Calm Down about the Infrastructure Bill
On August 10, nineteen Republican senators voted for the “hard infrastructure” bill after extensive negotiations to reduce its size. It passed the Senate by a vote of 69-30. Among those voting for it was Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. They came from every part of the country and included members of every ideological camp of the party.
In historical terms, I’d say this was in line with the way parties behave in the first year of a presidency: Biden did win the White House, Democrats held the House and Senate, and they got themselves one big bill with some support from the other party. In a similar manner, George W. Bush got 8 Democratic votes in the Senate for his tax cut in 2001 under very similar circumstances (a 50-50 Senate and a razor-thin House majority). In 1993, Bill Clinton got NAFTA through almost entirely due to Republican support.
If the House Democrats had turned around and brought the same bill to the floor of the House for a vote, it would have passed comfortably right then and no one would have batted an eye. Certainly, conservatives would have been unhappy with the result, but the practical decision Democrats in the Senate made to decouple the non-infrastructure stuff from the infrastructure stuff meant the bill had moved from the realm of the insupportable into the realm of the arguable.
This was normal, in other words. The parties were behaving in comprehensible ways. When Republicans are in charge, they try to cut taxes and reduce the size of government to the extent possible—and when Democrats are in charge, they try to increase spending and taxes to the extent possible. The trick is to seduce the other side into overcoming its natural desire to defeat you at every turn. And clearly, there was more than enough in the “hard infrastructure” bill to please 19 Republicans in the Senate and give them an opportunity to tell their constituents they’d done something popular and good.
Indeed, Republicans in the Senate could and will say their role in the bill—the need to have their support so that it could pass the 60-vote threshold that would have made filibustering it impossible—was crucial to making it something good. Then it went to the House, and if the House had been sane, it would have passed in a day. Democrats would have scored a win, Joe Biden would have said he had restored bipartisanship, and the political year of 2021 would have had a different coloration and flavor to it.
But then came the Wile E. Coyote House Democrats. Spurred on by Biden, who bafflingly said he wanted this to happen, progressives in the House lit upon a strategy to hold the bill that could pass hostage to the very stuff the Senate had eliminated from it to get it through. Unless the “social infrastructure” stuff was coupled to the “hard infrastructure” stuff, the progressives would tank the “hard infrastructure” bill.
And then came three months of madness. On no fewer than four occasions, Democratic leadership in the House announced they were going to vote on these bills only to have their determination fall apart again and again. Those three months contributed mightily to the sense that Democrats and Joe Biden are doing a terrible job both internationally (Afghanistan) and domestically. Late Friday night, facing the public’s judgment of their fecklessness in off-year elections across the country, progressives threw in the towel. All they got was a face-saving promise from moderates in the House that said moderates would support the bigger bill at a later date if an independent tally of its cost by the Congressional Budget Office satisfied them.
Had the progressives not been both crazy and stupid, what happened just now would have happened months ago—with far more Republican House votes than the infrastructure bill got last night. Thirteen Republicans out of the 205 in the House—about 6 percent of the membership—voted for it. Had the progressives not committed themselves to their deranged strategy, the GOP number would likely have been triple that.
Last night, conservatives who dislike the infrastructure bill—I do, too, by the way—expressed rage and despondency at its passage. There was dark talk of holding the 13 Republicans accountable by helping to raise primary challengers to oust them next year. There was more dark talk of the coming of socialism.
Come on, fellas. In 1987, Ronald Reagan vetoed an $87 billion infrastructure bill (those were simpler days so we called in a “highway bill” then)—in constant dollars, about half the cost of the 2021 bill. He did so because he said it was dangerously wasteful spending. Fair enough. And his veto was overridden by a vote of… ooh, there’s that number again… 13 Republican Senators (along with all the Democrats in the Senate). One of them: Kentucky freshman Mitch McConnell.
Democrats had won decisively in the 1986 midterms, and, like I say, what they like to do when they get a chance is to spend lots of money. But they have to do it in a way that will bring along those who would otherwise crush their dreams. And unless I misread Sen. Joe Manchin entirely, the fact that the House version just got significantly more expensive with provisions increasing the federal deduction for state and local taxes (SALT) means it will be “scored” at a level he cannot support. Manchin said repeatedly his bottom-line number is $1.5 trillion. The White House’s calculation is already $1.75 trillion. The SALT business will certainly bring it up over $2 trillion. An honest accounting of the cost would certainly say it would be many hundreds of billions of dollars larger than that.
That may be enough to cause the House moderates, who agreed to vote for the bill provided it was “scored” reasonably, to back off their “agreement.” The infrastructure bill is within the parameters of old-fashioned American politics. The Build Back Better bill is not. Republicans and conservatives who are freaking out about the passage of the infrastructure bill shouldn’t. If somehow BBB passes, the freakout would be more than justified.
