The Congressional Progressive Caucus is once again ready to push President Joe Biden’s domestic and climate agenda to fruition, and to do so, they’re more than willing to work with Sen. Joe Manchin, who is saying again he’s open to talking about some parts of it, after having burned it down last December.
“We’re open to that approach,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, chair of the CPC told the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman. Manchin wants the bill to be a deficit cutter and he wants to see tax reform. Okay, says, Jayapal. “Let’s come up with the revenue-producing measures,” she said, and then “look at it from there.”
Pinning Manchin down on what he actually wants has been the problem. That and moving goalposts. “There’s certainly a deal available if he means what he says-but Dems have been down that road before,” Ron Brownstein tweets. “As one D Sen told me earlier, whenever agreement seems close he finds a new objection.”
Manchin’s new demands are using tax increases to reduce the deficit and pay for the climate change part of the package, such as tax incentives for promoting the manufacture and use of alternate energy sources. Once, again, Jayapal says let’s try that. “We’re open to putting some of it toward deficit reduction, and then climate,” Jayapal said. She tugged that his “framework” could encompass any other provisions in the package he might support with any leftover revenues. Like maybe health-care or child-care subsidies.
“We’d have to see all the details, but progressives are absolutely committed to trying to deliver as much as we can,” Jayapal said, even if they can only get some of the provisions included because they “are all big progressive priorities.”
“We want to try and get major things done,” Jayapal continued.
They’ve wanted to get major things done, and have tried their damnedest to make it happen, for months. They even agreed to end their demand that what was the Build Back Better plan be coupled with the infrastructure bill Republicans created with Manchin to allow infrastructure to pass.
They did that based on Biden’s assurances that Manchin was with him, that the West Virginia Democrat was working with him in good faith and Build Back better was going to pass. We all know how that worked out, with Manchin running to Fox News to make the big announcement that he was tanking the bill.
He had been showing his hand for months. While ostensibly negotiating with Biden on BBB, he and fellow spoiler Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) were egging on conservative House Democrats, getting them to stand together in opposition to BBB while pushing the fossil-fuel heavy infrastructure bill. He strung everyone along, saying that it was “going to take a little while” to negotiate a BBB “framework…But with that being said, and we have the trust of each other, then we should be able to vote immediately on the bipartisan infrastructure bill.”
“We have the trust of each other,” he said. A trust he betrayed.
But something has to get done. That’s Jayapal’s position, it’s the position of the progressives she speaks for. Maybe this time it will work. Maybe this time they can isolate Sinema and make something good for the planet, something good for the people, happen.
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