According to the White House, this is what winning looks like.
On Tuesday, President Biden signed a sweeping $740 billion tax, climate, and health care bill into law and, in doing so, summarized his party’s message ahead of the midterms. “With this law,” he said, “the American people won and the special interests lost.”
A stripped-down and refurbished version of “Build Back Better,” the measure raises taxes on corporations, funds new environmental initiatives, and creates new prescription drug benefits. Biden and congressional allies named it the “Inflation Reduction Act,” while Republicans cite analysis that predicts it will do the opposite, and complain that Biden just hired an army of IRS agents.
But in the State Dining Room at the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer didn’t bother with that criticism, predicting instead that the bill Biden was about to sign “will endure as one of the greatest legislative feats in decades.” And to the president, the legislation was the latest example “of an extraordinary story that is being written by this administration and our brave allies in Congress.” For some time now, Democrats have been eager to turn the page.
Shortly after his inauguration, Biden gathered a number of presidential historians in the East Room to discuss in private one of his most admired predecessors and plan out his own presidency. He turned to biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin, and started to say, “I’m no FDR, but...” Then, according to Axios,
who first broke the story, Biden trailed off. Over the next 18 months, crisis and frustration followed.
Biden struggled with a deadly pandemic, oversaw an ugly end to the conflict in Afghanistan, and then watched as a land war broke out in Europe. As each challenge compounded and cascaded over the last, White House staffers joked that a plague of locusts must be next. Instead, they had to contend with
a baby formula shortage.
“Nobody elected him to be FDR, they elected him to be normal and stop the chaos,” Virginia Democrat Rep. Abigail Spanberger
told the New York Times late last year, alluding to what the paper described as “the sweeping agenda the president is seeking to enact with the thinnest of legislative majorities.”
The political arithmetic did not change, and some of that agenda has been pared down since then. But the story the White House now wants to tell has to do with big spending bills and significant reforms, lower gasoline prices, and slowing inflation, expanded alliances and dead terrorists. It has been a good summer for Biden.
He signed a $280 billion package to boost the domestic computer chip-making industry and another to shore up medical care for military veterans affected by toxic burn pits in foreign wars. He signed a bipartisan gun control bill in June, the first such reform in decades.
He has sent billions in military aid to Ukraine, helped welcome Finland and Sweden into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and green-lit the attack that ended the life of al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri with a Hellfire missile.
All told, said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, Biden is ending the summer months with
“more legislative success than any modern president.” The latest success, the spending bill he signed into law Tuesday, Biden reminded his guests at the White House, came no thanks to Republicans.
“Every single Republican in Congress voted against this bill,” Biden told an audience of Democrats. “Every single Republican in Congress voted against lowering prescription drug prices, against lowering healthcare costs, against a fairer tax system,” he added. “Every single Republican voted against tackling the climate crisis, against lowering our energy costs, against creating good-paying jobs.”
This is exactly the kind of contrast the president hopes to draw when he hits the campaign trail later this month. “My fellow Americans, that’s the choice we face,” he said. “We can protect the already-powerful or show the courage to build a future where everybody has an even shot.” Seated in the front row and beaming during the remarks was Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat who made that dichotomy possible.
Manchin was the lawmaker who bedeviled Build Back Better from the beginning. Biden had proposed a $1.75 trillion reconciliation framework last fall, and the House passed an even beefier $2.2 trillion package that ended up scaring off centrist Democrats in the Senate. Following the dizzying negotiations over those eye-popping numbers left White House aides exasperated and exhausted. Last October, Louisa Terrell likened the whole process to “a goat rodeo.”
The director of the White House Office of Legislative Affairs repeatedly asked Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, “What is our strategy?” According to a source with direct knowledge of the conversation, Terrell summed up talks by saying that “Schumer was in big hot water,” and Sen. Bernie Sanders was “pissed off.” Almost a year later, Sanders is still unhappy.
"I don't think it's debatable," Vermont’s Democratic-Socialist senator told NPR of his earlier characterization that Manchin had sabotaged the Biden agenda and advanced “his own” while negotiations were ongoing.
But progressive dissatisfaction with the Inflation Reduction Act was not the story of the day.
To fight climate change, the new legislation includes numerous tax credits. To lower drug and healthcare costs, it allows Medicare to negotiate prescription prices with manufacturers and extends subsidies for the Affordable Care Act. To pay for it all, the bill creates a 15% minimum tax rate for corporations with at least $1 billion in income, while providing $80 billion in new funding for the IRS to hire additional agents in the next decade.
Although Democrats insist the new spending will fight inflation, that’s more of a political calculation than a mathematical one. Preliminary analysis by Penn Wharton at the University of Pennsylvania found that the plan’s
effect on inflation would be “statistically indistinguishable from zero.” And Moody’s Analytics reported that, at best, the law would reduce inflation by
0.33% over the next decade.
“Isn’t it almost Orwellian?” asked Jon Karl of ABC News, citing a similar analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. “How can you call it the Inflation Reduction Act when the nonpartisan experts say it’s not going to bring it down?”
That analysis was incomplete, replied Jean-Pierre. The White House press secretary insisted that when new revenue brought in by the IRS was taken into account, the legislation – now law – “will lower the deficit, which will help fight inflation.”
Republicans counter that those IRS agents obviously won’t only target the ultra-wealthy, as Biden insists. “With the stroke of a pen, Joe Biden will guarantee congressional Democrats’ careers will come to an end. Biden and Democrats raised taxes on hardworking Americans and gave $80 billion to the IRS to hire 87,000 new IRS agents,” said Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee.
“Americans will never forget,” she added, “that Biden and Democrats raised taxes during a recession.”
Republicans are banking on that resentment to buoy their chances this November. The president’s poll numbers have stabilized, but not yet recovered, since they plummeted after his chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan this time last year. A clear majority, 56%, disapprove of Biden’s job handling in the RealClearPolitics Average, while
just 40.2% approve. Last week marked the first time that Biden was above the 40% mark in that metric since June.
The president and his party will soon hit the road trying to improve those numbers and highlight their wins across the country. If they fail, and Republicans retake one or both chambers of Congress, the slimmed-down Build Back Better bill that Biden signed into law may be one of his last major legislative achievements.
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. What a douche. You ain't doing s**t Nancy.
