[Editor's note: This story originally was published by the Real Clear Politics.]
By Philip Wegmann
Real Clear Politics
It was too cold to be extemporaneous, and most of the speakers on the South Lawn of the White House stayed on a message best summarized by Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Now, this bill, as significant as it is, as historic as it is, is part one of two,” she told the bundled-up lawmakers huddling together to stay warm while waiting for President Biden to sign a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill into law. “To lower costs and cut taxes for working families, to tackle the climate crisis at its core,” she continued, “Congress must also pass the Build Back Better.”
Those assembled clapped and cheered just as they had when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi insisted there is “more to come” and when Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer promised that Democrats would “build on today's success by passing the rest of your Build Back Better agenda in the weeks ahead.”
And while House Democrats are expected to vote on that nearly $2 trillion social-spending bill this week, it remains unclear whether their Senate colleagues have the votes to pass it in the upper chamber. Enter Sen. Rob Portman. He spoke for five minutes, just long enough to make Democrats grumble.
The Republican from Ohio, who plans to retire at the end of his second term next year, reminded the White House that it was a coalition of lawmakers who had ensured the physical infrastructure measure’s victory.
“We met, frankly, in response to the initial Biden infrastructure plan, which included tax increases and also included substantial investments in so-called human infrastructure,” he said. And only by removing the taxes and limiting the scope of the bill, in his telling, was Congress able “to find bipartisan consensus on finally fixing our nation's outdated infrastructure.”
Portman and moderate Democrats like Sens. Krysten Sinema and Joe Manchin had come to a consensus by agreeing on a few simple principles: “Core infrastructure only, no tax increases, and no linkage to the broader partisan reconciliation process.”
And it worked. Thirty-two Republicans, 13 in the House and 19 in the Senate, voted to give Biden the first major legislative victory of his presidency. But now that the infrastructure bill is law, Democrats have less leverage to pressure moderates into supporting their reconciliation measure. As Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who voted for the package, argued earlier in the week, Republicans had successfully de-linked the infrastructure bill from the larger social spending proposal to make it harder for Democrats to pass the latter. He called it separating the “sugar from the spinach.”
Choosing to address Biden directly, Portman urged the president and his party not to pass that remaining legislation on a partisan vote, saying, “In a moment you are going to sign this bill. I’ll say that you and I disagree on the tax and spending in the other priority you have, the reconciliation bill, but I think we can both agree that this infrastructure investment shouldn't be a onetime bipartisan accomplishment.”
It was pretty tame talk. The party out of power never likes getting trampled during a partisan vote. All the same, the Portman plea not to abandon bipartisanship was too much for some in the crowd. When he was talking about the reconciliation bill, someone in the audience griped loudly, “Is this the time for that?” Progressives are already angered that the two bills were not welded together. But now the White House can’t lose a single Democratic vote in the Senate if the other half of the spending agenda is to survive. They know it and, according to a Republican familiar with Portman’s thinking, “He knew exactly what he was doing too.”
With Biden moments away from signing the bill, according to the source, Portman felt comfortable “he already had a bird in the hand and could afford a few jabs.” The reference to Biden’s first proposal, the one with the tax increases and the spending that eclipsed the usual definition of infrastructure, was deliberate. One Republican watching said, “Portman twisted the knife a few times.”
The president didn’t take any of it personally. He called Portman a “hell of a good guy,” joking that his words wouldn’t cause him any grief because the Republican will soon retire. And despite the Ohio lawmaker’s advice, Biden committed to going full speed ahead on the reconciliation package: “I'm confident that the House will pass this bill, and then we're going to have to pass it in the Senate.”
While infighting among Democrats has gotten the most attention in recent months, Republicans were at each other’s throats over spending earlier in the year. Fiscal conservatives argued that the GOP should present a united front and oppose both bills. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned in July that if Republicans got on board, “Biden is gonna run around and say, ‘Look, it's all wonderfully bipartisan — I got these happy little Republicans celebrating the spending.” The result: “Republican fingerprints all over the inflation bomb.”
The White House won over enough members of the opposition party to overcome that hesitation. According to one senior Republican involved throughout the infrastructure talks, that doesn’t mean Biden gets the other half of his agenda passed. “I think the whole impact of this negotiation is that its passage has so completely derailed the reconciliation product,” the source told RCP. “Some people wonder if anything will get across now.”
[Editor's note: This story originally was published by the Real Clear Politics.]
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