I've made this point before, but I want to say it again to bang it into people's heads: BBB was wildly unprecedented. Nothing like it has ever been done in American history.
There were three things that made it so. First, depending on how you count, it created seven or eight big new programs in a single bill. Child care. Pre-K. Climate. Obamacare. Paid leave. Long-term care. Expanded, work-free child tax credit. Hearing and vision in Medicare.
In the past, any one of these would have been a major victory for liberals. The prospect of getting half a dozen of them in one go was breathtaking.
Second, it was expensive. The initial version of the bill probably would have cost more than $500 billion per year, though that number depends a lot on what assumptions you make. Even the cut-down final bill, using realistic assumptions instead of smoke and mirrors, probably would have come to $300 billion or so.
This amounts to 1-2% of GDP compared to less than 1% of GDP annually for FDR's New Deal during its first decade. So the plan was to pass a bill that was astonishing in scope and cost more than the New Deal.
Third, this was to be done in a Senate with precisely 50 Democrats, not FDR's 60 in 1933 (soon to be 70 in 1935).
This was crazy! What on earth convinced liberals that they could pass something like this? And why did so many of them consider it a vast betrayal as it eventually got cut down to "only" three or four big programs? Even that would have represented the biggest boost to the liberal program in decades. It would have been cause for celebration no matter which programs eventually made the cut.
So why did it go down the way it did? This isn't really about taking sides in the endless and tedious portioning of blame between centrists and lefties. After all, the vast majority of both supported the full bill. In the end, just as political science and common sense suggests, it was brought down by the two or three most conservative Democrats in the Senate.
As Mario Cuomo told us, you campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Bernie Sanders understands this. After campaigning on the promise of a progressive revolution, he's been Mr. Pragmatic during the tortuous journey of BBB. He knew from the start that Joe Manchin would be the eventual bottleneck, and despite the occasional outburst it's obvious that he accepted this.
Long story short, we should all stop feeling like the world has collapsed around us—and drop all the circular firing squad crap while we're at it. Manchin says he's open to further talks in January, and I wouldn't be surprised if they finally produce a compromise of three or four fully funded programs along with enough offsetting tax hikes to make the bill more-or-less revenue neutral.
And if this happens? "Only" three or four programs? Then pop the champagne. No other president in recent memory has done anything like this. And by any reasonable standard, it would make Joe Manchin quite a liberal senator.
"And if this happens?"
I'd give it a 10% chance. What odds would you give, Mr. Drum?
Take whatever Joe Manchin wants for godsake and get it over with. Or let it go. Move on. There are other fish in the sea. We live in a world that prioritizes chaos over sensibility. It's bored with itself and wants all the havoc it can get. Joe Manchin is right where the needle on the barometer has landed, and if he finally gets the bill he wants (he should just sit down and write it), then give it to him. If it's crap, it won't be any worse crap than the crap we've already got. And if it leaks through a drop or two of sweetness, then shucks. It's the American way. Take what you get. (Out of a nearly $30 trillion dollar annual economy, $500 billion, i.e. less than 2%, seems like not so very big a drop, but sure it's all relative.)
(Or a $21 trillion dollar economy its a little over 2%. At scale, it's still just a trickle.)
Spot on and really needs to be said. My wife asked “What is Mancin problem?”. My short answer was- the Bill is basically a wish list and had no shot passing. She then looked into it and laughed. Crazy that the left, cheered on by Faux News for propaganda purposes, runs the PR for our party. You are correct as a scaled down version that is paid for and permanent is quite an accomplishment.
What exactly does Joe Manchin want?
That's really the fundamental problem with your analysis here. It's just not as simple as "give Joe Manchin what he wants" because it's been really clear for quite a while now that "what Joe wants" moves around like a balloon in a tornado.
Manchin clearly opposes the size of the spending in the bill and he opposes the CTC expansion. But he can't say stuff about the size of the bill because those reasons seem really subjective and, at the root level, f***ing stupid. So he keeps talking about inflation (which is bullshit) and "funding trickery" (also mostly bullshit, since he's supported bills in the past, including GOP legislative achievements, that use similar tricks to get around CBO scoring.
And his reasons for opposing the CTC are REALLY f***ing stupid. That the money will "go to purchasing drugs" or "isn't means tested enough". These are the sorts of morality policing and targeting that have lost Democrats so much of the working class support in this country. The rest of the party knows it -- even Joe Biden knows it despite preaching the opposite for years.
Manchin is practicing the politics of the 1980's in 2021. He needs to update his priors and look to the future of the party. This isn't about him, but he keep making it about him, and he deserves a bunch of scorn for that.
Manchin just voted for a $750 billion defense budget without a peep.
There won't be many more fish in the sea if Manchin guts the climate change remediation efforts in BBB.
How much does he earn from the coal industry every year?
" What on earth convinced liberals that they could pass something like this?"
Remember that for all of 2020 until election day, the polls had Democrats trouncing Republicans everywhere. There was a belief that the Blue Wave was a-comin' - or maybe even a Blue Tsunami.
The sense was that *the nation* was fully on board. See those poll numbers?
But the pollsters were way off. Not just on Biden, but all the contests. It probably was due to the failure of traditional polling mechanisms (e.g. land-line phone calls) and improperly modeling the electorate.
The electorate wanted Trump out*, but not much change otherwise. That's why the GOP held state offices and gained a few Congressional seats.
BBB was a long shot from the beginning. I think some popular provision from it may pass in a mini-BBB next year.
* It's partly why Trump thinks the election was rigged. Down-ballot GOP candidates got bigger percentages than Donald. And he cannot conceive anybody could do better than him.
Narcissism is a disease.
Good point. Besides the election polling, there are the policy-question polls that find large majorities in favor of many Democratic initiatives, such as expanded access to health care and gun control. But we vote for candidates, not specific policies (there is no such thing as referendum at the federal level). And when we vote for candidates, we tend to vote for the incumbents, i.e. no change.
Gun control??? Nope. This is a Republic, not a direct democracy.
Manchin needs Biden's name attached to it. It is not the "Manchin plan", but the Biden/Manchin plan.
The anger is rightly directed at the fact Democrats have spent nine months doing little except cross"red lines", break promises, pass countless self-imposed "deadlines", change their positions ... and have precisely nothing to show at the end of it all. The prospect of getting any political benefit from a bill next year is zero. Democrats are in damage control mode. No matter what gets passed, if anything, the public discussion afterwards will be all about what got dropped off, why the bill is such a disappointment, and who stabbed whom in the back.
It was hard to imagine how the party leaders could make a worse cockup of a major bill than they did in 2009/10, but they managed to outdo themselves.
Lol, nope. 2009-10 was far worse because they went against the electorate. Try harder.
Of course, if progressives could have had a little forebearance, they could have already had that deal three months ago. I think progressives should all wear T-shirts that say "The perfect is the enemy of the good" so they remember.
How about that.
Pusillanimous politics does not work - worse, it encourages Trump and his ilk. I am glad that Democrats had the gumption to offer their vision to voters. The nation needs a wakeup call and I hope Democrats will keep delivering it.
No this isn’t a surprise.
Covid deaths, infant mortality, maternal mortality, gun deaths, child poverty, education , freedom of press , democracy, freedom..… you are slipping and slipping in the opinions of unbiased international experts on all crucial issues and in statistics on healthcare even compared to nations that sure don’t have your resources.
…. or you are actually not slipping, it’s the world outside of your borders that is in progress but you are frozen in time.
What did you expect in a country where the answer to another school shooting is some “thoughts and prayers “ from the politicians and the result of the massacre in Las Vegas is banning…. bump stocks
America is a failed state when it comes to public health , democracy, freedom, social progress and climate due to the fact that a minority of right wing extremists are able to manipulate the elections any way they choose , the will of “We the people “ isn’t of much importance.
You have ,for decades , been patterning yourself after a classic Third World plutocracy with no middle class since it’s possible for a group of insanely wealthy people to buy political influence, a gift handed over by a group of politicians dressed up in black robes impersonating judges.
USA is the only country where bribing politicians is protected by the Constitution (its called Citizens United)
This is the result…
Trying to govern a country still using a Constitution dating from the 18th century based upon the values of those days isn’t that smart
Your Constitution is a parchment consisting four pages and it was drafted by a group of upper class British slave owners who’s primarily interest was to protect their own privileges
Amendments?
Nothing of importance has been amended these last 100 years..
This is of course your problem, not my problem , you have to live with it and love it and just accept things as it are since your political system is frozen in time.
… but climate destruction isn’t just your domestic problem since you are sharing the biosphere with the rest of us .
5% of the population on this planet consists of Americans but you are responsible for +20% of all emissions and you did just decided that the situation for the next couple of years for a handful of coal miners in West Virginia is of more importance than the future for all coming generations.
You decided that the profits of the fossil fuel companies and the price of gas in Wyoming is also of more importance
A comment from a disillusioned Swede
Yes, even with reconciliation, they needed to find a way to vote on each grouping separately. The trick is that each grouping would have to be net revenue neutral--that would be hard. In effect, use "messaging" bills to tell people what's going into the reconciliation bill.
oh well...
No, the PAYGO rule is independent of reconciliation. You still get at most two shots at the latter in a year (Wikipedia says three, but each would have to address only one of expenditures, revenues or the debt, and I think PAYGO means revenue and expenditures must be addressed in one bill (unless the Republicans control the Senate and the bill is a tax cut for the wealthy, for which blowing up the debt is perfectly OK).
Maybe we felt that after a sixty-year near-drought for progressive legislation since the Great Society, broken only by passage of ACA and a few others of lesser significance, that it was time to get the nation moving in a better direction.
Dream on !
Priority is more guns, more misogyny, more gerrymandering, more voters suppression , more drilling, more dead newly delivered mothers and toddlers, more starvation, more money for the 1% , more bribes for politicians, more emissions of greenhouse gases, more money for the military defense… and some more guns
Enjoy some more tyranny of the minority
Greetings from your Swedish friend
Dialectic nonsense in this post. Try harder.
????
Gun sales has spiked with first time buyers making up more than 1/5 and its white men who are buying guns and laws are even more lax in places like Texas .
The “pro life “ mob has been very successful lately
Not even during Trump’s presidency was this large areas up for auction for fossil fuel companies to grab. It’s basically the entire Gulf of Mexico
The UN has been successfully battling maternal and infant mortality for a decade, it’s only in a few war zones and areas of natural disaster where statistics has been going the wrong way… and of course in the United States of America. Nothing has been done to change this disastrous fact since nothing much has been done to improve healthcare for lower income groups this last year
The tax “reform” from’17 is still in use benefiting the 1%
Biden’s plan to tackle child poverty and climate breakdown has been successful sabotaged by the minority who are in a position to do so on all they not will approve on
… and while I have been trying to write this in a foreign language has more guns been sold to frighted white men to be flashed out in the streets in order to boost their masculinity and putting everyone in harms way
Isn’t this what has happened this last years over at your place?
Lol, nope. Gun sales have spiked for every few years with different versions and different races. Your post is just making things up. A dialectical shell game. Please stop posting.
You are only commenting on my remarks on guns.. and you are only confirming my facts . Sales on guns is spiking… once again. You are now having 120,5guns/100 citizens
Impressive!
Guns is just 1/6 of my comment and you are very quiet on the rest.
I guess truth hurts
It's a supercilious, racist, semiliterate troll. It leaves its droppings to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
I am rarely commenting on this site but I am often checking up on Mr Drum
His facts are reliable even if he and I often are coming to different conclusions based upon them.
I am a news freak and reading a lot of your media and commenting more frequently elsewhere but I wouldn’t say our friend spadesofgray is that special, just another average US “conservative” (aka right wing extremist”
Ken, unless you have a thousand-horsepower dragster with huge gummy slicks, "get moving" does NOT mean "rev the engine to 6,000 RPM then drop the clutch."
The Dem Team "got the nation moving" with the infrastructure bill. Part of getting moving was selling it to enough conservatives that it could easily pass the Senate with over 60 votes. Then we almost blew it by allowing the "drop the clutch" extreme left in the House to hold it hostage to their seventy-leven page wish list. Thank goodness Mrs. Pelosi finally injected a dose of political reality into the veins of her own caucus, and we got that passed. Of course, by screwing around all that time, we lost most of the P.R. value, so it made the next step that much harder.
Then, instead of assaying what "next step" would get us further along while simultaneously affording tremendous P.R. value, our caucus decided to take one giant leap all the way to the finish line.
In my experience (encompassing school, sports, business, and romance), that is NOT the way to "get moving."
1) A few decades ago, an infrastructure bill would have passed the Senate by 90+ votes, if not unanimous consent.
2) As our Swedish ‘friend’/critic endlessly reminds us, most advanced-economy democracies have had the same programs for decades. Germany has had universal healthcare for well over a century - and BBB still doesn’t make ACA a universal plan. The provisions of BBB just aren’t radically lefty, and yet progressives have given far more ground than the conservatives: the Republicans are not even looking for a compromise, and it is not clear that Manchin is either.
3) How successful has incrementalism been lately?
Ken, I totally agree with your points numbered 1 and 2. The problem arises because of your point 3.
The gerrymandering of the USA, thanks to so many small states and so few large ones, has given the reactionaries a big advantage, which has gotten a lot bigger in the past few decades. You ask about how successful incrementalism has been? Well, there has been exactly one huge success in the past two decades, and even that smelled of incrementalism. Remember, ACA was NOT what most of us on the progressive side would have preferred. Rather, it's what we could squeeze across the finish line. Incrementalism is what we can achieve in these days of a gerrymandered country.
Meanwhile, in the first year of this administration, we've gotten a big stimulus bill and a big infrastructure bill. And now, according to Joe Manchin, Joe Biden, and some pretty knowledgeable persons on the Democratic side of the aisle, we could get a big general welfare bill as well; just not as big and all-encompassing as many of us Progressives would wish for.
Well, after we get through complaining about Santa Claus leaving a lot of our list items back at the North Pole, I say we ought to work at the feasible, instead of lamenting the fate of our wish list.
Whatever Democrats do moving forward, they should focus their energy on serving people who vote, and if possible, those who vote in swing states. Small bills passed over the next few months targeted toward these groups will help more in the fall than complaining about Joe Manchin.
And focus messaging on the fact that the Republicans have become a dangerous group of fanatical liars driven forward by an amoral (at best) media.
The "original" " bbb" had no chance to pass the House.........that tells you sonething.
"First, depending on how you count, it created seven or eight big new programs in a single bill."
This is only true to avoid the filibuster through reconciliation. In a sane world, we could address these items individually on their costs and merits, with filibuster properly used to extend debate when warranted, not to prevent up or down voting on bills.
But with Mitch and Manchin, we don't have a sane world. Not in the US Senate anyway.
You could give the trump loving lunatics all the benefits in BBB times 3 and they still won't vote for democrats. Instead of child care and tax credits for right wing parents, we should starve them. Instead of expanded medicare for fox news geezers, we should cut them off and send them to an early grave.
Progressives have the policy exactly backward. When a natural disaster strikes a trumpist city, you don't help them rebuild, you tell them to drop dead.
Instead, when some celebrity mean tweets about drug addled West Virginia rednecks, we demand they apologize. No one should ever apologize to drug addled rednecks.
We cannot appease our way to political power in this environment. It's time to face reality. These policies, while well intentioned, are not going to make one bit of difference. If democrats want to help children in poverty or old folks needing help, they should fund the benefits via a charitable foundation with a robust ideological test.
The problem for Democrats is that the people helped by these programs don't vote enough or in large enough numbers to help at the polls, whereas the people that hate them will crawl over broken glass to punish Democrats for passing them.
Excellent perspective. In my job I’ve been an administrator for 16.5 years. What have I learned both from my perspective of: a) asking for resources from those above me and, b) being asked for resources from those below me is to: 1) not make impossible demands but to ask for what you reasonably can expect and, 2) to take what you can get. Something is always better than nothing and it makes one appear effective and serious if one behaves rationally otherwise people stop listening to you.
Moreover, the best advice I got was from my predecessor - “You need to walk the halls so you always know what is going on” i.e., you should know before hand what is bloody possible, otherwise you are just wasting your and everyone else’s time which always makes you look ineffective and incompetent. Biden was in the Senate for a zillion yrs, how could he not know this? Or, more likely (hopefully) he is simply playing to the stupidity of some congressional Democrats? Biden can now say to unrealistic Liberals: “See - I really tried! Now, if we don’t get something passed we’re all screwed”. Plus, Manchin is the villain, not Biden and in the end it does serve the Democrats’ self interest to accomplish something.
The BBB was meant to be unprecedented (although it's size relative to the New Deal was news to me), in part as a response to unprecedented circumstances. The plan was to "go big" and to enact programs that would reach the middle class and be noticed by most voters. The Trump phenomenon taught us that the constituency genuinely interested in small government is close to zero. Part of Trump's message was that under Democrats and pre-Trump Republicans the government wouldn't help YOU--and that message resonated. The BBB was an effort to prove him wrong in a way that would benefit Democrats. It's no surprise that the size shrank under negotiation, and I do agree that some people reacted poorly to the tradeoffs that requires. But part of that is inevitable because the refundable Child Tax Credit was the centerpiece for a lot of people (and even has some support among conservatives), but it's cost meant that after the bill was shrunk by half (relative to the number authorized by the budget resolution) there was room left only for the CTC OR the other stuff, not both. The CTC was probably the last surviving piece that might have served the original purpose.
Anyway, the current crisis isn't the pain of these negotiations, it's that Manchin abruptly pulled the plug on the whole thing on Fox News. We're offered a story that this was because the administration refused to accommodate Manchin's reasonable demands. We're also offered a story by a friend of Manchin that he did it in a fit of pique over the fact that Manchin was mentioned by name in a (very reasonable and generally upbeat) statement from the White House. I find explanation #2 much more plausible. Now I'm asked to believe the BBB isn't really dead. I'll believe that when it passes the Senate.
Finally, it's worth noting that even with a full-sized BBB, the U.S. would remain less generous in social spending than many peer countries.
Sorry, but most of the "bbb" did not help the middle class. The original bbb was despised. Biden's bounce with independents didn't start until bbb was trimmed and infrastructure passed.
Oh, have all child-rearing people been drummed out of the middle class? Are they all the dirty poors now? I think this is the last time I'll ever respond to you; I don't have time to reply to idiots and bullshitters.
Yes, it's a racist, semi-literate troll. It only leaves its droppings to get attention. Please don't feed the troll.
Since BBB is short by _one_ vote, I don't know where Kevin is getting this.
It was short originally by half the Democrats in the Senate and a 3rd in the house. Then the trim down out it to 2. Then Halloween to 1.
Indeed Scent, indeed.
If the story ends up that it does not pass because of Mancin, and, as Shumer has the vote anyway (like the Repubs did for years trying to repeal the ACA) and if the proposals were popular. you campaign the shit out of it in 2022 and pick up a few seats in the Senate. Then pass it in its present form on day 1.
The reason it never worked for Repus on the ACA was that it’s actually popular and only opposable theoretically.
I enthusiastically support the strategy of making the strongest possible effort to flip vulnerable Republican seats, in the House as well as the Senate. Oh hell, statehouses too.
+1
The gap between “what people want” and “what the federal government can realistically squeeze through congress” is getting larger with every passing year. As is the gap between “what Americans can see other countries enjoy from their governments” and “what our government delivers to Americans.” These growing chasms fuel more frustration with the slow pace of our Congress with every passing year. So while I agree with Kevin and others that the BBB would’ve represented something ever bigger than the New Deal and thus was always a big ask of our politicians, I also see why average voters increasingly feel like their government isn’t working for them and the nation is falling further behind our peers.
Most of the stuff in the BBB simply replicated what all of our peers have given their citizens for decades. And the rest of the stuff in the BBB was to deal with climate change, which the Kevin Drums of the world are telling us we need to throw gobs of money at as soon as possible.
So while it’s sad that our Congress cannot move quickly enough to catch us up to our peers in terms of living standards for the poor and middle classes, it’s also crushing (for those of us who will be alive to deal with it) to know that our Congress isn’t going to move fast enough to mitigate that for us too.
This is why every left leaning person I know is depressed about the failure of the BBB. We all know it means our country will never be as nice as the countries we visit and have friends working and raising families in… and we also know that eventually our country will become more environmentally hostile to human life too.
TL;DR: watching the BBB fall apart is like watching your unvaxxed Fox News addicted uncle die slowly of Covid. It’s totally predictable and unshocking when it happens. It’s also a tragedy if you cared at all about the good things he did during his life. The BBB contained a lot of hopes for a better America and world. It’s not shocking and totally predictable that it’s falling apart. It’s also totally sad if you care about this country or planet’s future.
Nope. BBB is just another capitalist clap trap of the debt based system. You keep on trying to sell that as popular, but it wasn't. It's more popular now because it was reduced. Capitalism will die some day. The structure of the world will change. A true leftist notion. You progtards are really right Hegelian morons in the end.
Fuck off troll.
Sure, Joe Manchin will be more than happy to stall Democrats agenda for another year with pointless negotiations with himself where he revokes his previous positions, whatever they were. He hasn't been negotiating in good faith, and he's not about to start. His goal is to be the "hero" for the faux news crowd- and their agenda is stop Biden from doing anything.
I think that it is most likely that Joe Manchin isn't going to be a member of the Democratic party for much longer, and we just have to accept that and try to get as much done now as possible before he inevitably bolts the party and hands Moscow Mitch the majority during an "exclusive" interview on faux sometime next year.
I believe Manchin will find a dealbreaker in any version of BBB, no matter what is proposed.
It's a legislative skeet shoot.
Kevin in right that expecting a huge program to pass with a one-vote Senate majority was overoptimistic. But there were things causing this optimism. Because Republicans assisted in passing the first pandemic bills, there may have been a misconception that they were finally accepting Keynesian economics - anyway some pundits claimed this. Then as the stock market and the real economy bounced back rapidly from the initial plunge there was talk of a "Biden boom". Also it may have been expected that covid would be over after the first peaks were passed. But then other problems emerged and the media jumped on Biden for the Afghanistan withdrawal. The mood of optimism was lost quickly. Now things are back to normal - that is near-paralysis in Congress - and people have forgotten what was accomplished initially.
Manchin represents a state where a large chunk of the population is on disability. You would think that a large benefit program like Medicaid, the ACA or BBB would be really popular with so many vulnerable people there, but you'd be wrong. Throughout WV and other parts of Appalachia, there's a HUGE amount of anger and resentment against people on the dole. What seems like common-sense assistance for working-class people looks to them like another program for lazy bums to take advantage of -- hence Manchin's remark that parents will just use the child tax credit for drugs. That's exactly what a lot of his voters think. They're all nodding their heads along with him.
I think the core of the problem is something not often mentioned: that Democrats always believe they have to do everything RIGHT NOW because they are going to lose in the next election. It's this loser mentality that is creating the ugly chaos we see now.
My suggestion is a wholesale change in mindset. Focus on NOT LOSING. Then you can think more strategically about prioritizing what is possible under any given circumstances. This will not only result in getting more legislation passed, but will have the wonderful side effect of making Democrats look more like winners, and thus more likely to win over swing voters in the next election!
@Citizen99
This is what Republicans have been doing since the 1970s. They have utilized bigotry, jingoism and rage (because winning is all) to take over every state and local office from dog catcher to governor, and then used that success to rig the electoral process so they will remain in power forever. Along the way they completely lost sight of any principles they may have started with, as their moral center eroded while they were busy making sure of victory. For the past few years I've been wondering if the drive to NOT LOSE is worth the effort, given what happens when you forget why you wanted the power in the first place.
Kevin may be right in general. But frankly the chances for a new version of BBB are zero and we all better accept this. Manchin may have the gall to "be open" for negotiations but rely on it: He never intended to vote for BBB and never will vote for anything
Second: Yes, the BBB bill was unprecedented. But so is the situation in which it was conceived. This country is about to be converted into a fascist dictatorship. And the concentration of wealth at the top is back to the levels that eventually triggered the New Deal. And most of those super wealthy are perfectly fine with a Trumpist "USA" (will need to be renamed I think?).
Third: It is one thing for a senator to resist a bill based on his regional interest--or in Manchin's case the interests of the lobbyists he is friends with. It's normal politics. But promising and keeping to promise to make a deal while negotiating in bad faith (which he did throughout since he had never a sound policy rationale for any of his objections), milking the maximum amount of publicity out of the situation and then canceling the deal ON FOX NEWS while not even having the cojones to inform the President personally--this is unacceptable behavior--and he should be primaried for it. I hope somebody in W Virginia will.
This is all so similar to Joe Lieberman in the Obamacare era, including the stupidity and vanity and ridiculous self-pity of the main character in the plot.
Seems to me even Kevin ought to see this.
P.S. I do think Manchin was the only real obstacle to a deal; Sinema would have voted for some deal after getting her pound of flesh: She wants to "feel good" while being a politician (according to her book). Getting a pound of flesh and then claiming credit for a popular bill is exactly what makes politicians feel good.
I should add to this Manchin's refusal to support any reform of the filibuster in the face of clear and present danger to our election system; there is just absolutely no excuse for this, not even the fact that he is a policy ignoramus.
"Take whatever Joe Manchin wants for godsake and get it over with."
Amen to that because whatever he does Sinema will do as well and there's your 50 votes. Get it done in January and February and spend the rest of the year campaigning on it.
The Dems will probably lose the House simply by gerrymandering alone but I still think they have a shot of holding onto the Senate, maybe even expanding their majority by 2-3 because the GOP has some really awful candidates lined-up in some of these races. And if the Dems hold onto the governor's seats in these states: Nevada, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania and add Georgia and Arizona to that along with Massachusetts and Maryland, that's damn good mid-term for the party that holds the White House.
If Manchin agrees to a smaller bill, I believe it will pass both houses with bare majorities. Pelosi will allow a few lefties to vote no to assuage their fee-fees, but most progressives will bite the bullet and vote aye; they have already compromised much more than the conservatives. If Dems learned anything from 2010, they had better stand behind everything they manage to pass, talk it up as the greatest thing since Medicare and ACA, and flay their GOP opponents as tightwads unwilling to help anyone but the rich.
Such a minimill is just not worth wasting a reconciliation slot on. So forget it, please and see if a proper voting rights bill to prevent all the GOP shenanigans for 2021 could be achieved. There are several versions, one by Manchin (more likely one of his staffers). Some synthesis of these bills might do a lot more good than a mini-BBB bill.
I don't think a voting rights bill would pass reconciliation muster, which means Manchin & Friends would have to be willing to rescind or suspend the filibuster. This does not seem likely.
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