We’ve known all along that, Joe Biden’s pleas for “unity” notwithstanding, he would get precious little cooperation from Republicans. Beyond the courtesy of confirming most of the new president’s appointees—one old norm that still obtains, more or less—congressional Republicans will give Biden nothing. And he seeks nothing. His campaign rhetoric was driven by polls showing that most Americans still want to hear their politicians, especially their president, talk about working across party lines. But he and his team aren’t naive enough to believe that he’ll usher in a new age of bipartisanship. Hence the decision to pursue a major Covid relief bill right away and to pass it via the reconciliation process, which limits what can be included in the legislation but requires only a majority to pass, obviating the need to corral any Republican votes.
The path toward passage of the historic American Rescue Plan, the $1.9 trillion relief bill, also revealed that Biden will have some difficulties with his own party. Yes, the bill passed, and yes, it was an enormous victory, both symbolically and substantively. It will provide money for vaccines and schools, it will help the unemployed (there are still about 10 million fewer jobs than there were before the pandemic hit), and it will put money in people’s pockets that, it is hoped and presumed, they will reinvest in the economy as the country opens back up. More than that, the aid plan represents the beginning of a potential shift to large-scale public investment without the overriding concern about deficits and inflation that free-market neoliberalism has imposed upon much of US economic policy-making for forty years.
But it wasn’t easy. Those on the left were livid that the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the minimum-wage provision be stripped from the bill because it had no direct budgetary impact, as required by the reconciliation provisions. And they were angry that the Biden administration immediately announced that it would not seek to challenge the ruling, which would have been possible: if Vice President Kamala Harris, in her capacity as president of the Senate, had decided to ignore it, sixty votes would have been required to overrule her, meaning that Biden could have muscled the minimum-wage increase through. He chose not to, because the administration believed—accurately, as it turns out—that there just aren’t fifty votes in the Senate for a $15-per-hour minimum wage.
The disagreement over this provision was a snag in what has otherwise been a pretty smooth relationship so far between the president and the Democratic left. This is generally credited to Ron Klain, Biden’s smart and approachable chief of staff—a mainstream liberal himself, but not at all contemptuous of those to his left, as Obama’s first chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was. Klain keeps lines of communication open. Further, on personnel and policy Biden has been more progressive than many expected. Here, for example, was Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Chris Hayes’s MSNBC show on January 27, after the new president signed a number of environment-related executive orders and John Kerry, Biden’s special presidential envoy for climate, and Gina McCarthy, the White House national climate adviser, laid out their green priorities:
"Now, I’m feeling extraordinarily encouraged. And I think that the significance of President Biden’s executive orders communicates a lot. One is that it really communicates that he meant what he said on the campaign trail, that he would make climate change a central priority of his administration, and that he considers it not just a national security threat, but frankly, you know, the global matter that it is."
Good intentions, of course, only go so far. To satisfy the left, the administration will need to deliver this year or next on a long list of demands, from infrastructure to green jobs to immigration reform. On the minimum wage in particular, success will probably come by attaching it to a “must-pass” bill, like a defense appropriation. That’s how the last minimum-wage increase got through, in 2007. And it may be around $13 instead of $15. Whether the left will accept a lower figure is unclear, but Biden may have to try to convince them that $13 would constitute a significant progressive win, particularly if it’s indexed to inflation. For a forty-hour work week, $13 an hour would amount to an annual salary of $26,000 (assuming two weeks of unpaid vacation). Because the increase is phased in over time, the US minimum wage would eventually surpass that of most other developed nations. (France’s is at $12.20 an hour, the UK’s is at $12.13 and slated to rise slightly in April, and Germany’s is at $11.15.)
The left will keep up the fight over the minimum wage—and it should. But I would guess that Biden won’t lose many votes in Congress among progressives, so long as the administration treats them respectfully and accomplishes something. While the Senate was debating the Covid bill, Bernie Sanders introduced a stand-alone minimum-wage amendment. It lost badly, opposed by some Democrats who were concerned that if it passed and thus was reinserted in the overall bill, it would simply have to be removed again per the parliamentarian’s verdict. In the end, Sanders voted for Biden’s bill and praised it effusively, calling it “the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country.” Given that endorsement from Sanders, it’s no surprise that no House progressives voted against the bill when the House passed it Tuesday.
Biden’s bigger problem for the foreseeable future emanates from the middle—from Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. They have made it manifestly clear that the Biden White House will have to work to get their votes. They—Manchin especially—insist that they will support only genuinely bipartisan bills and have little taste for reconciliation (though they did both vote for the Covid bill). It is the “Byrd Rule” that restricts what can be included in reconciliation bills, and Manchin holds the seat once occupied by Robert C. Byrd.
In fairness, Manchin’s seat is precarious. Donald Trump carried West Virginia last year by 39 points, his second-highest victory margin in the country, after Wyoming. It’s a stunning number, and a formidable one for a statewide Democrat to contemplate. Manchin will be up for reelection (assuming he chooses to run) in 2024, and he must already know how many voters for the GOP presidential candidate he’ll have to persuade to vote for him, in this era when ticket-splitting is all but dead. (Back-of-envelope calculation: probably at least 80,000—more than 10 percent of the state’s electorate.)
I grew up in West Virginia in the 1960s and 1970s. It was a reliably Democratic state then, thanks in large part to the heavy presence of the United Mine Workers union. Today, coal-mining employs a fraction of what it did when I was a child. Class consciousness of the old New Deal sort is gone, replaced by an anger, stoked by Fox News and others, at the snooty elites who want to stop burning coal and destroy those jobs that do remain. During the Obama years, the state swung hard to the right: Republicans now control both houses of the state legislature, which would have been unthinkable twenty years ago. This year, for the first time in decades, Republican voter enrollment outpaced Democratic, according to figures released by the West Virginia secretary of state’s office three weeks into the Biden presidency.
Sinema would seem to have less of an excuse than Manchin for her aggressive centrism. Biden carried Arizona, however narrowly (three tenths of one percentage point). But Republicans control the governor’s mansion and both state houses; it’s certainly not a blue state, though it does appear to be getting bluer. Sinema is a rather enigmatic figure. Once affiliated with the state’s Green Party, she wrote a letter to the editor of The Arizona Republic in 2002 that included the sentence: “Until the average American realizes that capitalism damages her livelihood while augmenting the livelihoods of the wealthy, the Almighty Dollar will continue to rule.” As a state senator, she was mostly progressive, although cautious on immigration issues. (She opposed the successful effort to recall GOP state senator Russell Pearce, a hard-line anti-immigration figure.) When she first ran for the House, in a town-and-gown Tucson district, she campaigned to the left of her two opponents, both men.
Whatever motivates her—the dream that the presidency may one day be hers is a safe guess—she will be a constant annoyance for Biden. Sinema and Manchin have carved out for themselves considerable leverage. If their votes are the ones that can put Biden over the top, when a simple majority is needed during the reconciliation process, legislation can be only as progressive as they wish it to be. They are practically copresidents already.
Manchin had been using his leverage adroitly—until, in the final hours before the Senate voted on the relief bill, he appeared to overplay his hand. Democrats had reached broad agreement on the relief bill’s main aspects—the income levels to which direct payments would extend, and the size and duration of unemployment benefits—when Manchin suddenly decided that he wanted more limits on unemployment benefits. He said that if people are vaccinated by the summer and ready to go back to work, the government shouldn’t be paying them to stay home. “It’d be awful for the doors to open up and there’s no one working,” he said. “That’s the problem.” One Democratic source in the Senate told me that Manchin has long been concerned about fraud with respect to unemployment and disability benefits.
Manchin had spoken those words on Tuesday, March 2, and won a significant concession afterward: monthly unemployment benefits were cut from $400 to $300. It therefore shocked his fellow Democrats when he said on Friday, March 5, that the new numbers still weren’t good enough. He held up the Senate for ten hours. Even his fellow West Virginia senator, Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican, was perplexed. “I have no idea what he’s doing, to be quite frank,” she told Politico.
In the end, President Biden called him and talked him down. Manchin voted for the final bill—and voted with his fellow Democrats to oppose some twenty Republican amendments. This is part of a pattern; he is usually there when his party genuinely needs him (he opposed the repeal of Obamacare, for example). But he knows how much power he holds, and he will use it. Given the nature of West Virginia politics, he is impervious to pressure from the left, which lacks the numbers in the state to threaten him. Stephen Smith, the dynamic leader of the West Virginia Can’t Wait movement, ran a left-populist campaign for governor in 2020 and finished a respectable second to a more standard-issue Democrat. Smith thinks that only a certain kind of localized pressure could get Manchin to support more progressive policies. “When outsiders sprinkle last-minute Facebook ads and action alerts on our state, he laughs,” Smith told me. “Because they pose no credible threat. To win, our threat must be local, fearless, permanent, and owned by the working-class West Virginians who’ve been robbed by generations of politicians.”
