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Happy Monday morning. And welcome to August.

The Senate is in session today, the House is in recess. And President Joe Biden is in quarantine after testing positive for Covid-19 – again.

Let’s talk about reconciliation timing for a minute, and then we’ll get into the bigger political picture.

The Inflation Reduction Act – the formal name for the $740 billion legislative package agreed to by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) – may come to the floor this week. Or it may not.

Senate Democratic leadership and committee staff – along with their Republican counterparts – will be meeting with Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough this week to conduct a “Byrd bath” for the legislation. This is a highly technical review of the proposal to see if it comports with the Byrd Rule, which governs the Senate’s reconciliation process.

We’ve been told by Democratic aides that the Senate could take up the Schumer-Manchin bill later this week, with a vote-a-rama running into the weekend. Schumer has warned his colleagues this may happen.

But we’re still skeptical of this proposed schedule for one simple reason: Everything takes longer than you’d expect this Congress. Everything. So we could see the Senate not even starting on the vote-a-rama until next week. We’ll keep you up to date as soon as we hear anything.

→	Today’s theme – reversal. Or changing direction. Or flip-flopping. Call it whatever you want. It’s what politicians do best. But the key is how the best politicians do it.

Let’s start in the Senate, where the big topic of the day will be Republicans reversing their vote on the PACT Act, a suddenly very high-profile bill designed to help millions of veterans exposed to toxic substances during their military service.

First, Senate Republicans were for this bill. Then they were against it. Now they’re for it again if they can get an amendment vote on an issue that the majority of them didn’t care about when they voted for the bill originally. But they’ll vote for the bill even if the amendment fails. Got it?

The PACT Act – formally known as the Honoring Our PACT Act – was introduced in the House in June 2021. The full House passed it in March. Since then, the bill has gone back and forth between the two chambers, getting big bipartisan margins on the floor. Until last week.

At that point, 25 Senate Republicans switched their votes and opposed cloture on the measure, derailing the legislation just as it was on a glide path to Biden’s desk.

Some Republicans explained they voted against cloture because of a dispute over discretionary versus mandatory spending. See Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), who has consistently said this for months.

Yet nothing significant has changed in the bill from when these 25 other Republicans voted for it back in June.

What did change is that Schumer and Manchin cut a deal on a reconciliation package, a move that caught everyone in Washington by surprise. This upset Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) and other Republicans, who believed they’d been assured Democrats had given up on reconciliation before these GOP senators threw their support behind the $280 billion CHIPS Plus bill.

Cornyn and other Republicans – after an outpouring of fury from veterans’ groups – will vote for the bill now, although Schumer has offered Toomey an amendment vote. Toomey wants to make future funding of the program discretionary rather than mandatory, which means Congress would have to vote on it every year. That amendment is unlikely to pass, although the larger bill is expected to.

“I will hold a new vote this week, and I am urging everyone to vote ‘yes,’” Schumer said during a Sunday press conference with vets.

But don’t think Republicans are the only ones who change their positions. Democrats can do this too. There’s two issues we’re watching.

Biden vowed never to raise taxes on any Americans making less than $400,000 annually. Yet according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, the Schumer-Manchin bill does just that. Up to $16.7 billion worth of tax increases, JCT estimates.

Republicans, as expected, jumped all over this. “The mislabeled ‘Inflation Reduction Act’ will do nothing to bring the economy out of stagflation and recession, but it will raise billions of dollars in taxes on Americans making less than $400,000,” Sen. Mike Crapo (Idaho), the top Republican on the Finance Committee, said in bashing the Democratic plan.

Democrats countered that the JCT analysis failed to factor in several elements of the legislation, including Obamacare credits, savings from allowing Medicare to negotiate on prescription drugs and clean energy credits for individuals, as well as other provisions.

Here’s Ashley Schapitl, spokesperson for Finance Committee Democrats:

Now, let’s focus on Manchin for a moment. The West Virginia Democrat made the rounds on all five Sunday shows yesterday, and he was pressed repeatedly on his support for tax increases as part of the Inflation Reduction Act (we’re still wondering if he came with that name).

Manchin had previously suggested he’d support a 15% corporate minimum tax, which is a key provision in the Inflation Reduction Act, so that’s not new. His argument is that Democrats are closing loopholes, not raising taxes. Here’s Manchin on NBC’s “Meet The Press”:

Now, what we’re watching with Manchin – besides his reversal in cutting a deal with Schumer, which Manchin strongly insists isn’t a reversal at all – is he’s become the one seeking to pull a colleague into a deal, instead of the one being lobbied. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) is the key to whether this proposal succeeds or fails. So we want to see how Manchin handles it. The role reversal, if you will, is a new one for Manchin this Congress.

“Kyrsten Sinema is a friend of mine, and we work very close together. She has a tremendous, tremendous input in this legislation,” Manchin said on “Meet The Press.”

More Manchin:

– John Bresnahan

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