Joe Manchin’s Intervention
Democrats are trying to pass a Bernie Sanders agenda on a Joe Biden mandate.
WSJ Editorial Board
House Democrats scrambled all day and failed Thursday to come up with the votes to pass the Senate infrastructure bill. But the bigger news this week is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin’s declaration of what he won’t accept in the separate $3.5 trillion tax-and-spending bill. Think of this as an intervention to save the Democratic Party, and the country, from the left.
Progressives are furious with Mr. Manchin, and with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, for refusing to go along with the Bernie Sanders entitlement dreamscape. As an act of retribution, they’ve threatened to scuttle the $1 trillion infrastructure bill that the two Democrats negotiated with Republicans.
Mr. Sanders wants the House to defeat the infrastructure bill, a Biden priority, and Speaker Nancy Pelosi had to delay going to the floor again Thursday because she lacked the votes to pass it. Unless it passes, the moderate liberals who support the infrastructure bill will know they’re riding in the back of the party bus.
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Not so Mr. Manchin, who has the leverage in a 50-50 Senate to ride in the front, maybe even to drive the bus. They can’t afford to lose his vote, yet the left and the White House have behaved as if somehow the West Virginian would roll over in the end.
Mr. Manchin has been sending signals for months that his support has limits. First he refused to break the Senate filibuster. Then he said he couldn’t support $3.5 trillion because it’s inflationary and the economy no longer needs the help. Then in our pages he called for a “strategic pause” on the spending bill to debate specific policies. He might as well have been Ted Cruz for all that Democratic leaders paid attention.
Then, in statements and remarks Wednesday and Thursday, Mr. Manchin laid down markers that Democrats can no longer ignore. He won’t support more than $1.5 trillion in new spending. He says “social programs must be targeted to those in need, not expanded beyond what is fiscally possible.” He’s willing to raise some taxes, but nothing like what’s in the $2.1 trillion House Ways and Means bill.
“What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders,” Mr. Manchin said in a statement, “is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity.” He’s right.
Democrats may be angry, but as the days go by they may recognize that Mr. Manchin is doing them a favor. With President Biden abdicating to the left, the West Virginian is providing a reality check on progressive excess.
Inflation is already a political problem for Democrats, and another spending blowout would further associate the party with rising prices and falling real wages. The economy may have enough post-Covid momentum to absorb the tax increases, but they will slow growth over time.
The overriding problem for Democrats is that they are trying to pass a Bernie Sanders agenda with a Joe Biden mandate. Mr. Biden won because he ran against Donald Trump’s chaotic leadership and promised to end the pandemic. Even then he lacked coattails as Democrats lost seats in the House and won the Senate only because Mr. Trump demoralized GOP voters in two Georgia races.
Mr. Biden ran explicitly against Mr. Sanders’s socialism in the primaries. As the nominee he felt obliged to endorse a “unity” agenda with Mr. Sanders. But that should have gone by the wayside with the small majorities in Congress. For reasons that are hard to understand, Mr. Biden came to believe he was FDR and could pass the Sanders agenda as his own.
He has no mandate for the vast expansions of government he is proposing, and if Democrats somehow manage to pass even half of it, they’ll be crushed in 2022. This is the political message if you read between the lines of Mr. Manchin’s warnings. As he put it on Thursday, progressive Democrats can campaign in 2022 on what they don’t pass this year in Congress. Then they might have a mandate for what they’re trying to jam through now without enough public support.
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Unlike Mr. Manchin, we think even $1.5 trillion more in spending is far too much after Congress has spent $5.4 trillion in the last year. More than the amount of new spending, and even more than the tax increases, the real danger is from the many new entitlements demanded by the left. Even if they start small, they will always grow. And even if they are phased out to fit a 10-year budget window, they will never be repealed.
These entitlements are the largest stakes as Democrats try to pass whatever they can without a voter mandate. They would corrode the federal fisc and entrench government from cradle-to-grave. Meantime, Mr. Manchin is trying to save Democrats from themselves.
