President Biden and Democratic congressional leaders began the week expressing optimism that the great negotiation of 2021 on hard and soft infrastructure under budget reconciliation--or, if you prefer, the cascade of trillions of dollars--would reap happy settlement by the end of the week.
The reason for expressing if not generating optimism is clear:
(1) Terry McAuliffe is at risk of losing blue-state Virginia's governorship next Tuesday and has been pleading for his party's national leadership to give him some timely accomplishment of which to speak. He'd take the $1.2 trillion hard infrastructure bill that had bipartisan support in the U.S. Senate and that no House Democrats oppose on merit, but only on the tactic of not passing it unless they get the other soft-infrastructure bill that is a progressives' wish list for a generation.
(2) If the House doesn't pass that popular hard-infrastructure bill by the imminent end of the month--the one with roads and bridges and transportation hubs and broadband and electric car charging-stations and even some climate-change mitigation programs in flood and fire zones--then several transportation-spending authorities will lapse and 4,000 federal workers will have to be furloughed.
So, sure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says we're oh-so-close and Joe Biden says we're about there.
And West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the centrist and potential 50th vote, says ... well, that he doesn't like expanding Medicare into dental, vision and hearing without structural reforms on financing, and that he doesn't like federal imposition of Medicaid expansion for the states that haven't yet chosen it because those states would immediately get 100 percent federal funding while more responsible states (and that even includes West Virginia and Arkansas) have been phased down to 90 percent. And that we need to means-test some of these worker and child-care credits. And that he notices there is inflation about. And that he said $1.5 trillion was his number and that he still says $1.5 trillion is his number.
Meantime, the other Senate Democratic holdout--Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona--says ... well, nothing. She is the Greta Garbo of contemporary politics. But the press reports all say she is quietly negotiating with White House aides and is against raising corporate or individual income taxes on anybody, even the highest-income taxpayers.
She also says--and I've read her actual statement on this--that it was a betrayal of trust for House Democrats to decline to pass on its own the bipartisan hard-infrastructure bill sent over from the Senate, and on which she took a leading role.
Democratic congressional leaders say not to worry about Sinema's tax objections because, since the soft-infrastructure bill is down from $3.5 trillion to somewhere north of Manchin's $1.5 trillion, they won't need to raise as much money and can rely in greater part on stepped-up IRS enforcement to nab all those unpaid due taxes out there.
That includes the little item I wrote about in this space last week to have banks tell the IRS every year all our account deposit information so the agents can compare our deposits to our tax-form income reports. The Democrats claim they're going to catch only all the wealthy tax evaders that way--in the same way, I guess, that having banks report any and all cash transactions of $10,000 or more, which doesn't actually happen much, was going to nab all the drug-trafficking criminals.
All of that is to say, at midweek of this week of great Democratic optimism, that I'm rooting for magic while wondering what in the world the optimism is based on.
I continue to think Manchin has more sense than anybody in Washington and to note that he says he can't see how this gets resolved by the end of the week.
Let's see if it turns out the way I predict, which is perhaps influenced by the way I hope it turns out: The House will pass the stand-alone hard-infrastructure bill before Nov. 1 and the White House and congressional Democrats will announce full agreement by all factions--from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Manchin and Sinema--on a "framework" for the other, bigger social-spending bill.
No one will be furloughed and McAuliffe will hail all the new infrastructure coming from his party to Virginia.
They'll say the framework on the other bill is binding, awaiting only the technical writing of late-coming agreements, and that everyone has promised to hang tight and not do a double-cross.
But it's possible the details will be a little more complicated than that.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.