The rule that torpedoed much of President Biden’s first-term agenda exists thanks to one of the most infamous villains in early American history.
A relic of a misbegotten edit to the Senate’s rules that Aaron Burr proposed in the early nineteenth century, the filibuster has survived down the years as one of a minority party’s most powerful checks on the will of the majority. As it is currently written, the filibuster rule requires sixty votes to call a halt to debate on a bill in the Senate. Stopping debate is a necessary preliminary step to passing a bill, because Senate procedures otherwise allow for unlimited discussion.
The unlimited-debate rule, which allows for the traditional filibuster practice of talking a bill to death, has a murky and ignoble history. Its creation was, more or less, a mistake no one noticed at the time.
America’s Founding Fathers were preoccupied with the question of minority rights. Most of the founders you’ve heard of—James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson—tended to believe when push came to shove, the majority should rule. Madison called this “the republican principle.”
Madison and his allies, however, were hard-pressed by small states, like Delaware, who feared being dominated by the larger ones, like Virginia. Those small states threatened the unity of the Constitutional Convention, and their reservations about this issue delayed its work for weeks. The creation of the Senate itself was the resolution of this conflict; known as “the Great Compromise,” the founders hit upon the idea of a bicameral legislature, with the House apportioned based on population and the Senate where each state would have equal representation, no matter its size.
Nowhere was it suggested that the Senate should have unlimited debate, or that a supermajority should be required to pass legislation. It was not in the debates at the Constitutional Convention, not in the correspondence of the founding generation, not in the famous Federalist Papers authored by Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay selling the new Constitution to the American public, and not in the text of the Constitution itself.
Madison himself clearly believed that the Constitution provided for most big issues to be resolved by simple majorities.
“If a faction consists of less than a majority, relief is supplied by the republican principle, which enables the majority to defeat its sinister views by regular vote,” Madison wrote in Federalist No. 10. “It may clog the administration, it may convulse the society; but it will be unable to execute and mask its violence under the forms of the Constitution.”
In the beginning, the Senate had normal parliamentary rules similar to those found in the House. These rules contained a number of mechanisms for ending debate on a particular measure, the most salient of which was the “previous question” motion. Though not commonly used this way at the turn of the nineteenth century, the previous question rule allowed a simple majority to end debate on any given subject. The House resolved its own filibuster crisis with this rule during a debate over the early stages of the War of 1812. The Senate might have used the rule in the same way, but the founding generation’s famous scoundrel, Aaron Burr, had already done his work.
As Thomas Jefferson’s vice president, Burr served as president of the Senate from 1801 to 1805. It was a tumultuous time in Burr’s life. By the last month of Jefferson’s first term in office, Burr had been dropped from the Democratic-Republican ticket for Jefferson’s reelection, lost a race for governor of New York, and been indicted twice for killing Alexander Hamilton—whom he blamed for his loss—in a duel. Rather than face justice in New Jersey and New York, where warrants had been issued for his arrest, Burr would soon flee to Georgia. From there, he became involved in dubious conspiracies to carve a new country out of the West.
But, in February and March 1805, Burr was still doing his job in Washington and presiding over the Senate’s particularly thorny impeachment trial of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase for excessive partisanship. The justice was safely acquitted, and Burr’s conduct of the trial was widely praised in Washington. He acted, according to an official Senate history, “with the dignity and impartiality of an angel, but with the rigor of a devil.” After a few days’ work, Burr took the occasion to deliver a farewell oration.
Burr’s words were clearly stirring. Though the full text of his speech has been lost to history, a few quotes have come down to us including a reporter’s account of the speech.
“This House is a sanctuary,” Burr said. “A citadel of law, of order, and of liberty, and it is here—it is here, in this exalted refuge; here, if anywhere, will resistance be made to the storms of political phrensy and the silent arts of corruption; and if the Constitution be destined ever to perish by the sacrilegious hands of the demagogue or the usurper, which God avert, its expiring agonies will be witnessed on this floor.”
Beyond that lofty rhetoric, which sounds prophetic in light of January 6, Burr made some concrete recommendations.
Sarah Binder, a historian at George Washington University and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, found an entry in future president John Quincy Adams’s diary describing Burr’s speech and his recommendations in more detail.
“He mentioned one or two of the rules which appeared to him to need a revisal, and recommended abolition of that respecting the previous question, which he said had in the four years [of Burr’s vice presidency] been only once taken, and that was upon an amendment,” Adams wrote of Burr. “This was a proof that it could not be necessary, and all its purposes were certainly much better answered by the question of indefinite postponement.”
Burr was held in such high regard—notwithstanding his indictments for slaying another Founding Father—that the change was made with no apparent difficulty at the next rules revision. For years, no one noticed a difference. But with the coming of the slavery crisis, senators grew to learn that without the previous question motion they could hold the floor as long as they wanted to prevent a vote, and no one had the power to stop them. Indefinite postponement of the measure under consideration, Burr’s recommended alternative, supplied no remedy at all; in fact, it was exactly what most senators who used the filibuster typically wanted to achieve.
Allowing one lawmaker to hold up proceedings forever was untenable, but nevertheless, the senators were not inclined to give up their newfound privilege entirely and submit to Madison’s “republican principle.” Instead, the Senate created a cloture rule allowing for debate to end only with a supermajority vote. The Senate had accidentally invented, and then intentionally embraced, a greater check on the will of the majority than the founders ever intended.
Throughout the twentieth century, the filibuster’s most common use was to torpedo civil rights bills. The procedure has been used to stop laws protecting the rights of Black Americans for a hundred years. Before the partisan realignments of the 1960s, the filibuster was the favored tool of the racist Southern Democrats to preserve Jim Crow racial codes. Since Nixon’s Southern Strategy essentially flipped the two parties’ positions on race, it has been the preferred method Republicans use to suppress minority turnout and oppose voting reforms.
Within the past two decades, the filibuster increasingly became a tool of massive obstruction—stopping ordinary legislation, blocking judicial nominations from going forward, and even preventing new presidents from staffing the federal government with executive appointees whose jobs require Senate confirmation.
The procedure’s overuse in recent years has led to a pair of majority revolts that eliminated the supermajority filibuster rule for nominations. That process began in November 2013 with the Democrats, who were frustrated by years-long Republican filibusters of Obama’s executive-branch and judicial nominees. In response, then Majority Leader Harry Reid employed a maneuver widely dubbed the “nuclear option.”
Reid raised a point of order asserting—contrary to the then-applicable rules—that cloture could be invoked for all nominees other than nominations to the Supreme Court by a simple majority vote. When this point of order was denied, Reid appealed to the full Senate, and a simple majority vote sustained his new, whittled-down version of the filibuster.
Another revolt, this time by Republicans, resolved the conflict that erupted following the sudden death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in February 2016. At the time, with eleven months to go in Barack Obama’s term, Republican leaders refused to consider or even hold a hearing for his nominee to replace Scalia, Merrick Garland—who threatened to bring an end to conservatives’ 5–4 majority on the court. When Donald Trump took office in January 2017 and submitted his own nominee, Neil Gorsuch, aggrieved Democrats filibustered. In April 2017, McConnell invoked the same procedure Reid had used to break their filibuster. His point of order and subsequent appeal eliminated the exception for Supreme Court nominations. Republicans confirmed Gorsuch by a simple majority vote, 54–45.
Reid and McConnell’s dueling maneuvers illustrated why many senators were reluctant to touch the filibuster. Any changes could be quickly followed by aggressive gains for the party in power.
Following these court fights, the only remaining use of the filibuster’s supermajority requirement was to permanently stall ordinary legislation.
Conventional wisdom holds that each new president gets a “honeymoon.” It’s a period of a hundred days or so when it’s simply easier to get things done. Your mandate is fresh; your popularity is high; your party in Congress is behind you; your enemies are demoralized; your scandals—should they exist—have yet to emerge. It’s a good time to get a big bill passed.
But even in his “honeymoon” phase, victories on Capitol Hill never came particularly easily for President Joe Biden. It quickly became apparent that all fifty Democrats in the Senate were not fully on board with his planned agenda. The first cracks in the Senate coalition began on an issue that Biden had deliberately tried to avoid—filibuster reform.
In early 2021, with Biden newly in office, progressives were eager to get rid of the filibuster altogether in order to pass the agenda crafted by the unity task forces. They were also hoping to enact transformational policies that would confront some of the lack of campaign finance regulations and gerrymandering that helped lead to Trump.
“I think it’s on a lot of people’s minds because the dark money problem and the voting rights problem are of such concern and the pathway to solutions there is obstructed by the cloture rule,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said about the prospect of filibuster reform in a 2021 interview, “but I don’t think we have consensus yet on what the strategy should be to try to solve that.”
They were trying to ensure the party’s future. Abolishing the filibuster could be the decisive first step to both give Biden legislative accomplishments to run for reelection on and to shape a fairer environment for him to run in. While senators weren’t sure they were going to confront the filibuster, for some Democrats, the imperative to get it done was quite obvious.
“They have to get rid of the filibuster. They just have to,” Obama’s speechwriter Cody Keenan fumed, also in a 2021 interview. “It’s really, really frustrating.”
While Whitehouse and others were concerned about Senate norms and the reluctant colleagues who wanted to defend them, Keenan simply pointed to the stakes of the fight. He feared the party was sabotaging itself with excessive deference to congressional traditions.
“I guarantee you most of the pissed off people out there do not give a fuck about parliamentary procedure and the ins and outs of the filibuster fight,” Keenan said. “Unless they get rid of it and do big shit in the next two years, then we’re just doomed in 2022 and beyond.”
Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saw the looming fight in 2021 and moved early to head the progressives off. With the Senate split 50–50 in the first months of Biden’s term, McConnell and Democratic Majority Leader Chuck Schumer were hashing out a power-sharing agreement. McConnell stalled the process and said he would not move forward without a promise from Schumer to preserve the filibuster.
In a memo to his Republican colleagues, McConnell suggested they needed to protect the filibuster quickly before its opponents managed to tie the issue to some great moral cause or piece of popular legislation. He characterized the effort to preserve the filibuster as a fight to save the Senate from destruction.
“I believe the time is ripe to address this issue head on before the passions of one particular issue or another arise,” McConnell wrote. “We will need unity and the support of each of you as this may take time to work through.”
Schumer rejected McConnell’s demand that he commit to keeping the filibuster on general principle.
“We are not letting McConnell dictate how the Senate operates,” Schumer declared.
But after a few days of the standoff, two Democratic senators—Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona—broke ranks. The pair sided with the Republicans and vowed they would never vote to kill the filibuster.
In winning the filibuster debate, McConnell had also succeeded in detaching two Democratic senators from the rest of their party. No policy, nor any great social cause, had been much discussed. That was exactly the way McConnell had wanted it. And this two-member crack in the Democrats’ coalition would gradually grow to threaten Biden’s agenda and shape the principal political dramas of his first two years in office.
Having learned that McConnell would never compromise on any legislation, the administration designed the pandemic relief bill known as the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 to avoid the filibuster and pass by an alternative process known as budget reconciliation. This maneuver eliminated the prospect of a Republican filibuster in the Senate, limited the bill’s potential scope, and subjected it to an arcane and time-consuming procedure that afforded every senator the opportunity to offer amendments.
Reconciliation allows legislation to bypass the filibuster as long as it affects the budget—and does so without adding to the deficit. The process is enforced by the Senate parliamentarian, an unelected legislative-branch employee, who typically determines whether a given provision fits within the proper scope of the process. The parliamentarian quickly became an obstacle to Biden’s agenda.
One of Biden’s proposed features of the bill was hiking the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour—a cherished progressive goal—but the parliamentarian ruled it couldn’t be included, an outcome Biden had predicted. This set up one of the first flashpoints between progressives and moderates in the Senate.
Seeking to force a vote, Senator Bernie Sanders offered an amendment to reinsert the minimum-wage provision, and when the parliamentarian again ruled it out of order, he moved to appeal the ruling. In the ensuing vote, seven Democrats and the independent senator from Maine, Angus King, voted along with all the Republicans to sustain the parliamentarian’s decision. Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona stole the show with a theatrically exaggerated thumbs-down gesture. Turning on her heel, she strode out of the chamber and into progressives’ pantheon of villains.
Sinema’s star turn somewhat obscured the names of the other seven Democratic senators opposed to moving forward with raising the minimum wage. For the record, they were: Manchin; Tom Carper and Chris Coons of Delaware; Jon Tester of Montana; and Maggie Hassan and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire.
While there weren’t enough Democratic votes to move the $15 minimum wage as a standalone amendment, many progressives were confident it would have passed if the parliamentarian had allowed Biden to include it as part of the larger reconciliation bill. This suggested another path for Majority Leader Schumer: Fire the parliamentarian. It was a step progressives were eager to see him take.
“We should have been willing to get rid of the parliamentarian to get a $15 wage,” Representative Ro Khanna of California said in an interview for this book conducted months after the fight.
Schumer opted to follow the more standard operating procedure. When it reached the final votes, in late February and early March 2021, the American Rescue Plan passed with slender margins—50–49 in the evenly divided Senate and 219–212 in the closely split House. In the lower chamber, two Democrats joined Republicans in voting against it.
The American Rescue Plan was an impactful piece of legislation, even if many key parts of it did not last beyond 2021. Perhaps no aspect had a greater effect than its expanded Child Tax Credit.
The credit served as an example of how meaningful even a relatively small legislative change could be. But it also became an example of how resistant Manchin and Sinema were to change and how their whims could dictate outcomes for Biden and progressives.
A brainchild of Democratic senators Michael Bennet of Colorado, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and Cory Booker of New Jersey, the provision built on a long-standing $2,000 per child federal tax benefit. For lower-income and some middle-class families, the ARP expanded that credit to $3,600 per child under the age of six and $3,000 per child between the ages of six and seventeen. Crucially, for the first time it made the credit fully refundable—meaning that very low-income families could claim the full benefit in cash, $300 paid monthly, even if their tax liability was less than the total.
The effect was dramatic. Expansion of the tax credit kept six million American children out of poverty in the first month of its implementation in 2021, according to one study. However, the change was not a permanent one.
Because the American Rescue Plan, which passed in March 2021, was an emergency COVID measure, many of its provisions, including the Child Tax Credit, were set to expire at the end of that year. Progressives—including Sanders—scrambled to save the tax credit. They were overruled. The Biden administration promised that a permanent provision would be included in the flagship spending bill they planned to introduce next, in April or May 2021. Yet, once again, Biden and progressives would find their priorities thwarted by Manchin and Sinema.
After the slimmed-down version of Biden’s COVID relief package passed, a pair of voting rights and election reform bills that progressives had yearned for, which were the Democrats’ next priority for 2021, passed the House and got filibustered into oblivion in the Senate. Even though Manchin and Sinema supported the measures, they both said that the goal of making American elections fairer and more accessible was superseded by their desire to preserve the filibuster and prevent the majority from ruling without wider consensus.
That early fight set the tone for Biden’s first two years in office. The legislative filibuster was alive and well. With no votes in the Senate to spare, any Democratic senator could in theory kill any bill or nomination, barring an unlikely epiphany from a Republican senator (or eleven of them together, in the case of non-reconciliation legislation). Manchin and Sinema, radical centrists, were the most likely to kill any given bill. Everything had to go through them.
Because Manchin and Sinema were often in dissent together on major pieces of legislation, they were often spoken of in the same sentence. However, the White House worked to learn their idiosyncrasies—and cater to them. It was vital if Biden hoped to get anything done.
“They’re different politicians; they have different equities; they come from different states,” one senior White House official said of the pair. “While they get sort of get lumped together … we think they’re very different, and we try to take an approach that is tailor-made for each one of them.”
In the spring of 2021, with the American Rescue Plan enacted, the Biden team turned towards the signature domestic spending legislation he had campaigned on—the one he had promised progressives would include the expanded Child Tax Credit and so much more. The work on the Hill began in March 2021 on a reconciliation bill styled the Build Back Better Act, or BBB—a direct reference to Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan.
The fight that developed over BBB saw the centrist Democratic resistance to Joe Biden—or at least their resistance to the progressive set of ideas he had campaigned on—take on its full scope and compass.
Biden may have hoped that he’d get his signature domestic policies enacted by a united Democratic Party at the tail end of his honeymoon. What ensued was a torturous seventeen-month journey in which the project seemed to die multiple deaths.
The long saga of intrigues and disappointments would include, among other things, multiple alliances between centrist Democrats and Republicans, a bipartisan infrastructure package that appears to have been intended to spoil the pitch for BBB, and the writing and rewriting of Joe Biden’s political obituary.
In perhaps the clearest sign of how much power the radical centrists were wielding over the president, along the way the legislation lost the name of Biden’s campaign slogan. It was reborn with a name that Manchin chose: the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA.
As 2021 dragged on and Biden’s agenda twisted in the wind, the White House was gripped by fear and frustration. Their poll numbers and prospects for the coming midterm elections were gloomy. Staffers who had been there since the campaign were feeling drained and defeated.
“The vibes are bad,” a senior White House aide told us in the middle of those dark days. “A lot of the people in this generation are people who have been working straight through since the primary. You think about it, these are people who have not taken a vacation since January of 2019. People are fucking fried, the news is bad, the numbers are bad, the midterm looks like it’s not going to be awesome. I truly don’t think it’s too late to turn it around, but we’re losing daylight, and it’s not the most fun.”
Like a latter-day moderate version of the Boston Tea Party, the rebellion in the Democratic ranks was all about taxes. Shortly after the plan was introduced, a group of centrist Northeastern Democrats large enough to scuttle any bill in the narrowly divided House issued a demand that the next major legislative package include a repeal of the cap on SALT, the federal tax deduction for state and local taxes.
The cap had been imposed during the Trump administration as a cost-saving measure, but it was also widely seen as a vindictive swipe at the “coastal elites” and liberal jurisdictions that tend to have higher tax levels and lower levels of support for Republicans. It was an ironic piece of policymaking because the cap was a progressive tax reform, the kind typically favored by Democrats, but it also happened to serve Trump-era Republicans’ overriding interest in culture war and revenge.
The group included Tom Suozzi of New York and Bill Pascrell, Mikie Sherrill, and Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey. The cap they wanted to lift by its nature mostly affected wealthier families—people who generally paid a lot of state income and property taxes, but the advocates for repeal nevertheless cast it as a middle-class issue. They had a point; homeowners who didn’t consider themselves inordinately rich were paying higher state taxes and feeling the burden.
A full repeal of the SALT cap would be expensive and regressive, eating up around $475 billion in five years, with $400 billion of that going to the top 5 percent of households, according to one nonpartisan estimate. It would also be supremely popular in high-tax blue states, and both Republicans and Democrats who represented areas that would see relief from a repeal could expect to be strongly pressured by their constituents to support it.
The four Democrats who made the demand soon had backup. More blue-state Democrats rallied to their side. They teamed up with a group of Republicans and christened themselves the SALT caucus. The coalition was led on the Democratic side by Josh Gottheimer. A stocky Harvard-trained lawyer, Gottheimer won election to the House in 2016 in a New Jersey district spread across several prosperous New York City suburbs. He had quickly become a villain in the eyes of many progressives.
Gottheimer’s pedigree was almost perfectly designed to provoke the left’s ire. Before Congress, he worked for years in close proximity to the Democratic operative Mark Penn, who was one of the chief strategists from Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign against Barack Obama. Gottheimer followed Penn from the PR firm Burson-Marsteller to various campaign posts and to a strategy job at Microsoft. He is often described as Penn’s protégé. In Congress, Gottheimer co-chairs the Problem Solvers Caucus, which is closely aligned with the centrist advocacy group No Labels, which is run by Nancy Jacobson—who just so happens to be Penn’s wife.
The Problem Solvers’ stock-in-trade is across-the-aisle compromise. However, progressives contend that the Problem Solvers use their bipartisan branding mainly to subvert progressive policy.
“Josh Gottheimer … is definitely the number-one official on the Hill who’s working to sabotage Joe Biden,” one progressive activist said.
In addition to the SALT gambit, Gottheimer and the Problem Solvers also crafted a plan in the summer of 2021 to push their own bipartisan infrastructure bill, which could be passed quickly. They proposed removing a pillar of the BBB framework—urgently needed infrastructure spending—and passing that popular measure first as a separate bill. Doing so would sap popularity from the BBB package while also shoving it onto the back burner.
While the plan clearly threatened Biden’s signature legislation, the president’s team decided to take a win where they could easily get one. The White House embraced the bipartisan infrastructure deal, which swiftly passed in the Senate. Although it wasn’t everything Biden wanted, all the measure needed was House approval and he could sign a second major piece of legislation before his first autumn in office.
Now, it was the progressives’ turn to throw their weight around. They fought to keep the BBB bill off the back burner. Progressives would gladly sign off on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in the House, just as soon as the Senate had finished passing Build Back Better—all of it.
It was only natural that the progressives were the fiercest defenders of Biden’s original agenda. After all, they had worked closely with his team to craft it. Congressional Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal found herself putting her foot down with the West Wing.
“We made it very clear to the White House that we were not going to pass the infrastructure bill without the Build Back Better Act in the House,” Jayapal said, “And there were people, I think, that were worried that that was going to lead to not passing the infrastructure bill, but I knew that if we could just hold the line—and we did a lot of work with our members to keep everyone together on that—and if we could just insist that we had to pass both of them through the House, that that would give us the momentum that we needed.”
A series of caucus meetings followed. Democrats were split between the progressives, who wanted to seize the opportunity of full government control to pursue long-held progressive goals, and the Problem Solvers with their more centrist allies, who preferred the immediate benefits of the infrastructure bill.
Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, was frustrated. She waved around a handful of papers summarizing the infrastructure bill’s benefits for her district as she vented to reporters on Capitol Hill following a meeting with Biden and other congressional Democrats.
“So, I guess we’ll just wait, because evidently failing roads and bridges can just wait in the minds of some people,” Spanberger declared.
The progressive side understood that impatience gave them negotiating leverage. The infrastructure bill came with shovel-ready spending, and many members were eager to see that money flow to their districts.
Conditioning the release of that infrastructure money on the passage of the rest of Build Back Better was a powerful incentive to make moderates vote for Biden’s larger agenda. Jayapal and other progressives were certain the moderates would be highly unlikely to pass the rest of BBB if the infrastructure money was already on its way.
But Biden wanted to get a deal done. He made a pilgrimage to the Hill to meet with progressives. This broke the logjam. The progressives relented, passing the Senate-passed infrastructure bill in the House in late November. The House, led by the progressive caucus, passed the BBB package a few days later and sent it off into an uncertain future in the Senate.
Manchin had indicated he would support Build Back Better as long as the House passed the bipartisan infrastructure bill. However, as the bill hit the Senate floor, there was what Jayapal described as a “breakdown.”
“Then he decided, as you know, not to support Build Back Better,” she said of Manchin.
At least part of that discord came because the Senate was not impressed with the House’s work. “The bill that passed in the House was a mess,” said a former Democratic Senate aide who was familiar with the process. “You had a panoply of programs stuck in there, and some would go on for two years, some would be for four years, some would be for six years. Everything was set to expire at different points. And nothing, except the climate spending, was permanent.”
The radical centrists began sharpening their pencils.
“There was just this very weird dynamic where it seemed like Schumer was just waiting for Manchin and Sinema to tell him what they were going to cut,” the former aide said.
Understanding their leverage, Manchin and Sinema took their time. They also took very different approaches to the process. “Joe Manchin ended up just picking the programs he wanted to do,” the former aide said, noting that Manchin selected reforms to the Affordable Care Act, the energy package, and the Internal Revenue Service.
The former aide credited Manchin with choosing popular, broadly acceptable initiatives that would reflect well on Biden upon passage. However, they also argued Schumer and the White House should have exerted more control over the process by doing more to dictate the proposals from House progressives.
“Joe Manchin shouldn’t have been the one doing that. And I think we would’ve avoided a lot of that mess in the fall,” the aide explained.
It was the radical centrists who ended up controlling much of Biden’s agenda in his first year, and, the former aide added, Manchin was a better, more canny bill editor than Sinema. According to the former aide, Sinema wanted to make the prescription drug price negotiation program less progressive. She also refused to consider changes to the carried interest exception that gave preferential tax rates to hedge fund and private equity managers. Sinema was effectively standing up for the wealthiest investors rather than senior citizens.
“Nothing she did made that bill more popular or better, whereas [Manchin], I think, was the reverse,” the former aide concluded.
For progressives and the White House, the radical centrists’ editing of the Biden agenda was a bitter pill to swallow. A particularly painful loss was the Child Tax Credit, which had such a proven positive impact on families. According to a source who was involved in the negotiations, Manchin was the lone holdout on that front. The source said other Democratic senators repeatedly pressed Manchin with data points about how much the credit helped people and demonstrably alleviated child poverty.
“I had more conversations with Joe Manchin than I care to think about,” Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, one of the architects of the tax credit, recalled in an interview for this book.
Manchin, a millionaire who made his fortune in coal and lived on a yacht when he was in Washington, was unmoved. He would fire back with vague concerns about poor people using their tax refunds to buy drugs. According to the source, a good chunk of the Democratic caucus refused to keep dealing with Manchin.
“There’s ten to twenty of them that are just so angry at him,” the source said of the Senate Democrats.
With Manchin increasingly digging in and his fellow Democratic senators giving up, some lawmakers wanted Biden to step in.
“Manchin was not with us and the way to do this was to take him away to Camp David and just pound this out, get an agreement from him,” the source said.
In December 2021, Manchin decided he was done talking, picked a fight with the White House over a press office statement naming him as a continued holdout, and then went on Fox News to torpedo BBB for good. It took several months for Schumer’s staff to find a way to re-engage with him.
Few on either the House or Senate side had much good to say about the White House’s negotiating efforts, and some offered blistering criticism.
“You just don’t need the smartest policy person to do these kind of things,” the former Senate aide observed. “You need someone who knows Joe Manchin and what he gives a shit about and has a relationship with him and has known him for years.”
The consequences of failing to bring Manchin along were apparent to all. Midterm elections were fast approaching. Those races are normally a bloodbath for a first-term president’s party and Biden risked heading into them having few legislative accomplishments to show for his first years in office.
When Schumer’s office finally brought Manchin back to the table, he agreed to let a bill proceed. But it was no longer BBB. It was renamed the Inflation Reduction Act and it was limited to the programs that Manchin was willing to entertain.
Biden ran for president as a staunch moderate. However, after his efforts to connect with progressives, they proved to be far better allies for him than the centrists in his party.
For her part, Jayapal argued it was the progressive caucus’s defense of Biden that ensured even a reduced version of his agenda had passed. “I would argue that the Inflation Reduction Act would never have happened had we not passed Build Back Better in the House,” Jayapal said.
A senior House aide explained that Jayapal deserved “a ton of credit” for managing to keep her caucus together and willing to back Biden even as the centrists carved progressive priorities out of his legislation. “It took a lot of discipline to keep people focused on the end goal—climate, lowering prescription drug costs,” the House aide said. “Jayapal was strong there.”
Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki put things more in the president’s court. In an interview for this book, Psaki argued that—whatever issues there may have been with the process—Biden knew exactly what he was doing all along.
“Biden has negotiated a lot of deals,” Psaki said about the process of passing the Inflation Reduction Act into law. “Sometimes, as somebody who recognizes you need to plant the seeds and water and let things grow for a while, it’s not always it’s going to happen this moment, tomorrow. Sometimes things take a while to grow, and sometimes things need to happen behind the scenes, and he recognized that from having struck a lot of deals, and I think now people see that.”