This is a problem with a solution, this duel of infrastructure bills. After you, Alphonse. No you, Gaston.
The hard parts are the votes 49 and 50 in the Senate, as it seems no Republican dares to cross Mitch on this one. This gives Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema inordinate power over the content and timing, and they are making the most of it.
This whole big thing about the price tag is a bad PR joke come to life. The simple answer is to shorten the time frames, strategically, so as to remain more or less equalized in expected revenues and expenditures (so that the true price tag, in terms of additional deficit, is minimal) and expire certain of the "entitlements" proposed. The bill should allow those to be re-authorized by majority vote under the reconciliation process.
Finally, the cloture vote on a continuing resolution and debt limit increase was a rude thumb-nosing, and should be countered by a similar fart in their general direction. McConnell has said he would allow a "clean continuing resolution" (dirtied only by emergency relief, a demand we will be hearing a lot more from our Southern GOP Senators) to pass. So, do that, then immediately after change the Senate rules to allow "future" debt limit increase motions to go to immediate vote with a simple majority, then make the motion. In other words, make another crack in the filibuster for a "clean" debt limit increase measure.
It's either that, or put it in the BBB Big-Ass Biden bill. Which is just normal sausage-making, really.
Again, the hard part is discerning how to accommodate what Sens. Manchin and Sinema require to support the final bill. Beyond the simple price tag sticker shock of it all,* of course. Manchin seems to want some pullback from the Green New Deal-ish aspects of it--there are credits for energy savings that push aside fossil fuels. So, I'd say give him money to start a major "clean coal research" facility in Morgantown. There may be no practicable way to make coal clean, though from what I remember, certain varieties should be easier to take off their impurities. The big plus would be meaningful improvements in carbon and methane sequestration, which would be required on a high scale to make coal burning not release CO2 and other greenhouse gases. And the learning could pay off in the future. Just a few billion, or a few dozen billion, it wouldn't be that bad.
As for Sinema, the scuttlebutt is that she doesn't like the tax increases on the rich folk. (The scuttlebutt on Manchin was similarly that the corporations that have bought him didn't want the increase. I will come to this momentarily.) I would say that her key constituency is the striving class, middle and upper-middle, professions of various kinds, in Maricopa County and thereabouts (and a similar group in the Tucson area). What those people won't like, and where the rub is going to lie, is in the reversal of the SALT limit imposed by the Trump TaxScam that is a hardcore demand of Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Why is that? The limit hits those with higher incomes in taxes with relatively high state income taxes. Arizona is a no income-tax state. Though sales tax is a different issue, this is one of the big areas of appeal to put up with its infernal summers (it's gorgeous winters are also another, obviously). So, the invidious comparisons would suffer there.
The remedy will have to be some other kind of monetary concession, and I think Sinema has communicated what that will be. I'm guessing military tech spending of some kind.
As for Manchin, he is dealing directly with President Biden. My belief is that he has privately assured Joe that, when the time comes and he has satisfied himself, he will vote for the deal. He also gave him the size of sticker he could really support, after all the back and forth. And, importantly, that he would not oppose the corporate tax increase to 27%, which is what Biden promised.
Manchin has been giving clues all along, though: his voiced reluctance to add new entitlements really is pointing toward the sunset approach I suggested above. Again, in five years we should be able to take a new look at these, to see then where our priorities for investment should lie.
My over-under number for the tag is $2.31T, that last .01 T (ten billion dollars) being the Manchin Concession.
* (yes, $3.5 T is a big number, no doubt, though for a 10-year markup it's a slower rate than $2.0 T for an average of six years).
Assuring Election Integrity
In some of the comment areas of websites I have visited, I have seen that phrase used by those seeking remedies for the purported electoral abuses of 2020. I ask, what is election integrity, but this:
"ready access to the vote for all adult citizens, which is then counted, and reported, efficiently and accurately"
Question mark. So far, no one has disputed this formulation--I cannot see how one could. *
Frankly, it doesn't seem that much to do: nations in all parts of the world have managed it. Not all of them, mind you--the main requirements seem to be up-to-date use of technology, the will to use it, and precautions against its misuse. They have one tool, though, that we do not have: a standard national ID.
I guess it's too late to bundle that into the reconciliation, too, though there's every reason it should have been included: "election infrastructure". But maybe there's a way to make it "bipartisan", as I have suggested.
* I use no shock quotes around the phrase because it's not masquerading as another thing; it is the thing itself.
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