(MON 8/1/22)

Inflation Reduction Act this week … Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) (pictured) took to all the Sunday morning talk shows, including CBS News’ Face the Nation, NBC News’ Meet the Press, CNN’s State of the Union and Fox News Sunday to promote the attributes of the climate and tax provisions bill he and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) sprung on Senate Republicans last week. By all punditry accounts, the Inflation Reduction Act, a decimation of Biden’s Build Back Better proposal, is a rare case – perhaps the first case – of Schumer getting the better of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). 

Manchin was above all that, naming fellow moderates, both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate as his good friends and claiming to be above the politics of it all – he declined to take a position on whether Inflation Reduction would boost his party’s midterm fortunes or whether he would support a Biden’s re-election in 2024. 

But there’s no question that the Manchin-Schumer deal has boosted Biden’s fortunes and the Democratic Party’s chances of holding on to more House and Senate seats than had been expected only a week or so ago. There is a lesson and warning for progressive Democrats, though, who have expressed anything from disappointment to outrage that the party’s wafer-thin majorities in Congress haven’t been enough to pass Build Back Better, or climate legislation and gun regulation.  

Before the White House proposed BBB with its initial pricetag of $3.5 trillion bartered down to $1.75 trillion by Manchin before Manchin rejected the whole thing altogether, Biden had in his April 2021 address to a joint session of Congress 

<https://thehustings.news/bidens-joint-lets-ditch-trickle-down-economics/> an agenda that would amount to the wholesale reversal of Reaganomics, which in turn was a reversal FDR’s New Deal. This was the Biden agenda that had prog-Dems momentarily, and naively enthusiastic. 

And so it goes. Schumer expects to bring the Inflation Reduction Act to the Senate floor this week, in time to get out of town by Friday for Congress’ summer recess. As part of budget reconciliation, the bill would need just 51 Senate votes to pass before being taken up in the House, though Sen. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) has yet to sign off on it. 

--Todd Lassa