President Biden’s legislative agenda has stalled in the face of stiff Republican opposition and, more troubling for the White House, growing divisions among Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer managed to hold Democrats together for the failed attempt to keep alive a massive rewrite of nationwide election laws. But many Democrats harbored misgivings about the bill, and their unity stemmed from the knowledge that it wouldn’t survive the Republican filibuster.
Congress missed Mr. Biden’s May 25 deadline to pass a racial justice overhaul of policing. Negotiations trudged forward, and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the Republican leader in the talks, said Wednesday that a deal was in sight.
Any agreement would have a long way to go. The bill must win approval from the White House and enough Democrats and Republicans before it becomes law.
A bipartisan group of 20 lawmakers is nearing a $953 billion deal on another top Biden priority: a big-spending infrastructure bill. The package in negotiations is less than half of the $2.3 trillion that the president originally proposed.
The deal, which negotiators are calling a “framework,” has plenty of disagreement among lawmakers of both parties over its size and how to pay for it.
The resistance includes Democrats who oppose a bipartisan deal and those who refuse to ram it through the Senate without Republican votes.
Democrats papered over divisions within the party for four years when they unanimously opposed everything associated with President Trump.
“There is nothing Democrats love more than to fight amongst ourselves. You could give us the White House, every seat on the Supreme Court and 500 seats in the Congress, and we would find something to complain about,” said Colin Strother, a Democratic strategist. “There is always a struggle between incremental, targeted reform and outright revolution.”
Democrats have been trying to advance a liberal agenda and keep members in line since winning narrow majorities in the House and Senate last year.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has labored to keep the Democratic Caucus united while “The Squad” and other far-left members pull the party toward socialism.
In the Senate, which is split 50-50 between the parties, the situation is particularly tenuous. Because most bills require 60 votes to overcome a filibuster, Mr. Biden needs the support of at least 10 Republicans and all 50 Democrats to score legislative wins.
“Regardless of who the players are or who the president is or the Republican and Democratic leaders are, it’s a challenge,” said Trent Lott of Mississippi, a Republican who led a tied Senate in the early 2000s. “But Democrats have their problems with moderate senators and some progressives, although you could say they’re more socialist than anything else, who make the situation more complicated.”
Such complications were evident during the fight over electoral reform.
The Democrats’ bill, known as the For the People Act, died this week from a Republican filibuster.
The bill would have overridden state laws to mandate automatic voter registration, expanded vote-by-mail and instituted public financing of campaigns.
Republicans called the bill a Democratic “power grab.” Democrats said it was a vital response to restrictive new voting laws in Republican-run states that they claimed would suppress the Black vote.
The White House promised that Republicans didn’t have the last word when they killed the legislation. “This fight is not over,” said White House press secretary Jen Psaki.
The bill didn’t have a chance of surviving a Senate filibuster, making it easy for skeptical Democrats to vote for it.
The party’s far-left wing is pressuring Senate Democrats to end the filibuster to allow them to force through their agenda, including the election bill, climate change measures, tax hikes, and an expansion of social welfare programs.
Changing the rules would require the support of all 50 Senate Democrats, but moderates in the party, most notably Sens. Joe Manchin III of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, refuse to support the move.
“It’s no secret that I oppose eliminating the Senate’s 60-vote threshold,” Ms. Sinema wrote in a recent op-ed in The Washington Post. “If anyone expected me to reverse my position because my party now controls the Senate, they should know that my approach to legislating in Congress is the same whether in the minority or majority.”
Other Senate Democrats are quieter in their opposition to eliminating the filibuster.
Meanwhile, liberals are threatening to derail a bipartisan deal on climate change that trims too much of the original $2.3 trillion package and its major initiatives.
“No climate, no deal,” said Sen. Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and the author of the Green New Deal.
Liberals hope their threat to withhold support of the bipartisan deal will give them a guarantee from leadership to push through a “climate infrastructure” bill via budget reconciliation. The reconciliation process allows spending bills to pass the Senate with a simple majority of 51 votes.
“We have made our position clear: that the possibility of a bipartisan deal depends on a commitment to move forward on reconciliation,” said Sen. Brian Schatz, Hawaii Democrat.
The problem is that all 50 Democrats would need to support a climate-centered reconciliation bill. Such an outcome is unlikely given Mr. Manchin and Ms. Sinema’s lead in drafting the bipartisan infrastructure deal.
“To say that one’s being held hostage to the other, that doesn’t seem to be fair to me, but they’re going to make those decisions,” Mr. Manchin said.
Complicating matters is that there is no guarantee of support for a bipartisan deal beyond the 10 Democrats and 11 Republicans involved in the talks.
Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming said he and his fellow Republicans would support a deal only if it meets strict criteria. “It has to be true infrastructure, it has to be paid for, and it can’t touch the [Trump-era tax cuts],” said Mr. Barrasso, who serves as chairman of the Senate Republican Conference. “If we can get that done, then a lot of people will be supportive.”
It is unclear whether Mr. Biden would accept those conditions. The White House pulled out of an early iteration of the bipartisan infrastructure talks after Republicans refused to support corporate and income tax increases.
Mr. Lott, who as majority leader cut several major deals with President Clinton, said Mr. Biden’s problems stem from party disunity and a deficit of leadership.
“The main thing that is missing, and this is where I could get in trouble, is leadership,” Mr. Lott said. “It all begins at the White House. We haven’t had the kind of leadership we needed for [at least] nine years now … and the leadership that we’re dealing with now, it ain’t gonna change until they change.”
• Haris Alic can be reached at halic@washingtontimes.com.
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