What Leverage Do Progressives Have To Force Moderates Democrats To Vote For Reconciliation

Who has more leverage: Moderates or progressives? The reconciliation bill is at the mercy of Sinema and Manchin. Do progressives have enough leverage to keep the bill intact?

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Sam: Hear me out. Big update this morning from Axios on the reconciliation fight while the White House and Sinema's office have refused to comment apparently Sinema says she's done with reconciliation entirely if the bipartisan framework doesn't pass by September 27th. Confirming her and mods in the house are working together to get Pelosi to cough up a date for voting on the bipartisan framework and to gumming up the works in the senate side so that making it all through that date would be impossible. But here's what might happen McConnell company hasn’t blinked on raising the debt limit through regular order. While I don't know the mechanics or feasibility of this approach Democrats’ best bet of getting both bills done now as well as avoiding a debt crisis may very well be to shove the debt limit increase into reconciliation. That increase increases the pressure on mods and cements the reality that both the debt limit increase and the two builds back better bills will have to pass on party-line votes. That may lock incentives like Manchin we may not like it but this is very well may be the one path to both avoid the debt crisis and actually implement most basic parts of the Biden legislative agenda before the midterms. Potential upside perhaps they can establish a date where Biden won't have to deal with this debt limit again. See Krampell for Twitter for an explanation of the mechanics of debt limit via reconciliation versus regular order. Yeah so the only potential and I’ll walk through that in a second but the only potential sort of what a stick in the spikes of that or whatever it is are the spokes of that is that it appears that they're not going to be able to get this reconciliation bill by the 27th. Now personally I am skeptical that the moderates if they don't get their vote on the 27th are going to refuse to vote for it again on October 10th. But I also Pramila Jayapal said at least half of her 96 progressive caucuses has stated to her privately or some pro publicly that they're gonna vote against the bipartisan framework bill unless the reconciliation is brought here I mean. this is the bottom line. This is how it works. The reconciliation bill needs to be voted on at the same time as the bipartisan bill because that is the only leverage that progressives have in the Biden administration for that matter and the establishment of the leadership of the democratic party has to force these moderates to vote for the reconciliation bill. They need to both pass at the same time. The moderates had forced nancy Pelosi about three or four weeks ago you recall they were holding out to get a vote by the 27th with the idea that maybe the clock runs out on the reconciliation bill. But you can pump that vote. If you put in the debt ceiling limit rise which you have to do supposedly by September 30th. But what will happen is my guess is sometime in the next week and a half treasury will come out and go like whoa we've shifted some stuff around and that won't have to happen until October 12th. I’m making up a date but that's it.

Sam: But you say they can punt that vote. moderates are now saying they're going to jump ship on reconciliation if they punt the vote you can call their bluff.

Sam: But the problem is that the moderates have is that they're not on board with reconciliation right now. So it's very hard for them to pretend that they're giving up anything. And so this is I mean this is going to be a big stalemate. Because the Biden administration may be willing to trade off some big pieces of it. Or to make the whole bill crappier but look good. In other words, like we're going to fund everything only 15 of what it is so that it looks like we have a list of all the things that we're doing but in fact, all those things that we're doing are garbage because they're not funded enough.