Within hours of breaking off talks with West Virginia GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito over a compromise on an infrastructure package, President Joe Biden had leaped into the middle of a new negotiation with a new bipartisan group of senators.
In a conversation with the bipartisan group – that includes the likes of Utah Sen. Mitt Romney (R) and Maine Sen. Angus King (I) – this week, Biden “urged them to continue their work with other Democrats and Republicans to develop a bipartisan proposal that he hopes will be more responsive to the country’s pressing infrastructure needs,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
Biden’s quick jump from one bipartisan negotiation to another rankled plenty of liberal Democrats, who have long insisted that Republicans have zero interest in actually coming to any sort of negotiated compromise and instead are taking advantage of Biden’s bipartisan instincts to slow-walk important legislation for the country.
“Dems are burning precious time & impact negotiating w/GOP who won’t even vote for a Jan 6 commission,” tweeted New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday. “McConnell’s plan is to run out the clock. It’s a hustle. We need to move now.”
Even Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen – no liberal absolutist – clearly believes that Biden is wasting his time here.
“At the end of the day, if we can’t get the Republicans on board, we need to move forward,” Van Hollen told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday night. “And my view is that time has come.” He added that Democrats “cannot just sort of twiddle our thumbs at the negotiating table while the time fritters away.”
Republican leaders are also skeptical about any sort of bipartisan deal being made. “It’s hard for me to see a scenario where even 10 Republicans would vote for something that gets very far beyond where Shelley’s discussions were with the White House,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune told CNN’s Lauren Fox this week.
So why is Biden continuing to pursue the bipartisan path when literally everyone says it’s doomed?
Two words: Joe Manchin.
See, Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat, has to be on board for Democrats to do ANYTHING in the Senate. As it relates to infrastructure specifically, he’s the 50th vote Democrats need to pass some version of the bill by budget reconciliation – assuming that all of these bipartisan efforts fail. (Reconciliation is a budgetary measure that allows certain pieces of legislation to bypass the 60-vote hurdle to stop unlimited debate in the Senate. Read this for more on reconciliation.)
And Manchin has made it crystal clear that he wants Democrats – led by Biden – to wring every single last drop of potential bipartisan compromise out of the infrastructure package (and all subsequent legislation) before he will consider going the purely partisan route.
In an op-ed over the weekend in the Charleston Gazette-Mail, Manchin explained that view:
“What I’ve seen during my time in Washington is that every party in power will always want to exercise absolute power, absolutely. Our founders were wise to see the temptation of absolute power and built in specific checks and balances to force compromise that serves to preserve our fragile democracy. The Senate, its processes and rules, have evolved over time to make absolute power difficult while still delivering solutions to the issues facing our country and I believe that’s the Senate’s best quality…
“…. Do we really want to live in an America where one party can dictate and demand everything and anything it wants, whenever it wants? I have always said, “If I can’t go home and explain it, I can’t vote for it.” And I cannot explain strictly partisan election reform or blowing up the Senate rules to expedite one party’s agenda.
“The truth is there is a better way – if we seek to find it together.”
Whether Biden agrees with Manchin’s view is immaterial. Biden knows that he has to convince Manchin that every single bipartisan avenue is blocked in order to get the West Virginia Democrat on board with passing infrastructure via reconciliation. So whether or not Biden thinks that this new bipartisan group of senate negotiators is going to be any different than the last set of bipartisan conversations were (my guess is he doesn’t), he will continue to keep an open line of communication.
And he will keep talking (and talking) until Manchin signals that he is satisfied that a) Biden has given it the old college try and b) compromise isn’t possible.
That’s the current Democratic reality – whether Biden or the liberal wing in Congress like it or not.