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Democrats need to be united to pass $3.5 trillion budget plan
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
What are the details of the Democrats' proposed $3.5 trillion budget blueprint?
Well, the Democrats this week in the Senate Budget Committee agreed to move forward with the plan to spend $3.5 trillion spread out over about 10 years on a huge portion of President Biden's Build Back Better Plan. This comes on top of a bipartisan agreement, at least in principle, on another $600 billion in physical infrastructure, which is roads, bridges, tunnels, repair, broadband deployment and a whole bunch of other physical infrastructure spending that Republicans and Democrats agree they want to do but aren't clear on how they want to pay for. But on the $3.5 trillion in spending, this is a lot of new social services, it's extending a number of tax subsidies that are going to low-income families and families with kids as part of the American Rescue Plan, which was the Biden stimulus bill that passed earlier in the year. It also includes money for two years of community college, universal preschool, and expands Medicare to cover things like dental benefits and other things that Medicare currently doesn't pay for.
So, this is a really big, ambitious plan. Democrats are excited about it because they think it's going to reshape, eliminate poverty for millions of Americans and reshape the role of the federal government and a lot of people's lives. However, the road to get there is long and challenging. And this next, in this part of the process is just one baby step forward. The next part of the process will be to pass a budget. And the budget process requires only 50 votes in the Senate and the simple majority in the House. But with Democrats slim margins in both, they can't really afford to lose even a single member. So, Democrats have to be totally unified to get this thing through. They can't expect a lot of support from Republicans. And the tension in the party is between progressives who want to spend a lot of money, Senator Bernie Sanders said he was looking to do over $6 trillion, and more moderate members, which is a sizable but silent group led by the very vocal senator from West Virginia, Joe Manchin, who says, this whole thing has to be paid for, there can be no deficit financing. Which means the Democrats can really only afford to spend the money they can raise. And while Biden has put forward $3.6 trillion in tax increases, a lot of those tax increases are politically untenable. And most analysts see there's a realistic range of about one to two trillion dollars in tax increases that are possible. If you combine that with some budget gimmicks and some fake spending cuts that have been floated in the bipartisan framework, plus, you give yourself a longer time frame for how you count the revenues that will finance some of the short-term spending, you can probably get there. But the Senate and the House are probably months away from resolution of this process. And the challenging part right now is going to be keeping everybody on board until the very end.
Why election reform laws are deadlocked on Capitol Hill
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
With the For the People Act not passed in the Senate, what's the outlook on Democrats' election reform?
Well, the thing about election laws is that they're really all about power, how to get it, how to maintain it once you have it. And the Republicans and the Democrats are unlikely to agree on even the basics of what's wrong with our election system today, and they were definitely unlikely to agree on how to reform those things. So there's really no consensus on Capitol Hill on what's broken about the current election law. You've got Republicans at the state level who are pushing, rolling back some of the more generous rules that were laid out during coronavirus. You also have some that are trying to combat President Trump's allegations of widespread fraud during the 2020 election cycle. Democrats, on the other hand, are doing everything they can to make it easier to vote, to expand access to the vote. And that's part of what was in the federal legislation that Republicans voted down.
There's really no next steps for this law now that Republicans have said they're not going to go for it. There never really was a path to get this passed into law this year without changing the Senate's filibuster rules, and there's enough moderate Democrats who have ruled that out. That's not on the table. So election reform is going to continue to move on probably at the state level and at the federal level, you're going to be deadlocked at least as long as neither party in the Senate has a supermajority.
Amid criticism, Vice President Harris is traveling to the Southern border, what is the Biden administration's border security strategy?
Well, a big part of the border security strategy has been telling migrants to stay at home. Vice President Harris was very explicit in this message in her tour of Central America a few weeks ago. Otherwise, the Biden ministration is consistent with law, rehousing minors that arrive in the US until their claims can be processed and also sending back unaccompanied adults. What they're not doing is adopting many of the more harsh strategies of the Trump administration, including building a border wall and separating families. What eventually they're probably going to have to try to do is come up with a deal with Mexico and try to deal with immigration at its root source in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, three of the countries that are going through a hard time and sending a lot of migrants north right now.
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Marjorie Taylor Greene support in House shows Republican Party tilt
Get insights on the latest news in US politics from Jon Lieber, head of Eurasia Group's coverage of political and policy developments in Washington:
Lots of drama to start the year on Capitol Hill. First, you had an insurgency on January 6th, followed by an impeachment of the President of the United States, accompanied by magnetometers being installed on the floor of the House of Representatives because the Democratic members thought the Republican members were trying to carry in guns with which to hurt them. Accusations that some of the Republican members may have been aiding the insurgents in that 6 January riot. Not a lot of evidence for that, but it does show there's a lot of bad partisan will between the two parties, right now. And that is culminating this week with a vote to potentially expel freshman member Marjorie Taylor Greene from her committee assignments in the House of Representatives.
In previous instances, where members of Congress were outspoken and used rather inflammatory language, the Republicans voted to strip former member Steve King of his committee assignments on the basis of him using some inflammatory language about white supremacy. But in this case, the Republicans argue that Marjorie Taylor Greene's comments on social media before she was a member of the House of Representatives don't quite rise to the level that she should be stripped of her committees. The reality is, she's an ally of the <former> President Donald Trump and the Republicans want to stay in his good graces in order to help them in the 2022 midterms. So, the Democrats are taking matters into their own hands, setting up a vote to strip her of committee assignments, which potentially could lead to a path, if Republicans take the majority in two years, where they retaliate against Democrats that they don't like. You're already seeing some Republicans talk about that.
At the other end of the spectrum, you've got Representative Liz Cheney, daughter of the former vice president and a rock-solid conservative by any metric, who voted to impeach President Donald Trump, and now there's members of the Republican conference that want to see her pay a price for that. I think ultimately, she probably ends up keeping her job with the support of leader Kevin McCarthy. But the fact that this division is happening, where Republicans are rallying around Marjorie Taylor Greene and potentially want to take the leadership position away from Liz Cheney is an indication of where the Republican Party is going. And it looks like it's going in a more Trumpy direction even after former President Trump is out of office.
Senator Murphy on abolishing the filibuster, a Senate tool he has famously employed
One of the most heated debates happening on Capitol Hill right now is whether Democrats should push to eliminate the Senate filibuster in order to overcome Republican opposition to their legislative agenda. Bremmer posed this question to Democratic Senator Chris Murphy, a man who famously launched a 15-hour long filibuster of his own on gun control in 2016.
"I would certainly support reforming it, allowing for more measures to be passed by 50 vote majorities rather than 60 vote majorities," Murphy told Ian Bremmer on GZERO World. "Maybe that's a first step before we eliminate it entirely." The hedged reply by Senator Murphy indicates that eliminating the procedural rule may be harder than many progressives may have hoped. This episode of GZERO Worldalso features an interview with Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace.
- Elise Stefanik’s rise in the Republican Party - GZERO Media ›
- Elise Stefanik’s rise in the Republican Party - GZERO Media ›
- Why election reform laws are deadlocked on Capitol Hill - GZERO Media ›
- Why election reform laws are deadlocked on Capitol Hill - GZERO Media ›
- January 6 committee partisan battle; SCOTUS rules on election reform - GZERO Media ›
- January 6 committee partisan battle; SCOTUS rules on election reform - GZERO Media ›
- Democrats need to be united to pass $3.5 trillion budget plan - GZERO Media ›
- Democrats need to be united to pass $3.5 trillion budget plan - GZERO Media ›
- Senate's bipartisan $1T infrastructure bill could double US spending - GZERO Media ›
Ending the filibuster: Senator Chris Coons' changed views & a Biden administration
In a new interview with Ian Bremmer for GZERO World, Delaware Senator Chris Coons, once an ardent defender of the filibuster, explains why he's had a change of heart on the procedural policy. The filibuster prevents a simple majority from passing legislation in the Senate, and has been a tool that Coons says allowed Sen. Mitch McConnell, then Minority Leader, to "use the power of the minority to thwart the Obama Administration's agenda." Coons says, should VP Biden win the 2020 election, "I'm not willing to sit by for four years and watch an entire administration lose the opportunity to make real change."