The Agony of the ‘Centrist’ Democrats Pelosi views them as cannon fodder, and they’ll probably cave.
With the House back in town, the debate for Democrats is which colossal plan they should pass first: President Biden’s $1 trillion infrastructure package? Or Bernie Sanders’s $3.5 trillion budget outline? The media is covering it as a real showdown but, if history holds, this will turn out to be Kabuki theater.
Nine Democrats, including several from swing districts, say the infrastructure bill should be passed before any budget vote is taken, and so far they have held their ground. “We are firmly opposed,” they wrote recently, “to holding the president’s infrastructure legislation hostage to reconciliation, risking its passage and the bipartisan support behind it.”
The left is demanding the opposite. Do the $3.5 trillion spending binge first, the argument goes, and then reward the Democratic centrists with the infrastructure goody bag. Speaker Nancy Pelosi doesn’t want to lose either faction, and her narrow majority means she has only three votes to spare. She’s trying to accommodate both sides with a rule that lets her claim the two proposals are moving forward more or less simultaneously.
This is mainly about process, not substance. The nine Democratic holdouts want to vote on infrastructure now, but tomorrow they’re prepared to roll over for $3.5 trillion in spending and new entitlements, which is what really matters. “I’ve literally said to my colleagues, ‘Let’s vote on the infrastructure bill, and then, like, 15 minutes later we can start debate on the budget resolution and vote on it the next day,’” Rep. Josh Gottheimer told a reporter.
It speaks volumes about the power of the left that Mrs. Pelosi won’t take him up on the offer. The problem for the swing-district Democrats—please don’t call them moderates—is that Mrs. Pelosi likes it when they win competitive seats to build her a majority, but once they get to D.C. she expects them to toe the progressive party line. This year that dynamic is even worse, because she’s playing for her legacy.
Mrs. Pelosi knows that Democrats are likely to lose the House in 2022. Midterm elections are rarely kind to the sitting President’s party, even when he hasn’t bungled a military evacuation of Afghanistan. Mrs. Pelosi’s goal is to pass historic legislation to cement Democratic additions to the entitlement state. She’ll almost surely retire if Democrats lose the House. The left gets what it wants, Mrs. Pelosi goes down as a progressive hero, and the centrist Democrats get used as political cannon fodder.
The precedent here is ObamaCare. Remember Bart Stupak ? He was the Democrat from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, and a leader in the congressional Pro-Life Caucus, who threatened to defeat the bill unless it barred federal funds from going to abortions. In the end, after making a show with other antiabortion Democrats, Mr. Stupak accepted a fig leaf of an executive order. He retired rather than face almost certain defeat in 2010, a year the GOP gained 63 seats.
A replay is the likeliest outcome this week and on the budget. Mrs. Pelosi knows how to apply pressure. The chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has been dialing up the centrists, and some reportedly interpreted this as an implicit threat to withhold party assistance. White House officials are working the phones.
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What’s missing is any argument against spending $1 trillion and then $3.5 trillion, or the other way around. Mr. Sanders’s budget calls for enormous tax increases, universal pre-K, free community college, a lower Medicare eligibility age, and much, much more. His strategy is to pass temporary programs that will never be allowed to lapse, a sly way of permanently changing the average American’s relationship to the state. The true cost over 10 years is closer to $5 trillion, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
Where are swing-district Democrats objecting to the substance? They might get a process change, or another minor victory, but the House probably will still pass Mr. Sanders’s budget outline. If the centrists vote for that, they’ll be swept out to sea in 2022, not that Mrs. Pelosi cares. Her narrow majority gives them real leverage. History suggests they won’t use it for anything that matters.
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