For now, at least, he seems to be getting the rhetorical benefit of the doubt from both groups, after a weekend of clarifying, pulling back and promising that everything will be fine.
“I gave my word to support the [bipartisan] infrastructure plan, and that’s what I intend to do,” Biden clarified in a statement Saturday. “I fully stand behind it without reservation or hesitation.”
But that wasn’t entirely clear after a Thursday news conference announcing the deal.
The weekend’s infrastructure imbroglio hinged on one specific comment Biden made at that news conference. Everyone knew Democrats were in the process of creating their own second, more expensive infrastructure package that they hope to pass through the reconciliation process, which they could do without a single Republican vote in the Senate. But Biden, like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) did the same day, said he needed a separate bill passed via reconciliation before he would sign off on a separate, bipartisan deal.
“It’s in tandem,” he insisted. But while Democrats had been promising publicly to work on a separate reconciliation bill for a while, it was the first time Democratic leaders had conditioned the bipartisan bill’s passage on there also being a separate, Democrats-only bill.
The Republicans who’d spent weeks negotiating the bipartisan bill said they felt betrayed, as if Biden had involved them in crafting a strategy that could end up with Democrats just doing the big stuff without them — while claiming to have gotten major bipartisan buy-in on their proposal.
“No deal by extortion!” tweeted Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), who had endorsed the agreement.
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), one of the Republicans who negotiated the deal, told Politico he was “blindsided” by Biden’s demand.
And some Republicans pointed out that a bipartisan deal isn’t much of a deal at all, if Democrats are simply going to pass the measures Republicans wouldn’t agree to in the bipartisan proposal.
“Any compromise on paid-for infrastructure is a bad deal so long as President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Schumer insist on pursuing a multi-trillion dollar tax-and-spend reconciliation package,” Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) wrote in a statement.
Biden quickly backtracked, releasing a statement Saturday, then deploying a small army of surrogates on the Sunday television shows. In one illustration of how delicate things are, senior White House adviser Cedric L. Richmond, a former member of Congress, refused to flat-out answer whether Biden would sign the bipartisan bill, despite the president’s statement Saturday. And Richmond essentially conceded that Democrats will pass whatever they want in a second bill.
“An important part of this is to say where Democrats and Republicans can agree, we should agree, move on, create progress for the American people,” Richmond said on CNN. “And where we don’t agree, we can fight and we can fight hard. And that’s what we expect to do on American Families Plan. But we also expect to win.”
Expecting to win sounds a lot different from a bipartisan negotiation — especially one that resulted in just over one-fourth of the money Biden had asked for in his original $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. But it’s also a fair reflection of Democrats’ strategy — and the GOP seems to know it.
“You don’t have to pretend to believe that Republicans haven’t been reading the news for the last two months when legislative leaders said explicitly that we were moving on two tracks,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) asserted on Twitter.
Now, things seem to have settled into an uneasy detente. Some of the moderate Republicans who negotiated the bipartisan bill have basically said that what the Democrats do outside of this bill is up to them — if they can settle their own intraparty divisions and get all 50 Senate Democrats onboard.
“This is a bill which stands on its own,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah), one of the architects of the bipartisan bill, said Sunday. “I am totally confident the president will sign it if it comes to his desk. … Republicans are going to support true infrastructure that doesn’t raise taxes, but Democrats want to do a lot of other things, and I think they’re the ones that are having a hard time deciding how to proceed.”
Republican leaders not involved in the negotiations were less magnanimous. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Monday called for Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Pelosi to publicly disavow linking the two bills.
“Republicans have been negotiating in bipartisan good faith to meet the real infrastructure needs of our nation,” McConnell said in a statement. “The president cannot let congressional Democrats hold a bipartisan bill hostage over a separate and partisan process.”
That suggests McConnell would apply plenty of pressure on moderate Republicans to oppose the bipartisan package.
Romney’s confidence in the bipartisan bill, and moderate Republicans’ apparent willingness to back it, for now (Democrats need at least 10 to join them), seem to be an acknowledgment that the GOP can’t simply have a blanket position against infrastructure investments. The bipartisan deal would add $573 billion in new infrastructure funding. But Democrats want to spend potentially trillions more on additional expensive measures such as funding to combat climate change and create green-energy jobs, and for infrastructure-adjacent items such as funding for care for the elderly, and a massive expansion of Medicaid.
In that sense, it’s fellow Democrats that Biden now has to turn his attention to. He needs to come up with the framework of a Democrats-only bill that placates liberals, and delivers on big campaign promises, while not being too loud about it, at the risk of upsetting or embarrassing the moderate Republicans he needs to keep onboard for the first bill to pass.
And that raises the question of why liberals felt the need to pressure Biden on a reconciliation bill to begin with; they could have simply waited for a bipartisan bill to pass in the Senate, then moved on to their own second bill, without endangering the first. In some ways, Democrats’ apparent belief that the threat of a reconciliation bill was necessary pressure to bring Republicans to the table on a bipartisan bill has instead left Republicans wondering what’s in it for them at all.
Neither bill has actually been written, but to keep liberal Democrats and moderate Republicans happy (sorry conservatives, you’re mostly left out of this equation) will require a hugely delicate dance, and a more thought-out and considered communications strategy than Biden put on display Thursday.