The party’s fragile internal peace, which Biden and his team have tended to with great care since he won the Democratic nomination last year, suffered a double blow over the past 24 hours, as moderates clashed with progressives on the Senate floor, placing the White House’s big-ticket “American Rescue Plan” in legislative purgatory on the eve of its expected passage.
Though still likely to succeed on a party-line vote, the shape and scope of the bill remained an open question overnight, as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat, voted for a Republican amendment that would pare back jobless benefits further than what Democrats believed, earlier in the day, had been a compromise with support throughout their ranks. Manchin eventually supported both parties’ amendments, a weird if ultimately meaningless bipartisan stroke that will be wiped off the books when the bill becomes law and the Democratic majority’s version wins out.
Manchin’s eleventh hour deliberations and an earlier vote on a separate amendment, proposed by independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, to raise the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour — which was, as expected, rejected — set off a firestorm among progressive groups and their allies. The clashes underscored abiding divisions within the party, exposed the fragility of its narrow Senate majority and foreshadowed more visceral fights to come, like the brewing clash over a comprehensive new voting rights and election integrity bill passed this week in the House — the kind of legislation that will require all 50 Senate Democrats to get on board along with ten Republicans.
It seems unlikely progressives will be so accommodating when the next battle arises — and there are more than a few on the horizon.
A new phase
Time appears to be ticking down on the “team player” phase of Biden’s young presidency. Next up on the Democratic majority’s docket is an infrastructure spending package that will again lead to conflicts over how and how much to spend — this time with both sides of the party’s ideological split coming into the negotiations feeling owed a bone after agreeing to concessions on the relief bill.
Climate activists, who make up the most politically potent outside progressive groups, believe — and expect — that the next round could represent their last best chance to secure the kind of public investments necessary to seed a new, clean energy economy. But in a party that is all over the map on issues like fracking, and, given the makeup of this Congress, support for such transformative investments will require a number of powerful figures — Manchin, again, comes to mind — to acquiesce to bigger demands than anything in the pending relief bill.
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