Joe Manchin is a climate hero! Joe Biden finally succeeded by not really trying! Our takeaways from the grueling ride that brought us the Inflation Reduction Act.
It’s hard to blame progressives for trying the “go big or go home” approach—they may have been lulled by how easily Congress passed Biden’s truly massive COVID recovery bill. It’s also possible that their expectation setting benefitted Biden’s agenda; after all, the president is still poised to sign well over $1 trillion in new spending for long term priorities into law, once you include the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act.
But Democrats will now be left to wonder what kind of deal they could have gotten if they had simply met Manchin on his own terms last year a figure closer to $1.5 trillion. At the very least, they might have avoided half a year of psychodrama. —Joe Biden logged hundreds of hours in the first year of his presidency arbitrating legislative disputes between moderates and progressives on matters big and small. He chatted up and charmed key individual senators and members of Congress in the Oval Office. He made trips to Capitol Hill basements and lunch rooms to rally the troops ahead of key steps. He endorsed many a specific strategic pathway. What all of this working-the-room got him on his Build Back Better plan by the end of 2021 was: Nothing. Well, that’s not entirely true: He got a little humiliation.He wasn’t going to risk getting burned again when talks resumed late this spring–and he didn’t need to. By the time Manchin reentered negotiations with Chuck Schumer, there wasn’t much presidential mediation required. Democrats of all stripes, in both the House and Senate, had been beaten down and knew they would simply have to accept what Manchin could agree to, if anything. Were there no deal, Biden could say he wasn’t really involved; if Schumer and Manchin could reach a deal, Biden could declare victory. On Manchin’s end, the lack of the president and his staff breathing down his neck—Manchin blamed them for blowing up negotiations last December—made for more conducive negotiating conditions. It’s a reminder that sure, presidents will devise grand legislative plans when they’re running for office. But sometimes they can only get it by staying out of the way and letting Congress work its will. —Manchin, the millionaire coal broker from the mining state of West Virginia, did not craft the climate bill progressives wanted. He nixed ambitious regulatory ideas, inserted gifts to the oil and gas industry, and made sure to provide plenty of cash for carbon capture projects that some experts are skeptical of. Nobody seems to think this bill alone will put us on a path to net-zero emissions at the pace scientists have urged.But ultimately, America’s most famous house boat owner provided the 50th vote for a historic piece of legislation to decarbonize the U.S. economy; onesuggests that, by 2035, it could achieve 90 percent of the emissions reductions the House Build Back Better plan would have. Between the inflation Reduction Act and the energy and electric vehicle provisions of the bipartisan infrastructure law, Manchin is now personally responsible for negotiating more than $400 billion in spending and tax credits related to fighting climate change and building a green economy. I don’t know if that’s more thanan anomaly in U.S. politics. As a Democrat from the Mountain State, where Donald Trump won in 2020 by 39 points, nobody else in the Senate has been so successful at outperforming their own party. Had Manchin not pulled off the unlikely miracle of holding that seat in 2018, Mitch McConnell would likely still be majority leader, and we wouldn’t be talking about any kind of major climate legislation today. The tradeoff was that the final bill had to be something Manchin could bring home to West Virginia, where fossil fuels still rule. —Aside from tackling climate change, the Inflation Reduction Act delivers on another key Democratic priority: Prescription drug reform. The legislation will for the first time allow Medicare to negotiate pharmaceutical prices, bringing down costs for seniors.This is a crucial win for the party, which made fixing pharmaceutical prices a centerpiece of the 2018 midterms. The Democrats can now run on a promise kept. Paired with the expanded Obamacare subsidies it extends, the Inflation Reduction Act will let Democrats continue presenting themselves as the party of health care reform.Every single major Democratic candidate for president in the 2020 cycle campaigned on a platform that involved raising taxes on the rich to pay for a major new social spending on things like health care, paid leave, and child care. It turned out that the votes to do so simply weren’t there. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona personally nixed all manner of corporate and individual tax hikes, but didn’t act alone; throughout the process, the party’s moderates backed away from tax hikes on businesses, estates, high earners, and billionaire wealth. To fund their bill, they resorted to the most inoffensive ideas lawmakers could find—a minimum tax on corporations, a tax on stock buybacks, and increased tax enforcement .This is a worrying sign for the future. Taxing the rich is a political winner and a necessity for the party’s agenda—if Democrats want to expand the social safety net the next time they’re in power, they’ll need to agree on a way to pay for it. —Popular in
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