Why aren’t some House Democrats making waves like Manchin and Sinema?
At least five Democratic members of Congress could bolster their own political standing and do the country a favor by becoming as prominent in Washington’s spending debates as Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.
West Virginia’s Manchin and Arizona’s Sinema, both Democrats, are treated by their colleagues and the media as the sole obstacles to passing a version of President Joe Biden’s massive “Build Back Better” spending plan. But the five House members hold just as much power over the package, with just as much political reason to be wary of it.
Reps. Cindy Axne of Iowa, Cheri Bustos of Illinois, Matt Cartwright of Pennsylvania, Ron Kind of Wisconsin, and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan all won election in 2020 by less than 5 percentage points, even as Republican Donald Trump carried their districts in the presidential contest.
A number of others, including Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, won very tight races in districts where the presidential vote was markedly tight. Spanberger made waves immediately after last November’s elections by leading other, less-liberal Democrats in lashing out at party hard-liners for pushing their party too far leftward, costing it seats across the country.
All these would-be centrists have as much reason as Manchin and Sinema to balk at the massive social-spending bill, even the supposedly pared-down “framework” described by Biden on Thursday. The framework is pegged at $1.75 trillion for 10 years, a nearly astronomical number already, but that’s only because budget gimmicks hide its actual, likely cost of $4 trillion.
These Democrats know they ran in a year in which Democratic turnout, driven by antipathy to Trump, was at a record high. Without Trump as a drag on the Republican ticket, their own seats are in serious peril unless they bolster their image as centrists. (Two of them, Kind and Bustos, are not running for reelection, but that frees them to do the fiscally responsible thing without regard to threats from the party’s angry, activist base.)
These swing-seat members of Congress can do the arithmetic of the Democrats’ narrow House majority: If just four House Democrats refuse to vote for the package while all Republicans remain opposed, the bill will fail. They thus hold as much power to stop the big-government madness as Sinema and Manchin do in the Senate.
As indeed they should. They should not just work to whittle down the blowout bill; they should refuse to vote for it, period. The truth is, they already won a victory for an aggressively problem-solving government in the form of a separate, $1.2 trillion “infrastructure” bill . The original Republican offer on infrastructure was for just $568 billion, so the current version that awaits a House vote is twice as “generous” as the GOP wanted.
That infrastructure bill is the “compromise” the more centrist Democrats have won for their more liberal constituents, even without supporting a penny of Biden’s “Build Back Better” plan.
Of course, most of these swing-district Democrats also like elements of “Build Back Better.” Fine. They should insist that those elements be handled individually, in “regular order,” during ordinary bills on appropriations, project authorizations, and entitlement reform. There’s no need to tie all the provisions into one, massive package, especially without hearings or public input.
If these “centrist Democrats” walk away from “Build Back Better” now and say “infrastructure or nothing,” the party’s radicals will howl, but eventually, they will surely take the infrastructure bill that they too, after all, want.
Then, the centrists can carefully work to pass other parts of “Build Back Better” that may be popular, with due diligence. That’s how reformists act — and it’s how they impress independent voters enough to get reelected.
