OPINION | JOHN BRUMMETT: The fleeting joy of the deal

There was bipartisan joy in Washington last week. It lasted several minutes.

Twenty-one senators as evenly split as 21 could be--11 Republicans and 10 Democrats counting one independent who caucuses with the Democrats--acted in the national if not partisan interest. They hammered out a compromise to spend $1.2 trillion on traditional infrastructure including water systems and broadband, along with a little money on electric vehicles and climate change.

President Biden strolled out with several of those senators to the front of the West Wing and told reporters that he had agreed to the deal and that the word of the senators was good enough for him.

On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, elected by the same number of people seating such luminaries as Rick Crawford and Bruce Westerman, decreed to reporters that there would be no passage of that infrastructure bill on her side unless a companion and larger bill currently unwritten to spend for climate and social programs was passed by the Senate.

The infrastructure compromise bill could be passed over a Senate filibuster with the compromising 10 Republicans, assuming all Democrats could be herded. But U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren said she wouldn't be herded unless the other bill was passed.

Warren got 2.8 million votes for the Democratic presidential nomination last year. That was 7.7 percent. She got that many only by staying in the race pointlessly a lot longer than Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar.

Biden got 19.1 million, which was 51.8 percent.

Clearly, Warren is not reflective of the general population. But she's not even reflective of her own party's population. For that matter, she finished third in her own state's presidential primary. So, sure, it's quite efficient politics for her to block a bridge, a road, a new water system and extended broadband.

The reconciliation bill could be passed by 50 Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris, assuming all Democrats could be herded. But centrist Democratic U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia says he won't join the herd until he sees the bill and the pay-for provisions. He's from a fossil fuel-dependent state. And a 50-50 Senate permits not a single partisan defection.

Minutes after his compromise celebration, Biden got asked about Pelosi's decree otherwise. Your president wilted instantly.

He said he wouldn't sign that infrastructure bill--the one he'd excitedly proclaimed the trustworthy deal on -- unless he also got that other bill on his desk.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was chortling about a presidential cave-in occurring so abruptly that heads were spinning. Most compromisers were reported to be confused at best. The motor-mouth among them, Lindsey Graham, was crying double-cross.

Two days later, Biden was saying he hadn't said what he said. He was walking back his walk-back.

Some quipster called it moonwalking, meaning walking backward by appearing to walk forward, or vice versa.

It's all not really all that confusing.

First, Biden wants to have it all ways. He wants to appear jovially bipartisan while keeping his left flank happy.

Second, Biden has a history of blabbing into gaffe, and it was never reasonable to think his staff could keep that from happening forever.

Third, Pelosi has her own caucus concerns and couldn't sell out her "progressives," as they're called.

Fourth, our polarized political bases are dysfunctional and no single moment of détente at the White House was going to repair that.

So, what's going to happen? At this point, all possibilities exist.

The Democrats could fail to get 50 votes in the Senate on the reconciliation bill. The left base of the Democrats and the right base of the Republicans could nix the compromise on infrastructure. Somehow Biden's optimism that both will get done might be borne out.

Through it all, someone ought to say a naïve word for the trans-partisan ideal.

Ideally, the bipartisan compromise on traditional infrastructure would be treated as a stand-alone measure and the broader spending would be treated as a stand-alone measure.

Biden would embrace the stand-alone compromise, separately endorse budget reconciliation on other spending, and push separately to get both passed.

If both couldn't pass, he would be all right with sending only the stand-alone infrastructure compromise to the House, putting at Pelosi's doorstep the responsibility of whether to let nothing pass unless everything passed.

For the record: Biden got 81 million votes for president, the most ever, and millions within those voted to reduce Pelosi's majority in the House. Maybe Biden could invoke mathematics and advocate for a little of that regnat populus for a change.

And since we're being naïve in fantasizing of an ideal: I'd like to see those 21 senators defect into their own caucus, called "The Reasonables," and tell grand poobahs McConnell and Pelosi to run everything through them.


John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Upcoming Events