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**SEPTEMBER 23, 2021**

Meyerson on TAP

How to Pass the Reconciliation Bill

Congress appears headed for a multi-bill pileup, a collision whose
earthshaking consequences threaten to eclipse the cosmos-revealing
smashing of particles in the Large Hadron Collider. Democrats have
bundled together the bill that will fund the government's operations
after current funds run out at the end of the week with the bill that
raises the government's debt limit, which enables it to keep paying
its creditors, bondholders, and such. Unless the limit is raised, the
government will start defaulting on its obligations in the first week of
October.

McConnellized Republicans oppose this legislation, hoping to pin on the
Democrats (who could enact this bill by themselves by bundling it into
their only-takes-50+1-votes reconciliation package) the label of big
spenders for raising the debt limit. For their part, Democrats intend to
bring up the government-funding-debt-paying bill as a freestanding piece
of legislation, outside of the reconciliation process, thereby
compelling the nay-saying Republicans to, in effect, force the shutdown
of the government and induce a financial panic. Once the Dow drops
10,000 or so points and unemployment skyrockets, the Democrats'
thinking goes, the GOP will sheepishly agree to these measures, but
great political damage will have been done to them.

However ...

Either once this occurs, or even before, what would happen if the
Democrats did bundle funding the government and raising the debt ceiling
into the reconciliation bill? How would that affect the votes of the
Manchin-Sinema-Gottheimer gang on reconciliation? Would these
self-described fiscal conservatives say that they're so deeply opposed
to funding child care that they're willing to have the government
default on its debts? Would the Wall Street lobbyists now hard at work
endeavoring to persuade Manchinesque Democrats to kill the
reconciliation bill because it raises their clients' and their own
taxes still oppose that bill if it also includes the only path to
forestalling an unprecedented financial panic and, possibly, meltdown?

Seems to me this could be the ace in the Democrats' hole. They should
play it.

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter

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public interest. BY DOROTHY SLATER

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