Senate, and, in turn, the more likely it is that the raft
of moderate House Democrats who end up voting for it will be left stranded. As
the victims of the failed attempt to repeal Obamacare will tell you, there is
nothing worse in American politics than having cast a recorded vote for an
unpopular bill that is defeated in the other chamber; you don’t have any
tangible accomplishment to point to for your trouble, and you’re left
vulnerable to attack ads in your next campaign.
It has long been a mystery to me why the rebellion
against the president’s preposterous agenda primarily comes from the Senate,
when members of the House of Representatives have so much more to lose from
siding with the White House. If, by next November, the national mood remains dour,
the Democrats are going to lose anywhere between 30 and 50 seats in the lower
chamber. At present, the party’s majority in the House is just three seats.
Surely — surely — there must be three representatives out of
the group that is at risk who can see that their leaders are asking them to
commit political suicide?
No comments:
Post a Comment