Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP Images
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) arrives for a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee markup in Dirksen Building, October 6, 2021, on Capitol Hill.
The fate and composition of the Build Back Better Act remain undetermined, and there exists a strong possibility that, despite President Biden’s support for the $3.5 trillion package, the party’s moderates will win out in their desire for a smaller bill. A recent statement from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, lamenting that the bill will likely be shrunk, and a “Dear Colleague” letter saying that Democrats must make “difficult decisions” and “do fewer things well,” indicates as much. What that means in practice is still up for debate, but moderates want and might get a smaller, less ambitious bill, absenting any or all of child care, prescription drug price reform, Medicare expansion, or meaningful tax reform.
The ongoing battle over Build Back Better harks back to the Affordable Care Act deliberation of 2009–2010, the last time the party’s two halves were at loggerheads over an ambitious piece of legislation that they had the ability to pass into law. In that showdown, moderates triumphed definitively. They crushed progressives who were holding out for price controls, a public option, Medicare buy-in, anything. It was the moderates’ bill that became law, with a few scant progressive add-ons like community health centers (of course, it was much maligned, and ended up failing on numerous counts, but the reality of that was still far off).
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Their victory was not just legislative. Democratic moderates (called “center-left,” but more accurately center-right) were riding high as a political camp. The Blue Dog Coalition sported record membership numbers in 2009 and 2010; the then–similarly sized New Democrat Coalition suffered only minor losses compared to the widespread wipeout House Democrats suffered in the coming years under Obama, and rebounded quickly enough to establish itself as one of the largest caucuses in the party. Leadership in those caucuses was seen as the party’s rising stars.
Most importantly, center-whatever moderates were taken as intellectually serious and rigorous, with a dispassionate ability to craft legislation and achieve desired outcomes far beyond the trenchant ideologues of the weakly Progressive Caucus. These were intelligent nudgers, market wizards, efficiency aficionados. An armada of young pundits was dispatched in the D.C. press scene to ensure that message took hold.
The fight over BBB has been the opposite. No faction has revealed itself to be less intellectually rigorous or serious than the moderates. They are unwilling and seemingly unable to articulate a single positive concern, legislative vision, or priority for the Democratic agenda. They are allegedly worried about spending, but oppose tax hikes and hugely effective cost-saving in the way of drug pricing reform. They are worried about inflation but can’t even engage with the reality that the entire bill seeks to lower the most acutely inflationary costs—housing, education, health care, and child care—for American households. They can’t conjure a contrary vision, or even a counteroffer, other than making things smaller for smaller’s sake. They don’t even speak to the press to explain themselves. They do, however, oppose.
Making matters worse is the transparent corruption and pay-for-play that motivates the party’s moderates in this wandering journey. The individual provisions inside the BBB are extremely popular with the American public, but not the corporate world and its lobbying apparatus, and its opponents make no attempt to even put forward a plausible explanation for why they’re opposed to popular things beyond the fact that they’re paid to be.
New York’s Kathleen Rice, who held a leadership role in the New Democrat coalition last year, voted for the identical drug pricing reform bill that she just voted against barely two years ago, and conjured a nonsense excuse for why. Scott Peters of California, currently vice chair for policy of the New Democrats, pulled the same maneuver, and his explanation was standard-issue, roundly debunked “loss of innovation” pabulum ripped from industry tear sheets. When pressed on the exorbitant pharma money he’s taken in, he didn’t even pretend to disavow its influence on his judgment, but instead said he wouldn’t “defund [his] campaign so that Republicans can win”—this in a district that Joe Biden carried by a cool 30 points. As is now well known, Big Pharma is by far his top campaign contributor, and his wife’s investment firm sports a portfolio company that does manufacturing for pharmaceutical companies. Super-centrist Kurt Schrader of Oregon—member of the Blue Dogs, the Problem Solvers Caucus, and the New Democrat Coalition—another holdout against drug pricing reform, inherited his personal fortune from a Pfizer executive.
New Jersey’s Josh Gottheimer, co-chair of the Problem Solvers Caucus and a member of the Blue Dogs, has similarly been unable to muster a coherent position. No Labels, a conservative dark-money group out of which the Problem Solvers was born, tried and failed to down the entire BBB by uncoupling it from the bipartisan infrastructure bill, using Gottheimer as its de facto spokesperson. They spent a boatload of money celebrating him as a fearless leader in ad buys, and he took to their bidding in negotiations.
The Beltway press has tried to do its job in covering for them, but even they can’t make a fundamentally unserious group of politicians seem to have a consistent intellectual framework.
But even in softball interviews with Punchbowl News, Gottheimer could manage no satisfying explanation for why the bipartisan bill had to be passed so urgently and without the reconciliation bill, because he couldn’t say aloud the obvious, which is that the corporate donor class wanted no reconciliation bill at all. An early and often critic of the cost of the reconciliation package, he pivoted to celebrating the necessity of tax cuts via SALT, another one of his priorities, a very expensive component of the same reconciliation bill he was working against. None of these contradictions was even attempted to be explained. All of this happened in broad daylight.
But before the pivot, Gottheimer issued a scathing letter, flaming Nancy Pelosi for refusing to pass the infrastructure bill, which did not have the votes to pass, by the September 27 nonbinding deadline. The letter was meant to be signed by Gottheimer and the rest of the “unbreakable nine,” as No Labels branded them in their ad buy. But the other eight wouldn’t even put their names to it, and Gottheimer had to run it solo, as sure a sign as any of the legitimacy crisis in these center-right organs, who have been shown to be so transparently loyal to lobbyist money, and so inconsistent and untactical in their approach, that recruiting new members is basically impossible. Even keeping current ones in the fold has become tough.
It’s the same story in the Senate with Kyrsten Sinema, who is on the receiving end of generous ad buys from pharma groups one day, suddenly opposing drug pricing reform that she once ran on the next; taking money from Exxon one day, and opposing climate measures the next (as a former Green Party member no less). Ditto Joe Manchin, who makes hundreds of thousands of dollars from coal investments, and just so happens to oppose the climate provisions himself.
The Beltway press has tried to do its job in covering for them, but even they can’t make a fundamentally unserious group of politicians seem to have a consistent intellectual framework. Axios tried to make Sinema seem contemplative with a puff piece about her aptitude in using Excel spreadsheets, but her repeated return to high-dollar fundraisers in the midst of a media maelstrom was too brazen to make the story stick. And on rare occasions when Sinema has spoken for herself, she’s come off as even less serious than activists’ caricature of her corruption. This exchange, reported by NBC News producer Frank Thorp, sums it up neatly.
Q: What do you say to progressives who are frustrated they don’t know where you are?
Sinema: I’m in the Senate.
Q: There are progressives in the Senate that are also frustrated they don’t know where you are either.
Sinema: I’m clearly right in front of the elevator.
Behind the curtain of centrism, and its foremost exponents, sits a bunch of corporate cash, and nothing else. Even if those forces eke out a win, the insincere intellectual performance that has been used to justify letting big money have its way with an urgently needed and wildly popular piece of legislation has already done irreparable damage to the centrism brand. That trajectory is not without historical precedent; in the post-2008 era, libertarianism surged within the ranks of the Republican Party, before figurehead Paul Ryan’s big-brained whiz kid approach was revealed as nothing more than an unprincipled play to cut corporate taxes, and libertarianism lost its legitimacy, allure, and membership. Centrism seems to be on this path.
Meanwhile, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, now the largest caucus in the Democratic Party, with a surprising amount of power and discipline, continues to grow in its influence and scope, fighting for a number of clearly articulated policy priorities. These are coalitions headed in opposite directions.
Democratic centrism has been eulogized plenty of times in the past, all prematurely. After the 2016 election, for example, it was maligned for its inability to win elections, and pronounced dead with Hillary Clinton’s defeat against an extremely unpopular Republican opponent in Donald Trump. But those eulogies proved premature, and in the years since, centrists have managed to win plenty of elections (look no further than Joe Biden).
Centrism, now, is imperiled as a political orientation not for its competitive viability, but for the emptiness and corruption that has been exposed at its heart. Not a single young voter, or someone politically up for grabs, can look to the leadership of Kyrsten Sinema or Scott Peters and see a politician with a positive vision for governance and society, one they could believe in, knock on doors for, or turn out to vote for. Heck, Joe Biden can’t even see that. All that exists is a list of donors and a willingness to imperil the agenda of one of their own and the entire success of the party, for the sake of a few bucks in their personal campaign coffers, and, if that doesn’t work out, a plum private-sector job to fall back on.
