What Disarray?

Jonathan Bernstein: “Could the whole thing still fall apart? Sure. The House shouldn’t be a problem; after having voted yes on Friday (and in preliminary votes even earlier) there’s little incentive to kill the bill when it returns. But all it takes is a single Democratic senator to bring everything down. Still, it does seem unlikely that events would have reached this stage without some confidence that Manchin and Sinema would be on board, and one would imagine that those senators would have given more of an indication long before now if they intended to oppose final passage. Which gets back to the point about shared incentives: Even as both Manchin and Sinema have strong electoral incentives to establish themselves as clearly more moderate than the party, they also have incentives for the party to thrive overall.”

“So it sure looks likely that some version of Build Back Better, modified by the Senate, will wind up passing. And if that happens, this will have been (for better or worse) one of the most productive Congresses in a long time. With one year remaining to do more.”