President Joe Biden announced on Thursday that he reached a deal with a bipartisan group of senators on a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. This number is much closer to Republicans’ asking price than it is to Democrats’ original $6 trillion progressive wish list, but it’s not a win for the GOP — not yet, at least.
To make sure this bipartisan agreement really is a compromise, Republicans need ironclad assurance that Democrats won’t turn around in a few weeks and try to pass the rest of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda through reconciliation. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has already threatened to withhold a floor vote on Biden’s infrastructure compromise unless Senate Democrats promise to use the budget reconciliation process to circumvent the filibuster and pass the policies that Biden had to cut from his original infrastructure proposal.
In other words, Democrats want it both ways: They want Biden to be able to say he reached a bipartisan deal without ever having to give some things up.
Sen. Joe Manchin. a West Virginia Democrat, has already suggested he would support including some parts of Biden’s “human infrastructure” plan, which includes policies such as free child care, community college, and paid leave, in a budget reconciliation bill. This means that most of the leftist junk Republicans successfully removed from Biden’s original infrastructure proposal would end up getting passed anyway.
It might be tempting for Republicans to agree to this infrastructure deal so that they can hold it up to their constituents later on. But unless Manchin and other centrist Democrats agree to oppose Democrats’ reconciliation plot, the GOP should oppose the compromise. Democrats might just turn around and pass a reconciliation bill anyway, but at least Republicans won’t have helped them do it.
