The ambition of Biden’s spending package reveals the distance that US politics has travelled since the Great Recession
The stench of defeat has clung to the Democrats’ failure to get either of their major infrastructure bills passed by Congress during the last week of September. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had committed herself to 27 September as the date by which she would bring to a vote the smaller, bipartisan bill infrastructure package already passed by the Senate. This was going to happen, she said, even if no progress had been made on meeting the progressive Democrats’ key demand: passing the larger reconciliation infrastructure bill at the same time. But Pelosi held no vote that day or even that week, even as she vowed with increasing frequency (and seeming desperation) that one was imminent. The week ended not with a dramatic roll call but with plenty of Democratic handwringing and gleeful Republican predictions that the collapse of Democratic rule and, with it, of Biden’s presidency, was at hand.
Treating that fateful week as the moment when the promise of the Biden presidency vanished may be too hasty a conclusion, however. The difficult challenge facing Pelosi was to unite Democrats behind a second infrastructure bill much larger and more ambitious than the first. It was never going to be easy to pass that second bill, and not just because the Democrats were holding a slim majority in the House and the thinnest of majorities in the Senate. It is also the case that a bill of this size and scope has no clear precedent. We hear a lot about FDR’s remarkable accomplishment, passing 15 separate bills in the first 100 days of his New Deal administration in 1933. The Democrats’ second infrastructure bill, if passed, would have been equally remarkable. It is best understood as an attempt to compress the equivalent of Roosevelt’s fifteen separate initiatives into one giant piece of legislation.
Gary Gerstle is Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge and is writing The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022). He is a Guardian US columnist
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