The public hand-wringing by House liberals, at times, masks how much they have become the mainstream of the party during the Biden presidency. Despite frustrations over the current negotiations on infrastructure and larger social spending bill, they are no longer pushing policies from the wings hoping to get some of what they want into the Democratic agenda as was the case during the first years of the Obama administration when their top priorities — like a public health care option as part of the Affordable Care Act — seemed like pipe dreams.

As many of CPC members have recently pointed out — Biden’s agenda is their agenda. The party outliers now are the shrinking group of moderates whose votes are still key, but whose views represent a minority of the party.

“This is, oddly, the progressives who are holding up [Biden’s] agenda and trying to make sure the president can fulfill that agenda,” Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a vote counter for the CPC, said last week. “The majority of the agenda that the president ran on that delivered us the House, the Senate and the White House is in the Build Back Better agenda. If we fail to deliver on that promise, we have failed the American people.”