The battle over raising the country’s debt ceiling is delayed, not over. The government faces another potential shutdown in December. House Democrats are holding up President Biden’s infrastructure legislation. The Democratic Party is still at loggerheads over how to structure its domestic policy bill, and the Republican Party has its own divisions — such as the ongoing clash between former president Donald Trump and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), which ramped up this week.
Every separate piece of legislation — and all the major players who want and don’t want them — are intertwined. So, here is a rundown of the most important of those players, and what they want out of it all.
President Biden
What he wants: Two big legislative wins — a bipartisan infrastructure bill and that big domestic policy bill that could remake America’s health care, climate and social safety-net programs, while raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations to pay for it all. The latter bill, especially, would be the capstone of Democrats’ and Biden’s agenda.
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They also say signing those bills would go a long way in boosting Biden’s sagging approval ratings, which are among the lowest of his presidency so far: 44 percent of people approve and 49 percent disapprove of the job he’s doing, according to a Washington Post average of recent polls.
Biden seems to be prioritizing achieving a deal over specific details in the legislation. He recently sided with liberals who wanted to hold off on voting for his infrastructure bill for the sake of getting a broader deal on all the other things Democrats want. “Let’s try to figure out what we are for … and then we can move ahead,” Biden told Democrats of the second spending bill.
Charles E. Schumer
What he wants: To thread a legislative needle and deliver Biden’s agenda, while keeping the government open and paying its bills as McConnell tries to foment chaos and obstruction. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) notched a temporary win this week when McConnell suddenly offered a path to raising the debt ceiling. But only until December. So this fight is going to happen all over again during the holidays, while Schumer is likely to be busy with the rest of this agenda.
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While Republicans used some hardball tactics on the debt ceiling, Schumer also played a role in pushing things right up to the edge as he tried to get Republicans to back down. Months ago, he could have raised the debt ceiling by a complicated budgetary process that McConnell was demanding Democrats use. But instead, Schumer kept trying to raise the debt ceiling his way only to be blocked by Republicans three times with weeks to go before the United States potentially defaulted. (Yes, this fight has been all about arcane Senate process rather than the actual policy).
Nancy Pelosi
What she wants: More than anything, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) wants to pass this spending bill that would expand the federal safety net in big ways. While the legislation could still be scaled back dramatically, major proposals include universal pre-K, free community college tuition, expanded Medicare, major climate change initiatives and potential changes to immigration.
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While Pelosi has been careful not to explicitly say this will be her last term in Congress, she recently suggested that she sees the pending bill as a capstone to her four-decade political career. “I just told members of my leadership,” she said to reporters in September, “that the reconciliation bill was a culmination of my service in Congress, because it’s about the children.”
This bill is referred to in Congress as “reconciliation” because that’s the budgetary process Democrats are using to pass it and skirt a Republican filibuster in the Senate. (The same process that Republicans want Democrats to use to raise the debt ceiling.)
Mitch McConnell
What he wants: The majority in the Senate back. That’s a possibility, especially if he can make Democrats’ domestic policy bill politically toxic. In part because the legislation is so sprawling, and in part because some of the major items are quite popular, Republicans have yet to settle on a specific attack on it, other than calling it a “reckless tax-and-spending spree” and seeking to connect it to rising inflation.
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One reason McConnell led his caucus in a procedural fight against the debt ceiling was to slow down Democrats’ agenda — staring at the precipice of a default certainly took everyone’s attention away from other matters. And his insistence on making Democrats raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation would require them to set the debt at a certain number — possibly $30 trillion or more — rather than just suspending it for a period of time. While the GOP did plenty to run up that tab, Republicans would eagerly use a number like that in next year’s political ads.
Donald Trump
What he wants: Possibly to be president again. But more immediately, he wants Republicans to gum up Congress even more, and to push McConnell, whom he sees as a traitor for not supporting his bid to overturn the 2020 election results, out of Senate leadership.
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Trump specifically blasted McConnell for offering Democrats an off-ramp to avoid financial catastrophe if the country defaulted on its loans because Congress didn’t raise the debt ceiling.
“Looks like Mitch McConnell is folding to the Democrats, again,” Trump said in a statement this week. “He’s got all of the cards with the debt ceiling, it’s time to play the hand. Don’t let them destroy our Country!”
Joe Manchin III
What he wants: To shrink Democrats’ social safety net legislation to around $1.5 trillion. Negotiations are happening behind closed doors, but, in general, Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) wants the benefits focused on the young and the old, and targeted away from the wealthy and upper-middle class. While he is open to taxing the wealthy and corporations to pay for it, he isn’t willing to go as far as other Democrats.
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He is also opposed to new programs, according to a memo he wrote in July, which could mean he withholds his crucial vote because Democrats create a universal pre-K program, for example, reports The Post’s Paul Kane. Representing a coal state that voted for Trump by nearly 40 points in 2020, he’s also skeptical of some of the legislation’s climate change policies.
Because the Senate is split 50-50, with Vice President Harris as the tiebreaking vote, just one Democrat voting no on this package is enough to sink it.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.)
What she wants: First, for the House to pass the infrastructure bill. She helped negotiate that in the Senate, where 19 Republicans voted for it. But House liberals have held up that bill in their chamber to try to get Sinema and Manchin to agree on a framework for the social spending bill.
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And like Manchin, she wants Democrats’ separate domestic policy legislation to cost much less. But she’s been much quieter about what she could support, frustrating liberals who say they can’t negotiate with a moving target, or no target at all.
Sinema also appears to be skeptical of the major ways Democrats want to pay for it: She has a record of opposing tax hikes, and as a House member from 2013 to 2019, she voted for multiple GOP tax cut bills. Other Democrats also fear that she is opposed to the party’s plan to allow negotiated prices for prescription drugs purchased under Medicare, which is estimated to save the government hundreds of billions of dollars over the next decade.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and the liberal wing of the party
What they want: For centrist Democrats, particularly in the Senate, to get behind $3.5 trillion in gross spending, and ideally not a penny less. As the head of about a 100-member strong Congressional Progressive Caucus, Jayapal speaks for a group that is increasingly willing to use its votes as leverage. To get what they want, the CPC has taken the bipartisan infrastructure bill hostage.
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As many as several dozen liberal lawmakers said they wouldn’t vote for it unless there was some kind of an agreement among all Democrats on a framework on the separate domestic policy bill. It’s a threat they followed through on, and why Pelosi had to pause a vote on the infrastructure bill.
Sanders, meanwhile, has taken the lead in the battle against some moderates’ desire to give the reconciliation bill a $2 trillion haircut. In his view, liberals already compromised in July, when the Senate Budget Committee, which he leads, agreed on a $3.5 trillion bill. But Manchin and Sinema don’t sit on his committee and weren’t party to that deal.
Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) and House Democrats’ centrist wing
What they want: A vote on the infrastructure bill posthaste, which they didn’t get. Gottheimer and other centrists in the House are frustrated that the Democratic-controlled upper chamber is all that so far blocks this bill from becoming law, and their bid to set a Sept. 30 deadline for its passage fizzled when liberals revolted. The Senate passed it this summer, Biden wants to sign it, but Pelosi has yet to bring it up for a vote.
The collapse of the Sept. 30 deal has left the centrists’ influence in doubt. Gottheimer blamed liberals for indulging in Freedom Caucus-like tactics, referencing the hard-right GOP bloc that has bedeviled House Republican leadership. But the centrists themselves used their leverage to force the Sept. 30 deadline, and it took a Capitol Hill visit from Biden himself to make clear: The infrastructure and reconciliation bills would have to move forward in tandem.
The centrists, however, have yet to walk away. They, too, have an interest in passing a reconciliation bill. Gottheimer, for instance, is pushing for a restoration of the state-and-local-tax deduction, also known as SALT, a provision that could save some of his constituents thousands of dollars a year.