Getting It Over the Line

Part of it is that the GOP were not saddled with an ailing, part-time president physically incapable of doing his job. We now know for a fact that Biden’s decline had started well before he was elected and affected his ability to serve as president in his very first year, when he and the Democrats were trying to get his BBB over the line. To manage Biden’s difficulties and to hide them from the wider world, the president’s activities were scheduled only for between the hours of 10 a.m. and 4 p.m., members of Congress and even his cabinet had limited contact with him, and he was kept away from unscripted public appearances.

This decline reached such a point that, as the White House desperately tried to get Congress to pass at least a portion of his agenda by the end of the year, Biden held a meeting with the Democratic caucus about it and delivered a meandering and incoherent pitch that shocked those who attended, requiring a do-over. Then he did it again, speaking for half an hour without even making the ask that the meeting was about, forcing then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to make the point that Biden was supposed to have made once he left the room.

By contrast, Trump — even as he was stunningly ignorant about the details of his own legislation — was by all accounts highly active and deeply involved throughout the process in pressuring and cajoling his party to stay unified on the bill. He held an hours-long meeting in February that helped quell an early conservative revolt over spending cuts. He repeatedly had lengthy private conversations with individual holdouts and persuaded them to change their minds. He made both personal assurances to and threats against those who were wavering, and at one point sternly told the ultraright Freedom Caucus to knock off their never-ending attempts to extract concessions. And as the bill’s Friday deadline loomed last week, he reportedly spent the hours between 5 a.m. Wednesday and 1 a.m. Thursday calling House members on and off to ensure its passage.

But this is only one part of the story. After all, even in his diminished state, Biden was only dealing with two holdouts — West Virginia’s Joe Manchin and Arizona’s Kyrsten Sinema in the Senate — while Trump was dealing with an arguably much more fractious congressional majority: members in swing districts and whose constituents relied on Medicaid who had been yelled at for months about the cuts, and members who wanted more cuts and a lower price tag; members who wanted the deficit-exploding tax cuts for the rich at all costs, and members like those in the radical Freedom Caucus, who had built a reputation as “legislative terrorists” for blocking GOP leadership’s legislative priorities until they got their way.

No amount of persuasion could make up for these internal contradictions. So how did Trump do it?

There’s no doubt part of it was with a large stick, in the form of frequent threats to have rebellious congressmembers primaried and thrown out of office. But more important were the carrots, the series of policy bribes Trump and his team made to sweeten the deal for lawmakers on the fence.

That included provisions that were written and rewritten into the bill over time, like a higher state and local tax deduction cap to bring in blue-state Republicans, more quickly putting in place Medicaid work requirements and ending renewable energy subsidies to get hard-right ideologues on board, and a $50 billion relief fund for rural hospitals impacted by the Medicaid cuts.

It also included verbal assurances from the White House that it would take aggressive executive action on certain members’ priorities that were left out or considered weakened in the bill’s final language, in a confusing and sometimes contradictory set of cross-compromises. For example, to woo Senate “moderates,” Senate Republicans deleted a potentially industry-killing tax on clean energy from the bill and added a carve-out for the sector. But that in turn angered the Freedom Caucus in the House, where the bill was due to go next. So the White House then promised the House holdouts that they would still put a chokehold on the industry anyway by strictly enforcing federal rules for tax credits for wind and solar projects.

These verbal deals were being made on the House floor right up until the final moment, producing the longest vote in the chamber’s history as Speaker Mike Johnson cut down the number of holdouts from more than two dozen to just two.

But arguably the most important policy bribes were aimed at securing just one vote: Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, the Republican “moderate” who ended up the deciding vote in the Senate. GOP leadership gave her a tax break for Alaska’s fishing and whaling industries and an absurd exemption from its food stamp cuts that effectively rewards states for having worse records of waste in paying out the program (further goodies, like shielding Alaska from the Medicaid cuts every other state will suffer, were tried but didn’t make it in). It worked, and Murkowski’s eleventh-hour switch to a yes vote is what pushed the bill over the line in the Senate.

At this point, you might be wondering: If Biden’s similar BBB bill was, by contrast, being held up by only two people, why didn’t he and the Democrats similarly load the legislation up with policy bribes and verbal deals to induce yes votes from those two? And the answer would be, they did — but then they split those sweeteners off from the rest of the legislation, rendering it moot.

A Strategy Divided Against Itself

I’ve made this point several times before, but here it is again in brief: What later became known as the BBB and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law were, to begin with, a single, gargantuan piece of legislation, and the key to enacting what were meant to be BBB’s major planks — universal pre-K, tuition-free community college, expanded Medicare, and more — was that it all stayed one single bill. This was the opinion of not just progressives, but of even the second-highest-ranking Democrat in the Senate. The reason why was that the Democratic holdouts on BBB, as well as their corporate funders, really, really wanted to see the infrastructure portion become law.

Despite threatening he would happily walk away with nothing, Joe Manchin was quietly desperate for the infrastructure bill to become law, even several times publicly suggesting, in a rare poker tell, that maybe the Democrats should just try pass it as quickly as possible and forget about the BBB. That wasn’t just because virtually his entire investment-starved state’s voters, business lobby, and political establishment (not to mention his donors) were all salivating over the federal money that would pour into its run-down infrastructure — but because the bill, in a particularly barefaced bit of palm-greasing, handed $1 billion to a commission Biden had appointed Manchin’s wife to cochair.

In another tell, Manchin incessantly promoted and took credit for the infrastructure bill before it passed, repeatedly referring to it as his legislation. Kyrsten Sinema did the same, calling it “my bipartisan infrastructure law” as she incessantly touted its benefits to Arizona and how she had been the one to deliver them, a message her office spent weeks promoting.

When the two halves were one bill, Sinema and Manchin wouldn’t have been able to get the benefits of the infrastructure bill — including the lucrative corporate work each has been rewarded with upon leaving office — without voting for the whole thing, including the BBB welfare state expansion they didn’t like. Once the bills were split, as Biden decided to do in April 2021, they could safely kill one while voting for the other, even if the two were theoretically “coupled” while moving separately through Congress. And this is exactly what they ended up doing.

Trump, notably, did not take this approach. In the end, his massive, and massively unpopular, BBB’s bigness was exactly what allowed it to succeed among a divided GOP caucus, as Republicans who didn’t like one or more parts of his bill — the price tag, or the Medicaid and food stamp cuts — had to vote for it anyway to get the parts they did like, like the obscene tax cuts for the rich and the turbocharged immigration enforcement funding. Just as notably, it was also not the approach Biden himself later took when his White House worked for months to get a deeply divisive military aid bill passed through Congress in early 2024.

Why did Biden split that 2021 bill in the first place, by the way? For the most laughable, Bidenesque reason possible: to save bipartisanship. It’s things like this that make it truly hard to overstate how uniquely ill-suited Biden was for the historical moment he found himself in, and what a damning indictment it is of the Democratic establishment that moved heaven and earth to put him there.

It’s also hard not to conclude from all this — not just Republicans keeping their bill together but their months-long flurry of ceaseless maneuvering and behind-the-scenes activity right up to the final moment — that Trump and the GOP simply cared more about the policy agenda contained in their BBB than Biden and the Democrats did about theirs. This is not exactly a stretch: neither Biden nor any other Democrat ever mentioned any of the 2021 BBB’s big-ticket social welfare provisions again, even when running for reelection.

Given the cyclical nature of US politics, the Democratic Party will likely one day control Congress and the White House again, and the public that voted it in will likely hear the same excuses and claims to powerlessness to preemptively justify its failure. But that failure was not inevitable, but a choice — and Trump and the Republicans just proved it.