THIS WEEK INSIDE THE BIG TENT:

Who knows how things will actually play out, but as of this writing Democratic leaders seem to be having a crisis of confidence that the Build Back Better Act will ever become law, let alone before the end of the year.

The snag, like all the previous snags, stems from the fact that Joe Manchin has imposed conditions on the legislation that mutually contradict one another. In this case: He wants the bill’s programs to be enacted permanently, but for a 10-year cost of no more than $1.75 trillion, fully paid for. 

Liberal wonks have praised Manchin for insisting that Democrats prioritize a small number of permanent programs, to insulate them from future GOP sabotage, without seeming to realize how crippling his demands are in combination. Permanency is a reasonable approach in theory, but completely untenable under the spending cap Manchin (in concert with Kyrsten Sinema) has imposed. The 10 year cost of Joe Biden’s child tax credit alone is $1.6 trillion. To meet Manchin’s requirements, Democrats would either have to jettison the centerpiece of the bill, jettison almost every other item in it (including its non-negotiable climate-change provisions) or impose severe means testing on the credit itself, which millions of middle-income parents would experience next year as a large tax increase.

At previous impasses, Democrats have responded to Manchin’s demands by conceding to them or by expecting him (not unreasonably) to become distracted by some other point of view and dial them back. This time, though, the party has feinted in a way that only makes sense if they see the need to cover for a crushing defeat. Given that possibility, I think rank and file members of the party should start to grapple with how to respond to failure on an almost unfathomable scale. 

Specifically, Democrats have seeded news stories about how they’ve shelved Build Back Better in order to make an aggressive push on democracy protection. The problem is, they’ve foreshadowed a pivot without any indication that they’ve overcome the internal obstacles to passing election-related legislation.

It’d be a wonderful surprise if they’d made some secret breakthrough and planned to spring it on all of us before the Senate breaks for Christmas. And if they had made a breakthrough on democracy protection, it’d be perfectly fine to reverse the sequencing of the agenda; take the vote when you have the votes, even if it means BBB takes a couple extra weeks. 

Early in the year, I think Democrats believed sequencing was important. If Democrats do pass democracy protection, it’ll require a change to filibuster rules, and Republicans will feign more outrage than we’ve seen since the days of the Affordable Care Act debate. The bipartisan infrastructure bill probably wouldn’t have been possible after such a rupture, so Democrats wanted to put that negotiation first; also, twisting Manchin’s and Sinema’s arms over the filibuster rules might disincline them to work on any forward looking agenda items, so waiting until Build Back Better passed also made some sense. The squandering of nine months has upended that calculation in favor of movement on any available front. 

But there’s no sign of movement on either! I’ve read vague reports of Democrats ramping up pressure on Manchin and Sinema to soften their opposition to filibuster reform, and Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) gave an inspiring speech about it. But pressure has been brought to bear in the past, and Warnock has been a beacon of moral clarity on this issue for months, to no avail. If progress were imminent, you might expect Chuck Schumer to make a statement about how this week’s stunning January 6 select committee revelations have left Senate Democrats no choice but to act. Instead those revelations came and went without broader consequences (the Mark Meadows contempt citation notwithstanding) and democracy protection looks stuck as ever. 

And if that’s right, Democrats aren’t pivoting to voting rights because the votes materialized; they’re “pivoting” to voting rights in the spirit of “infrastructure week,” to paper over the fact that their top priority (BBB) is stuck, too.

Needless to say, the total collapse of the Democratic agenda would augur terribly for the party’s political fortunes, and, thus, the fate of the country. But the direness of the situation may not have sunk in quite as deeply as it should. Morale among Democratic organizers and activists would collapse; millions of families benefiting from Biden’s child tax credit would experience the failure of BBB as a substantial tax increase; then Democrats would have to contest the election on a playing field so uneven that they’d have a hard time winning even if BBB became law and the party got its mojo back. 

It would be a staggering bloodbath. In September, Jonathan Chait, who’s more forgiving of Democratic Party leaders than I am, argued that if Biden’s only lasting accomplishment is the bipartisan infrastructure bill, “it would be a failed presidency.”

Passing that bill alone, rather than nothing at all, would amount to “the difference between finishing 0-16 and finishing 1-15,” he added. “The D establishment would be discredited. The left would just want to burn the whole party to the ground. And it would be very hard to argue against them…if the only permanent change Biden signs into law is a plussed up highway bill, there's no defending that. It's a failure and there will be a reckoning.”

I wish I could argue with that, but I can’t. And here’s the uncomfortable corollary: If party leaders strand Democratic voters with nothing but the fear of a Republican resurgence to motivate them, it’s incongruous to beseech those voters to buck up and remain engaged, without allowing accountability for those who did the stranding. 

It wasn’t progressives (members of Congress or outside activists) who set the party on this course; progressives had different ideas, but lined up to support Joe Biden’s agenda. It was Biden and Schumer who agreed to split the economic agenda in two and give Republicans partial credit for the infrastructure piece that passed; it was the two of them who gave Manchin and Sinema more than half a year to joyride with the party’s approval rating; it was Schumer who allowed the party to build its expectations of the possible around a $3.5 trillion topline figure, knowing Manchin had privately pegged his preference at less than half of that. 

Those were the biggest errors, and Nancy Pelosi didn’t commit any of them—the House actually passed the Build Back Better Act! But she did use her principle political skill (whipping votes for legislation) to delink the bipartisan infrastructure bill from BBB, over the objections of progressives who recognized that’d leave BBB terribly vulnerable to Manchin’s whims. More generally, we should question whether it’s wise to continue vesting so much power in a leader whose main asset (again, whipping votes for legislation) has been so devalued by a dysfunctional 50-50 Senate and the era of zero-sum partisan warfare. It was Pelosi who dropped a grand piano on Biden’s campaign promise to forgive student debt, and beyond the realm of policy she has a tendency to do things like defend the right of members of Congress to trade stocks because, “We have a free-market economy, [and] they should be able to participate in that.”

If, with the threat of fascism looming so close, leaders preside over a humiliating failure that leaves stakeholders empty-handed and candidates defenseless against minority rule, they should resign; the leaders who replace them should impose internal sanctions on the Sinemas and Manchins in Congress who broke faith with the party; and it shouldn't just be newsletter writers demanding it, but prominent and allied House and Senate Democrats, too. That at least would provide Democratic voters a level of recognition that things went sideways and the party isn't asking them to place their confidence in the same failed arrangement all over again.

Since this is the last Big Tent of the year, I want to close on a sunnier note, because I don’t think failure is written, even if it seems likelier at the moment than success. I think the expiration of the child tax credit might be disruptive and damaging enough to make Manchin and Sinema get over themselves and vote for a pretty good version of BBB. When the student-loan payment moratorium ends, Biden might realize he’s better off keeping his campaign promise to forgive student debt, rather than renege on it. The democracy-protection situation seems very dire, but perhaps Senate Democrats really are closer than we realize to some accommodation that will allow legislation to pass on a party-line basis—that would certainly make Schumer’s determination to hold failed test vote after failed test vote seem less delusional than it does at the moment. And if most of those things go better than it looks like they will as of this writing, then you can imagine party morale improving. If Democrats find the spring in their step, and the economy continues to hum, and the public-health situation improves over the next few months, you can even imagine them doing pretty well in an election against a Trump-festooned insurrectionist party. 

Nevertheless: Brace for the alternative.