It’s Always A Battle Against Corruption
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin
The fight over the reconciliation bill is not an honest ideological conflict — it is a clash between necessary policy and corporate greed.
by DAVID SIROTA
Way back in August, The Daily Poster told you that progressive House Democrats’ willingness to hold out for a serious anti-poverty and climate-focused reconciliation bill would likely determine the outcome of the epic battle unfolding on Capitol Hill.
We also told you that if progressives began holding out, corporate Democrats, egged on by a deal-hungry president, would revise their strategy and try to help their business donors hollow out that bill by defanging the legislative details.
One month later, all of that has proven to be true, and this conflict has now devolved into what most fights in Washington become: a clash between good policy and blatant corruption, and a deeper struggle between aspiration and lethargy.
“All Done Together, Or It's Going To Be None”
Thanks to the whip count work of The Daily Poster, The American Prospect and The Intercept, we know that 21 House Democrats have publicly pledged to vote against passage of a business-sculpted infrastructure bill unless it remains coupled with the much bigger reconciliation legislation, which is supposed to include climate initiatives, drug pricing measures, anti-poverty programs and higher taxes on the wealthy.
This two-track strategy is sound: The idea is that the only way to get corporate Democrats to provide necessary votes to pass a reconciliation bill they hate is to link it to an infrastructure boondoggle that their corporate donors desperately want.
"We're either going to have to get this all done together, or it's going to be none,” Daily Poster subscribers were told during last week’s live chat with Democratic Rep. Brendan Boyle, who has committed to withholding his vote. “That's the practical reality."
If progressives follow through and vote down the bipartisan infrastructure bill, it would be no small thing. It would not only be a reversal from their previous surrender on a $15 minimum wage as part of President Joe Biden’s COVID relief bill, it would be the first time in forever that progressive lawmakers actually opted to wield real power.
That’s yuge — but there’s a catch.
Progressive holdouts have — deliberately — not made specific demands about what they believe must be in the reconciliation legislation. That omission has created the political space for corporate Democrats to try to whittle down the bill to barely anything at all. If that effort is successful, it would force progressives to choose between voting for an empty husk of a bill that is at least called “reconciliation,” or risk getting nothing at all. Corporate Democrats would be betting that under enough pressure, progressives will eventually choose the husk and calculate that they’d be able to sell it to voters back home as a spectacular victory.
In the last two days, this kind of pressure has ratcheted up in a coordinated fashion.
Biden is now reportedly telling corporate Democrats that they get to decide how much to slash out of the reconciliation bill.
Similarly, John Podesta — who ran the corporate-funded Center for American Progress — circulated a memo on Capitol Hill telling progressives to suddenly back off the $3.5 trillion framework, even though it already passed the House and Senate, even though $3.5 trillion is already a compromise from $6 trillion, and even though $3.5 trillion is a comparatively paltry sum that’s less than what the government is expected to shovel out the door to the Pentagon in just the next 5 years alone.
Podesta has declared that “we will not secure the full $3.5 trillion investment” — demanding Democrats once again back off and live to never fight another day, all in the name of protecting the party’s prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.
Somehow forgotten is how the same demands for compromise and capitulation were made during President Obama’s first two years, resulting in an all-too-small stimulus that did not adequately boost the economy, and that helped create the conditions for Democrats’ electoral shellacking in 2010.
Pay Attention To The Billionaires Behind The Curtain
We know what’s at issue in this conflict — and it’s not some earnest policy dispute over which particular policies would be good for the country. We’ve long known what needs to be done to fight the climate crisis, make taxes more fair, and prevent Americans from being fleeced with the world’s highest prices for medicine — and with the nation facing a climate cataclysm, a health care emergency, a pandemic, and economic turmoil, much of that has been promised by Democrats and is supposed to be in their reconciliation bill.
But in recent weeks, we’ve seen these agenda items put on the chopping block: Tax measures have been trimmed, prescription drug pricing provisions have been voted down, threats against climate programs have been made. This has happened because of a factor that politicians rarely acknowledge and that reporters and pundits at corporate media outlets don’t like to mention.
And that factor is: blatant, obvious corruption in a capital city immersed in corporate cash, overseen by business lobbyists who buy votes, and run by lawmakers who have their own financial interests in mind.
Some obvious examples:
The Daily Poster reported that after campaigning on a promise to reduce prescription drug prices, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., threatened to oppose those provisions as a Big Pharma-funded dark money group began bankrolling ads for her — a move boosting drugmakers’ support for Sinema beyond even the hundreds of thousands of dollars of pharmaceutical industry campaign cash she’s already raked in. The pharma front group, Center Forward, has already spent around $600,000 on TV and radio ads characterizing Sinema as the second coming of the late Arizona Sen. John McCain, according to data from AdImpact.
The Daily Poster broke open the story of three House Democrats blocking those same prescription drug provisions after they hauled in roughly $1.6 million of campaign cash from the pharmaceutical industry, and as one of the lawmakers’ top aides became a pharmaceutical industry lobbyist. Facing an angry backlash from voters, one of the lawmakers effectively admitted that the industry uses campaign cash to buy political access to legislators, while another refused to stop taking the industry’s money because he said that would “defund my campaign.”
Forty-eight hours after his corporate donors launched a huge lobbying campaign against the reconciliation bill, West Virginia coal magnate-turned-senator Joe Manchin took time out from partying on his luxury yacht with other senators to demand that the bill be halted. Now, to the likely delight of his staffers-turned-fossil-fuel-industry-lobbyists, Manchin is promising to try to gut the bill’s climate measures amid worsening wildfires, droughts, and hurricanes.
Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., used his chairmanship of the House’s tax-writing committee to eliminate or defang provisions closing tax loopholes that benefit billionaire dynasties and private equity moguls — and he did this almost exactly a year after Wall Street helped him buy reelection in the face of a tough primary battle.
The nine House Democrats leading the charge against their party and pushing to decouple the infrastructure bill from the reconciliation bill raked in more than $3 million from donors in the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel industries — the industries most opposed to the latter legislation.