Senator Joe Manchin’s declaration last weekend that he “cannot vote to move forward on” the Build Back Better Act is a tough pill to swallow for anyone who supports the myriad of critical programs the bill contains, from green energy infrastructure to child tax credits. The existential threat of climate change in particular makes this news reverberate with the weight of collective doom — with the polar caps melting and the West Coast burning, will the U.S. still not do the bare minimum to protect our collective future? This is to say nothing of the needless kneecapping of working families and the larger economy — Goldman Sachs has already downgraded its forecast of U.S. growth in 2022 due to Manchin’s declaration — not to mention the political prospects of Manchin’s fellow Democrats in 2022 and beyond.
But it is exactly because the stakes are so high that everyone who has an interest in the BBB’s substance, if not this specific legislation, needs to take a beat and not succumb to doomsaying and hair-rending. There’s no getting around the agony of being one recalcitrant senator short of getting this over the finish line, but this can’t blind us to a near-miraculous unity among Democratic legislators. Whatever its many shortcomings, this is not a party in disarray, but rather one discovering once again that being on the cusp of either victory or defeat often looks nearly indistinguishable.
On the economic front, this Zachary Carter piece that I discussed last month remains persuasive. Increasingly progressive economic thinking has won the day among Democrats, and Manchin represents a dwindling, rear-guard effort within the party to say otherwise. Of course, his power is magnified immensely by the Democrats’ extremely narrow Senate majority, but it’s a mistake to confuse a position of leverage with anything like the strength of Manchin’s political ideas. The fact that he has resorted to easily disprovable lies in his opposition to measures like green energy incentives drives home the point.
The stakes are so high right now, and the collective anguish among Democrats and supporters of democracy so intense, because there is a basic perception that Democrats really only have one shot at passing the collection of policies folded into the BBB Act: fail on this (and on voting rights legislation), and the Republicans will sweep into permanent power in 2022 and beyond. I share these fears — but the fact that Democratic leadership signaled an immediate pivot to voting rights legislation in place of a tabled BBB bill highlights their basic mishandling of the very dangers to democracy they seem to understand. All along, legislation that protects democracy should have been given equal priority to passing the BBB Act. They are flip sides of the same coin — efforts to defend America against an authoritarian GOP onslaught by reinvigorating American democracy and our economy in progressive, egalitarian ways — and should never have been decoupled. Rather than being a distraction from economic reforms and policies, foregrounding threats to democracy by pushing actual legislation would have a synergistic effect with the BBB Act, raising the true stakes that both types of legislation need to pass in order to address a common challenge.
This is not to say that such a strategy would have, or will, change Joe Manchin’s mind, but I think it would have led to the Democrats being much better-positioned to weather Manchin’s sabotage than they currently are. Manchin’s position would have appeared even more extreme and disloyal not just to the Democratic Party but to the United States itself, and the Democratic Party would have elevated the stakes of failure in the eyes of the American people. We also can’t lose sight of the basic fact that exactly zero Republicans support the BBB Act, and that no more than a thimbleful (if that) support democracy-strengthening legislation. Anything that would maximize the Democrats’ position as appearing reasonable, and the GOP’s position as appearing extremist, would be to the Democrats’ benefit — as more deeply advertising the BBB Act as having democracy-saving benefits would do.
The good news is that it’s not too late for Biden and the Democrats’ congressional leadership to change course. Ultimately, they need a strategy that will both maximize the chances of getting Manchin’s no vote turned around, but also the ability to communicate clearly the stakes of getting the BBB and pro-democracy legislation passed for the survival of our democracy. After a certain point, spending so much of your firepower working over a single antediluvian member of your party (however truly gratifying that can feel!) instead of the entirety of an obstructionist authoritarian GOP doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense. Here we can reach out for the grain of truth Manchin himself has offered — if Democrats want more Democratic legislation, they’re going to have to elect more Democrats. Any party strategy from this point forward needs to be aimed at maximizing the chances of getting those extra votes in 2022 — even in the absence of the BBB legislation. By gradually whittling down the BBB Act, only for Manchin to declare none of it worthwhile, the unsuccessful effort to woo Manchin has inadvertently downplayed the urgency of this moment — even as the efforts to woo Manchin were indeed rooted in this very urgency.
At the same time, the Democrats seem not to have simultaneously pursued democracy legislation at least in part because it would bring them into direct conflict with a GOP that it desperately wanted to sign onto the bipartisan infrastructure bill. In other words, the Democrats have been at cross-purposes with themselves, projecting disunity to the public while giving unwarranted breathing room to a Republican Party hell bent on sabotaging the economy, the fight against covid, and American democracy. Again, some of this was unavoidable — it made sense to try to get Manchin’s crucial vote — but in retrospect we can see the harm this strategy did, a harm only compounded by Manchin’s apparent, final “no.” My bottom line — if the BBB Act and democracy legislation aren’t going to get by Manchin, make the next year about how Republicans are stymying progress, not Joe Manchin, and figure out a way to leverage this into Democratic victories in 2022.