“It’s a beautiful sight,” Rebecca Katz, a longtime progressive operative, said of liberal lawmakers linking arms, grabbing the detonator, and pointing menacingly at the BIF. “This is the most together they’ve been. I mean, I can’t remember the last time we’ve seen something like this. … I’ve been retweeting Jonathan Chait and Hillary Clinton people today. It’s very confusing.”
During the Clinton and Obama years, progressives routinely swallowed their pride, as Katz noted. The most classic case came during the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Back then, the progressive ecosystem rallied around the public option as a litmus test of the bill’s intellectual virtue. Then they agreed to pare it back so that states could opt out, then so states could opt in. Then they dropped the concept entirely, replacing it with a provision that would have opened up Medicare coverage for those 55 and older. And when that didn’t get the votes, they begrudgingly moved forward without it … with one exception…
The reconciliation package is popular. It is the Biden agenda. If its passage is materially threatened because moderates — having been satiated by getting the infrastructure deal done — no longer feel compelled to support it, then the party will once again be taking the suicidal path. Or so progressives believe.
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