Bernie Won
October 5, 2021 By Emily Jashinsky
Democrats’ infrastructure negotiations don’t reveal their divisions. They reveal the party’s unity. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has won the center.
Sanders spent the summer pushing for a $6 trillion infrastructure package. If Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.V., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., somehow negotiate the reconciliation package down to $2 trillion, as the president recently suggested, it will still be a clear win for Sanders.
How could that be? Sanders maintains $3.5 trillion should be the bill’s minimum price tag, so anything less might seem like a loss. If the wishes of Manchin and Sinema prove irreconcilable with party leadership, nothing will pass. (I’d still put money on such an outcome.) But the point here is that party leadership is Team Bernie.
The $3.5 trillion Build Back Better plan, which by Democrats’ own admission would dramatically remake America, is the “moderate” president’s agenda. Democrat leadership is pushing it, siding more with Justice Democrats in negotiations than with the likes of Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J. Even Manchin’s $1.5 trillion suggestion, which almost certainly won’t fly, would enable Democrats to overhaul the country with a massive expansion of federal power.
Again, the point is that Manchin’s number is too low for basically every other Democrat in the Senate and White House, with the exception of Sinema. Manchin and Sinema, decried by the left as members of the party’s establishment, are actually out of step with the party’s establishment on reconciliation, from Biden to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. That point cannot be overstated.
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https://thefederalist.com/2021/10/05/bernie-won/
