By Charles C. W. Cooke:Congressional Democrats are Being Played
https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/09/congressional-democrats-moderates-are-being-played/
F or the last two months, a ragtag group of parvenue political extremists has somehow managed to convince the leadership of the Democratic Party that what the swiftly ailing Biden presidency really needs at this moment is an acrimonious standoff over spending. More impressive yet, these radicals have managed to make it seem as if the blame for the standoff lies not at their own gormandizing feet, but with those whom they have routinely harassed. If, as they must, the Democrats wish to avoid a further collapse in their fortunes, they must snap out of this reverie and call their browbeaters’ bluff.
The progressives’ ploy rests upon their claim that the Democratic Party has just two political options before it: To go big, or to go home. More specifically, it rests upon their declaration that Bernie Sanders’s gargantuan, nation-changing reconciliation bill is nonnegotiable, and that, as a result, everything else that Congress does must be contingent upon its passage. Summing up this position last night, Representative Pramila Jayapal (D., Wash.) confirmed that she and her like-minded colleagues intend to kill even the colossal infrastructure legislation that has passed the Senate if they don’t get what they want. “Try us,” Jayapal told reporters who questioned how serious she could possibly be.
Underpinning Jayapal’s strategy is the asseveration that the Democrats will lose badly in next year’s midterm elections if they do not pass something enormous. But this, of course, is nonsense. Certainly, there are some political risks associated with President Biden’s achieving nothing at all this year. But there is an extraordinary amount of space between doing nothing at all and engaging in the largest spending binge since the New Deal on a panicked, party-line vote. It is, of course, to be expected that the progressives in the party will try to spend as much money as possible; that is what progressives do. But, by pretending that the whole party is doomed if they don’t get their own way, they are doing the rest of their colleagues no favors at all. There is political hardball, and then there is assisted suicide, and the Jayapal plan is beginning to resemble the latter.
If everything stays the same in American life between now and November of next year, it will prove tough for the Democratic Party to retain its exquisitely narrow congressional majorities. If the Democratic Party chooses to throw another $4 trillion in spending on top of the $2 trillion it spent in March, keeping power will prove utterly impossible. Yesterday, Politico reported that some in the party are beginning to cotton on to this. “A group of five to 10 House moderates,” the outlet noted, “have signaled to leadership that they would be willing to let the infrastructure bill fail rather than be held hostage by liberals over the broader spending bill.” Why? Because “it’s a more attractive alternative to them than having to vote for painful tax increases to pay for an unrestrained social safety net expansion.”
This assessment is correct. Joe Biden is already dangerously unpopular, and if he and his party cram a set of extraordinary changes to the American order through a 50–50 Senate and a 220–212 House, he will become more so. The United States already has more debt that it has had since World War II; its sprawling entitlement system is already in crisis; and this year alone, it has already run up a budget deficit of $3 trillion. If, in a period of dangerous inflation, the incumbent party elects to make all of these problems worse, it will be wiped out. Presumably, this outcome would be worth it to radicals such as Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Pramila Jayapal, who would be able to obtain the dramatic change they seek without losing their own safe seats in the process. But to the centrists, who are in essence being asked to sacrifice themselves in order to achieve a set of policies they didn’t want in the first place, the calculation should be quite different. As they seem increasingly to understand, all of the political boxes that they need to check ahead of next year’s midterms can be ticked off by passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill that has already emerged from the Senate. And if that’s not an option, the next best choice is passing nothing.
That the progressive position has gained any traction at all remains completely incomprehensible to me. In part, this is because the details of the ruse are so self-evidently absurd that, by rights, its architects should have been laughed out of the room at the outset: In what universe, one wonders, is the insistence that you can only spend $550 billion if you also agree to spend $3.5 trillion a good deal? But I am mystified, too, that President Biden has allowed this to get so bad. Over at National Journal yesterday, Josh Kraushaar noted that where “successful presidents are firmly in control of their own party, striking fear in the hearts of allies who dare challenge their prerogatives,” Biden has chosen to equivocate. “A more involved president,” Kraushaar writes, “would be close to a rare bipartisan victory on infrastructure spending, but he’s been unwilling to confront progressive demands for trillions in a separate social-welfare package.” Biden, he suggests, “needs to step up and lean on progressives to support the public-works package without making further demands on spending that lack broad public support within the Democratic Party.”
Indeed so. Once upon a time, Biden dismissed charges that he would be a rubber stamp for radicalism by insisting, “I am the Democratic Party now.” But, as the time to bet or fold arrives, he is cowering under the resolute desk in the desperate fear that his least useful players might somehow have a royal flush.
They don’t.
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