COMPROMISE, PLEASE!

 

Are the Democrats stuck?  Mired in limbo?  Will Biden become a failed president before his first year is over?  Anyone following the media in the past week has heard these questions asked several times.  Because our competitive news networks deliver political news in a way much like sports broadcasting (focusing on who's up and who's down), you'd think the entire party was going to be destroyed sometime soon.

The reality of the situation is this: there are two bills working their way through congress, one's a bipartisan infrastructure plan that will cost a trillion dollars, and the other is  a spending plan that will cost three and half trillion dollars.  Progressive congress members want both bills passed, and are willing to hold up voting for the smaller one if it looks like the larger one won't pass.  But the larger bill is being held up in the Senate (where the Democrats need every vote) by two moderate Democratic Senators, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.  Manchin has said that he thinks the spending bill is too big, and Sinema's motives are oddly mysterious.  A vote in the House of Representatives over the infrastructure bill was cancelled last week when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi realized that she did not have the votes.   

One of the annoying things about the way that the media has covered this is that they talk about the three and half trillion dollar plan without mentioning that that spending will take place over a period of ten years.  This would put the annual spending at about three hundred and fifty billion a year, which is less than half of what we will inevitably spend on defense.  In other words, it's not the budget busting proposal that it sounds like.  It's also important to remember that the various provisions of the spending bill are popular in polls: national daycare, paid family leave, expanding medicare to include vision and dental, dealing with climate change.  It's not only progressives who want these things, they  are popular with Democrats, independents and some Republicans. A July poll USA Today poll put the infrastructure plan at sixty three percent positive and the spending bill at fifty two percent. (In contrast, the twenty seventeen tax cut passed by the Donald Trump administration had only a forty percent rating).

The future of both bills are in doubt, and it's sad to think that this may be the last chance to really deal with climate change, given that the Republican party will very likely retake congress in twenty twenty two.  The hope is that the progressives will give in (like we always seem to have to) and agree to lower the spending in the second bill so that both bills will pass.  The fight going on here reminds me of the similar battle that raged in congress during the passage of the Affordable Care Act; and while that bill was also watered down by Democratic moderates, its passage was still a good thing.  I'm thinking that we'll get the same result here, seeing as how not passing either bill would be such a blow to the party.  While it's upsetting that we have a process in which popular bills can be blocked by just two members of the senate, that's the system we have.  Not losing the good while fighting for the perfect seems to be the sad cry of the progressive in this country these days, and here it is once again.  And once again, congress should do the right thing, which means pleasing Manchin and Sinema by cutting the spending down until they're willing to vote for it, so that both bills pass.  Compromise is necessary.