President Biden has a strategy for getting big things done. But he can’t afford to say it out loud. gdebenedetti reports
Got something in mind. Photo: Pool/Getty Images Joe Biden’s pique built slowly during his morning workouts. He likes to watch the breakfast-time political news shows — Morning Joe, New Day — while he exercises before descending to the Oval Office, and he’d noticed their tone shifting this spring.
On the same Tuesday early this month that his infrastructure talks with a Republican Senate negotiator fell apart — not long after Tulsa — a bipartisan gun-control effort unraveled as well. This was just after Manchin confirmed in an op-ed that he wouldn’t support a sweeping voting-rights measure while doubling down on his opposition to getting rid of the Senate’s legislative filibuster, a rules change that would make it easier for Democrats to pass their bills unilaterally.
Biden himself raised expectations last spring as a candidate, when Democrats looked likely to have wide majorities in the Senate and House, and he started comparing the nation’s plight to the one it faced when FDR took office in the early phase of the Great Depression. Yet Roosevelt was greeted by a Congress overwhelmingly controlled by his own party.
Manchin and Sinema would presumably vote against that kind of maneuver, say senior Democrats, so they can’t even try it. And it would ruin Biden and Chuck Schumer’s plan to demonstrate to the American people — and to Manchin, who understands his colleagues’ gambit — just how obstructionist the Republicans are being, by trying to pass repeated popular measures and seeing them fail at GOP hands. See: the proposed commission to investigate the January 6 insurrection.
Even if the bipartisan infrastructure maneuver fails, people close to the White House think that could prove the point to the swing senators. “You can’t just come out and say, ‘We are doing this because we think it’s going to fail, but we have to prove to some people on our side it’s going to fail.
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