But that deal alone isn’t enough for Congress — or Biden, apparently.
Republican leaders seem to not want to give Biden a win, and five GOP senators isn’t enough to get a bill past the 60-vote threshold required to pass most legislation in the Senate. Last week, 11 Republican senators said they’d signed onto a similar framework, which could be enough to pass a bill if most or all of the Senate’s Democrats also vote for it.
But therein lies the delicate balance Biden has to strike.
Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio) told reporters Thursday that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is considering whether to support the plan; if he does, that could open the door to more Republicans voting for it.
But in some ways, the efforts Biden has made to court GOP support for a bipartisan bill has turned off liberals who want guarantees they’ll get a vehicle to fund their own priorities — particularly in expensive areas such as climate change.
The administration’s response to that criticism, which has been getting louder within Biden’s own party, is that Democrats will also attempt to pass a second bill, without Republican votes. The second bill would go through the reconciliation process, the same process Democrats used to pass a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package in March without GOP support.
“We have two tracks,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) told Politico. “But ultimately, the two tracks all have to meet at the end to make sure that we actually have a climate infrastructure package.”
Markey had previously summed it up more succinctly in a tweet, writing, “No climate, no deal.”
Markey isn’t alone; Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) warned the administration earlier this month that, “An infrastructure package that goes light on climate and clean energy should not count on every Democratic vote.” And liberal members of the House have also said they won’t vote for a package that cuts out such funding; House Democrats only have a nine-member majority right now.
That means actually getting a bill — or two — passed into law will require a bit of a tightrope walk, especially if Republicans see the second bill as undermining or devaluing the bipartisan bill they spent weeks negotiating. GOP senators could see it as an affront, if Biden simply inserts the items they resisted into a separate bill.
“The top two Democrats literally pulled the rug out from under their bipartisan negotiators before they’d even made it to the White House,” McConnell said on the Senate floor Thursday. “An expression of bipartisanship, and then an ultimatum on behalf of your left wing base ... that’s not the way to show you’re serious about getting a bipartisan outcome."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) served up a reminder Thursday that the House isn’t simply a bystander in this whole process — that House Democrats won’t simply pass whatever the Senate sends over unless their priorities are also included.
“We will not take up a bill in the House until the Senate passes the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill,” Pelosi said Thursday. “If there is no bipartisan bill, we’ll just go when the Senate passes a reconciliation bill.”
That was a pretty clear message to Biden and her Democratic colleagues on the other side of the U.S. Capitol.
And Biden seemed to commit to Pelosi’s position later Thursday, saying that “if this [bipartisan deal] is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it.”
While Biden’s agreement with the bipartisan group of senators calls for $973 billion in spending, including $579 billion in new funding, a Democrats-only reconciliation bill could cost roughly $6 trillion. In addition to funding to combat climate change and create clean energy jobs, it could also include measures to expand the child tax credit, offer universal prekindergarten and guarantee paid leave to workers.
The reconciliation bill could also be a vehicle to accomplish another of Biden’s campaign trail promises, unwinding the tax cuts Republicans passed in 2017, and to fund a huge expansion of Medicare.
It isn’t clear if all of those measures are allowable under budget reconciliation rules — and Democrats would need all 50 senators to vote for it for Vice President Harris to cast a tiebreaking vote.
But there’s now a clear path for Biden to get two wins on infrastructure: A genuinely bipartisan bill to fund core infrastructure improvements, and a Democrats-only reconciliation bill to fund Democratic priorities that Republicans can’t stomach voting for.