After almost a year of the Joe Biden presidency, it's easy for a progressive to feel a sense of whiplash: on the plus side, the mere exiting of Donald Trump and all the corrupt and incompetent people he surrounded himself with was a cause for relief and celebration. Sanity was restored, with Biden cutting an elderly but good natured figure who would bring common decency back to the White House. And while at first it appeared that the Republican party, other than Trump, did well in the 2016 election (they actually gained seats in the House of Representatives), when the Democrats pulled off a post presidential election upset by winning two senate seats in Georgia, giving them a narrow control of the Senate, things were looking up. Shortly after taking office, Biden passed a stimulus plan that cut child poverty in half. He also just passed an infrastructure bill, something that Trump tried to do in vain for years. Plus, even though the Supreme Court appears to be lost to progressives for decades, he's managed to appoint more lower court judges in his first year than Trump did.
But, on the negative side, Biden's promise to put the pandemic behind us has proven hollow. While this can be blamed on both the variants of covid and the conservative resistance to vaccines, it still makes him look bad, as a weary country about to face another deadly pandemic winter takes its anger out on him. Add to that the fallout from inflation (especially in gas prices), the rise of violent crime and the general perception by the public that the economy is doing poorly (it's actually doing quite well) and it's easy to see why his approval ratings are low (although not lower than Trump's were at the same time in his term).
But from a progressive perspective, there has been nothing more frustrating from this presidency as the Build Back Better Bill. First proposed almost a year ago, this was a bold multi trillion dollar package that would nationalize child care and paid parental leave, while also working to transition this country away from fossil fuels. In its initial form, it would have been the most progressive bill passed since the new deal, and by raising taxes on the rich to aid the poor, it would have been the first genuine attempt to even this country's shameful class imbalance since Ronald Reagan's massive tax cuts for the rich and gutting of social programs drastically increased that imbalance back in the 1980's.
But then the Democrats discovered that a slim majority in the Senate meant that these welcome changes couldn't pass without serious revisions to the bill. Not when every Democratic vote would be needed, and one of those Democrats was Joe Manchin of West Virginia. From the beginning Manchin has demanded cuts to the bill before he would vote for it. For months those cuts were made with a meat axe, with the cost of the bill sliced by more than half, muting the positive effects of it. Barely a week would go by in the past year without Manchin preening for the press while demanding more and more spending reductions in the bill. For a while, it almost appeared that Manchin had been placated, but just yesterday, in an interview on Fox News, he said he still opposed it, citing national deficit and inflation concerns. He did this even after Biden had reached out to him personally, and even after every study of the bill found that any impact it would have on inflation would be minimal. None of that mattered, Manchin shot the bill down. It's a bit hard to understand just what Manchin's game is here: is he showing off for the Republicans before switching parties? Is he killing the bill because he's afraid that the climate change provisions might hurt his coal rich state? His national deficit concerns are really ridiculous, given that the bill's spending would take place over a decade, making its yearly amount a mere fraction of our nation's defense spending. (Congress just passed a $768 billion defense bill for this year, and that number won't be going down in the next ten years!)
So is it all over for the bill? Hopefully not. There's still a chance that a reduced version will be introduced that will win him over. At this point, it would probably be best to let Manchin himself write the bill, which will probably be a hollowed shell of its former self, and sullen progressives in congress will have to support it just to avoid a total loss. And once again, the concerns of the poor and middle class will be ignored in this country, as they have been for decades.
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