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**SEPTEMBER 15, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

A Grand Bargain on Infrastructure and Saving Democracy?

****

Chuck Schumer is bargaining with Joe Manchin on two vital fronts. One
concerns the survival of American democracy. The other involves the
scale of President Biden's public-investment program, to be resolved
in budget reconciliation.

In a just world, Joe Manchin would not be calling the tune, but this is
the world we live in. We urgently need his vote on both fronts.

Of the two fights, literally nothing is more important than voting
rights. If Republican state legislatures are able not just to suppress
voting and intimidate poll workers but overturn election results after
the fact, it's game over-not just for Biden's slender majority in
Congress but for democracy itself.

On this front, there seems to be a breakthrough. Schumer, Amy Klobuchar,
and Manchin have co-sponsored a voting rights bill called the Freedom to
Vote Act. It doesn't quite have everything progressives might wish
for, like public financing of elections, but the bill does what needs to
be done to block the various forms of Republican mischief and safeguard
the right to vote. Here is a good summary
.

The choreography is simple. The bill is brought to the Senate for a
vote, Republicans use the filibuster to block it, and then it is
showtime for Manchin.

Does Schumer have a deal with Manchin, whereby Republicans block the
bill and then Manchin makes a one-time exception to his defense of the
filibuster in order to save this Republic?

Schumer isn't saying. Neither is Manchin. It's hard to believe they
would go this far without a plan for the endgame. (A far inferior backup
plan would be to tack some, but not all, of a voting rights bill onto
budget reconciliation, which has to involve taxing or spending.)

Due to the interesting timing, there may be an even grander bargain
here. As I reported Monday, there also seems to be a deal in the making
whereby the spending part of Biden's Build Back Better program is cut
by at least a trillion dollars in budget reconciliation; but in return,
a lot of de facto spending is done through what are described as
"middle-class tax cuts," most notably the Child Tax Credit
.

So progressives get their $3.5 trillion total package, and fiscal
conservatives get their spending cuts. This deal is also tailor-made to
get Joe Manchin's support.

The two deals might even be connected: Schumer goes along with steep
cuts on the spending side; Manchin agrees to a one-time suspension of
the filibuster, enabling Democrats to get voting rights.

If Majority Leader Schumer pulls this off, he is a worthy successor to
LBJ as Master of the Senate-and with a 50-50 partisan split and Joe
Manchin, no less.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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How Kathleen Rice Is Threatening the Biden Agenda

Rice and two other House Democrats oppose aggressive drug price reform,
which provides the budget savings available to fuel spending in the
Build Back Better Act. BY DAVID DAYEN

The No-Surprise Recall

Trumpism, it turns out, is not widely popular. BY HAROLD MEYERSON

Whip Count: The Democrats Who Support the Progressive Reconciliation
Strategy

A running tally of the lawmakers who have-and have not-committed to
withhold their votes on the bipartisan infrastructure bill in favor of
robust budget reconciliation BY JULIA ROCK

Infrastructure Summer: The Sophie's Choice of the Reconciliation Bill

Democrats may have to decide whether to do a few things well or a bunch
of things not so well. BY DAVID DAYEN

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