Pelosi Is Poised for Another Big Victory

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The Democrats’ two-bill approach to funding many of their priorities is now halfway home, more or less. Moderate holdouts have managed to bargain for a fixed date to vote on the first bill (a bipartisan one to fund relatively traditional public works) while the House has passed a budget that will allow the second bill (a partisan one containing much of the party’s agenda, which they plan to pass using the reconciliation process) to move forward.

So three comments.

First, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi continues to be very good at her job. This is her fourth term as speaker, and she can point to landmark legislation in each one. If these two bills pass, on top of the pandemic-relief legislation from earlier this year, this will probably be her most successful Congress yet. And that’s with basically no margin of error: Democrats right now can only afford to lose three votes in the House, and none at all in the Senate, as long as all the Republicans vote the other way.

Second? Standard reports of Democratic disarray turned out to be off the mark. Only 10 moderate liberals made any trouble at this stage of the process. One reason why is that there just aren’t that many policy differences within the House Democratic caucus. Another reason is that pundits keep expecting the Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the party to ruin things for everyone else, and it keeps not happening. That’s mainly because the most liberal Democrats, who are in fact ideological outliers, appear to be generally pragmatic, not radical, in their approach to politics. That is, they’re willing to bargain for the best deal rather than insisting on getting their way no matter what the consequences (see a good Greg Sargent item for more details). By contrast, House Freedom Caucus Republicans and many others in both chambers are radicals without necessarily being policy outliers, at least within their party.

Third point: The next step is for House Democrats to write and pass their version of the reconciliation bill, followed by Senate negotiations on their own version, at which point the House will have little choice but to accept whatever the Senate decides. At some point, the House will also have to vote on the bipartisan bill, with the most liberal Democrats only willing to support it if they’re confident that both bills will pass. This is where the Democrats would be better off working out a deal now, in a summit with factions from both chambers (and from the White House) working together. Such things are generally not done — the chambers only come together after each passes their version of a bill. But there’s no reason it couldn’t happen, and it seems to me that it would both speed the process and help avoid the various obstacles to come.

Granted, I’m just an outside observer, and my real opinion — see above — is that if Pelosi thinks otherwise, she’s probably correct.

1. Seth Masket on media coverage of Afghanistan and lessons for future presidents.

2. Levi Boxell, Jacob Conway, James N. Druckman and Matthew Gentzkow at the Monkey Cage on the pandemic and partisan polarization.

3. Kelly J. Shannon on women’s rights in Afghanistan.

4. Ed Kilgore on the Herschel Walker Senate campaign in Georgia.

5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Ramesh Ponnuru on why President Joe Biden is getting terrible press over Afghanistan.

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