Progressive Democrats need to support their president, deliver legislative victory

Progressive is the latest word in the lexicon of Democrats. That’s the word these days for liberals who had to find another way to describe themselves since Republican strategists weaponized the word “liberal” and hung it on Democratic candidates like a dead and smelly fish.

Today, members of the U.S. House Congressional Progressive Caucus are refusing to vote aye on the bipartisan infrastructure plan until Biden’s $3.5 billion Build Back Better America plan passes the Senate and is voted on by the House.

Yet, there are Democrat moderates in both the House and Senate who do not support all the elements of the Build Back Better bill, much less the $3.5 trillion price tag, and passage requires the vote of every single Senate Democrat and virtually all Democrat members in the House, as well.

Biden made no secret of his game plan in his campaign for president in the 2020 election. Biden ran as a centrist who could bring Americans together again. He had spent years working both sides of the aisle in Congress, counted Mitch McConnell one of his Republican friends and he promised to bring bipartisanship back to Washington.

Once elected, he unveiled the $2.25 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which included investments not traditionally seen as infrastructure such as caregiving for aging Americans and workforce training. But he worked with moderates in both parties in the Senate to pass a smaller, targeted version of the bill and convinced 22 Republicans to support it, a rare bipartisan moment in Washington these days. U.S. Sens. Mike Crapo and Jim Risch, both R-Idaho, voted for the bill.

Now projected at $1 trillion, it’s not just about concrete for bridges and highways. Biden’s infrastructure bill addresses the critical need to expand and modernize public transit and to provide for transportation safety for all users, including cyclists and pedestrians.

It travels well beyond mass transit, roads and highways by helping America meet its challenges in a 21st century digital world. On the cyber front, there is funding to close the digital divide in the nation and improve broadband infrastructure in communities that were left behind in the cyber revolution. It will rebuild the nation’s electric grid and upgrade water infrastructure.

What caught my eye was a national network of plug-in electric vehicle chargers across the nation. That network would remove my one last hesitation for buying an electric vehicle and having to drive beyond the city.

With progressives in the Democratic Party withholding their votes from the bipartisan package until the Build Back Better Act with a price tag of an additional $3.5 trillion of social spending is voted on, as well, the classic stalemate visited official Washington.

Sen. Bernie Sanders

What I find most puzzling is how U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, seems to be driving the agenda, encouraging House members not to yield an inch in this high-stakes game. Didn’t Joe Biden defeat Bernie Sanders in primaries in state after state until Sanders finally suspended his campaign? And isn’t that a pure reflection of the sentiments of Democrats across the country? And yet today you cannot turn on the TV without seeing Mr. Sanders, a Social Democrat and not a member of the Democratic Party, selling his plan and disparaging those who oppose it.

Although the Progressive Caucus members have their eyes trained importantly on getting Medicaid coverage, paid family and medical leave, support for child care and education and climate change initiatives funded, their obstruction could have dire political consequences, handing Biden a defeat to the great satisfaction of Donald Trump.

The Progressive Caucus wants to use its leverage to install social safety net programs they have long championed. They think this time, with Democratic control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, they should be able to succeed. But their strategy flies in the face of the reality. Their exceedingly narrow margin in both chambers means that each Democrat has to vote in favor of passage.

Although Sen. Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, has become the bogeyman of the Democratic Party for his refusal to go along with the original Biden plan, he has also pointed out the fiscal foolishness of one leg of the Build Back Better Act. Bernie Sanders’ “free community college” proposal lacks any kind of means test. Why would we hand off a community college education to families financially capable of paying for it?

Progressives are setting up Biden for a perceived failure that the media is already busy reporting daily. “What happened to all of those assurances Biden gave us that he could broker a bipartisan deal?” Well, he did, and it is about to be blown up, not by Republicans but by members of his own party. Perhaps it’s time to stop holding out for the $3.5 trillion version when the president has already said that perhaps it needs to be trimmed to $2 trillion. It’s time to pass the infrastructure plan and hand the president a well-earned victory.

The progressives in Washington today who are playing this game of chicken with the Biden infrastructure plan should heed one of the oldest lessons of politics — a lesson Congress has forgotten in recent years, as each side has dug its heels into the dirt and too often refused to budge.

There was a time when our two major parties caucused and deliberated on how to compromise. The parties’ leaders held considerable sway over members as they offered rewards like committee assignments or leadership positions to those who complied and found ways to punish those who didn’t. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has no such control over her members as speakers once did.

That’s all changed as members of Congress depend on new bases of power and influence in social media to achieve their goals. As NPR analyst Ron Elving characterized politics in Washington these days, senators and members of the House are sole proprietorships operating in their own ecosystem.

The latest and best example of that is the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, California Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who speaks as though her caucus of 100 members speaks for everyone in America and seems unable to grasp the implications of their astonishingly narrow majorities. One day as demographics change, they may speak for more Americans, but for now, we still live in an America dangerously close to electing Donald Trump to another presidential term.

Now is not the time to give the media all the print it needs to cast President Biden as unable to bring the two parties together. What great fodder that will be for Trump and his Republican minions.