View this email in your browser

This is a sample of the Prospect's latest pop-up newsletter
If you want to keep receiving it, please update your preferences by
logging in to "My Account "
on the Prospect website and clicking the "Manage Newsletters
" link.

 

 

Republicans Attempt to Pull the Football on Bipartisan Deal

This was always going to happen, and Democrats should be prepared for
it.

 

Sen. Jerry Moran (R-KS) arrives at the Capitol for a Senate
Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense hearing, May 26, 2021. (Bill
Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images)

 

****

**** Stop me if you've heard this before, but Republicans are proving
themselves untrustworthy in policy negotiations.

About a month ago, 11 Senate Republicans secured a deal with the White
House on a subset of infrastructure spending, while claiming to speak
for enough of their colleagues to break a filibuster. But now there are
murmurs of wavering. CNN reports

that five of the 11 are having second thoughts, while Politico gets a
couple specific senators

on the record with their misgivings. Jerry Moran, a nondescript
backbencher from Kansas, is in both pieces, and his presence is notable.
Moran's two complaints are consistent with why this bipartisan deal
was always going to be a Lucy-and-the-football scenario.

Moran told Politico that there are "red flags" around using increased
IRS enforcement as a revenue-raiser in the deal. The agreement would
give $40 billion more in funding

to the IRS to reduce the "tax gap" between what people owe and what they
actually pay. About $100 billion in revenue depends on this provision in
the deal. Moran hinted at conservatives being targeted by a bulked-up
IRS, but his concern is obviously political.

The Coalition to Protect American Workers, a dark-money group helmed by
Mike Pence's former vice-presidential chief of staff Marc Short, has
been running ads against Moran in his home state
,
darkly warning of an army of jackbooted government bureaucrats. "If Joe
Biden gets his way, they're coming: IRS agents," the ad intones.
Short's group has set a goal of $25 million

for the pressure campaign against Moran and other Republicans.

This is part of a larger mobilization campaign

from an all-star team of conservative politicians

and far-right groups (among them some of the richest people in the
country) that should have been anticipated from the get-go. The entire
impulse of anti-tax conservatives for at least 40 years has been to
starve the IRS of funding. Around 30 percent of IRS enforcement division
staff has been cut

since 2010, leading to a withering of its duties. The right was not
going to be silent as the agency was propped up with additional
resources. And they'll use any tool available, including the
ProPublica leak of high-earner tax information
,
to prove that this "rogue" agency doesn't deserve more money.

**Read all of our infrastructure coverage here**

Click to Support The American Prospect

A related complaint is that the revenue provisions of the deal are
phony. Several GOP senators went on the record about that. Of course
it's phony
!
Republicans won't raise a dime of tax revenue and they don't even
want to collect taxes already owed. How exactly else would $579 billion
of revenue be raised over a decade?

Some of the measures, like unused coronavirus aid, are just figments of
the GOP imagination. Democrats are now embracing dynamic scoring
-essentially
factoring in the economic benefits of spending-which they have savaged
for many years when Republicans used it to justify tax cuts. I'd
rather phony pay-fors than the privatization of public assets
,
but since Biden forced all the spending to be offset, you were always
going to run into this problem in a bipartisan deal.

The rest of Moran's complaint was also predictable: that "a bipartisan
bill could help kick off a massive subsequent round of spending by
Senate Democrats on party lines." The idea that Republicans will only
agree to one bill if Democrats agree to never pass another bill ever
again is rather absurd, but this was always a question I had. Why would
Republicans facilitate the biggest priority of the Biden administration,
and give him the opportunity to claim at least a portion of it was
bipartisan?

The common thread in these complaints is that Republicans don't really
want to do any kind of bipartisan bill on a Democratic priority.
They're happy to get Democratic support for their priorities, but not
the other way around. Looming over this is the overlord of the GOP,
Donald Trump, who's criticized the effort, entirely on the terms that
you shouldn't make any agreement with any Democrat ever. And we've
endured years of Republicans paying fealty

to whatever Trump says. The fact that in the face of this, the White
House is courting conservatives on supporting welfare spending

seems just crazy.

[link removed]

But let's recall that signing on to a smaller bipartisan bill for
"hard" infrastructure was actually a Republican idea. The theory was
that if they gave on the smaller spending package, Democrats would cave
in on a larger reconciliation bill with social spending and tax
measures, which would require practically all of their members in
Congress to agree. If Republicans now pull out the rug on the bipartisan
agreement, this could plausibly anger moderate Democrats enough to push
them into the arms of the reconciliation package, at which point
Democrats get the victory they sought anyway without having to share
credit for any of it with Republicans. They could even increase funding
for the IRS to Biden's preferred level of $80 billion, and add back in
a host of infrastructure elements cut out of the bipartisan bill.

The question is whether Democrats would get it together to follow
through on that threat, which Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) made publicly
earlier this month
,
only to face backbiting from anonymous staffers that he was threatening
to derail the bipartisan effort. The thrill of bipartisanship still
holds far too big a sway among elements of the Democratic caucus.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the dual-track process, Sen. Bernie
Sanders's (I-VT) ambition for a $6 trillion reconciliation package has
already been cut nearly in half
,
and that's the starting point of the negotiation. That said, what
appears to have been excised are the parts that weren't in Biden's
original proposals. It's good news that climate and housing measures
are in the baseline bill, along with the social spending in Biden's
American Families Plan. And the threat of building the physical
infrastructure pieces into the reconciliation package if Republicans go
AWOL from the bipartisan bill remains front and center.

Though Senate moderates have been the focus for who holds the ultimate
outcome in their hands, if I were to guess I'd say that House
moderates will be the bigger obstacle. Already we're hearing about
House members who are jittery about a reconciliation bill, particularly
those who represent Trump districts
.
The Problem Solvers Caucus has backed the bipartisan Senate proposal
,
but their thinking could be to just take that and run as well. Speaker
Pelosi has remained strong on linking the two bills, and vowing not to
pass either until the Senate passes both. But moderates are going to
scream about that, and the thin margins in the House give them the
leverage

to force a shift.

Of course, progressives have that leverage too. And if moderates are
left at the altar by nervous Republicans, progressives have a far better
argument to say it's time to stop waiting for bipartisan Godot and
just execute the Biden agenda.

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

 

[link removed]

YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM

Copyright (c) 2021 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
_________________

Sent to [email protected]

Unsubscribe:
[link removed]

The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States