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PRESENTED BY

BY JOHN BRESNAHAN, ANNA PALMER AND JAKE SHERMAN
WITH MAX COHEN AND CHRISTIAN HALL

THE TOP

Happy Thursday. It’s Sept. 30. The federal government is going to run out of money at midnight tonight, but Congress is on a path to avert a shutdown for at least another two months.

It’s also “Infrastructure Day” — the day on which the House is scheduled to take up the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. This is huge for President Joe Biden, Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who face some stark political choices over the next few hours, days and weeks that are going to anger either the moderate or progressive wings of the party — or even both.

Let’s start with the immediate: Today is gonna be a drag. On these kinds of days, something always goes wrong or takes way longer than expected to start. Or finish. So deep breaths, everybody, we’re gonna get through this like we always do — together!

Schumer has scheduled five votes beginning at 10:30 a.m. This is the start of the process to avert a government shutdown. Congressional leaders and the White House have agreed to a stopgap spending bill that funds federal agencies through Dec. 3. There’s tens of billions of dollars in additional money for disaster relief, as well as aid for the wave of Afghan refugees evacuated during the U.S. withdrawal.

Here are three amendments that the Senate will consider before final passage:

→  Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has an amendment to bar the federal government from providing Afghan evacuees with REAL IDs. It also limits federal benefits for Afghan “parolees” brought into the United States under humanitarian circumstances. SIVs (special immigrant visa recipients) get eight months of benefits, and parolees can get indefinite benefits. This amendment will be considered under a 50-vote threshold.

→ Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) has an amendment banning the use of federal funds to implement vaccine mandates. That will be considered at a 60-vote threshold.

→ Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) has a “No-budget, no-pay” amendment at a 60-vote threshold. This is an old conservative favorite.

Following those votes, there will be an amendment from Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), chair of the Appropriations Committee, removing debt-limit language from the continuing resolution. This will probably be voice voted.

Then it’s on to final passage, which will also be at 60 votes. There should be wide bipartisan support for the legislation.

That means the House should get this bill in the 2-p.m.-to-3-p.m. neighborhood. Rules Committee Chair Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) offered a unanimous consent agreement on the House floor Wednesday night stipulating that the funding package doesn’t have to be considered by Rules but can go straight to the floor. So the House should be able to move fairly quickly. Hopefully!

“The CR extends funding for critical education, health, housing, and public safety programs through December 3, delivers $28.6 billion in desperately needed disaster relief, and provides $6.3 billion to address needs created by the end of the more than 20 years of war in Afghanistan,” said House Appropriations Committee Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) in a statement.

So what happens with the bipartisan infrastructure bill?

Speaker Nancy Pelosi went to the White House yesterday with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer to talk to President Joe Biden. The backdrop here is that the bipartisan infrastructure bill is in deep trouble — there’s no other way to put it.

It seems exceedingly unlikely —  we’re being generous here — that the House will be able to pass the infrastructure bill today due to widespread discontent on the left over how the reconciliation process is going. We wrote at the time this deal was cut that it was a mistake for moderates to accept it because progressives would end up using it to their advantage. And here we are. 

In essence, progressives don’t trust that Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) share their commitment to passing a gigantic $3.5 trillion social safety net bill quickly — and why would they trust that? Manchin and Sinema are miles from progressives on a whole host of priorities. Manchin and Sinema are acting on their own timetable, they’re not progressives — especially Manchin — and they have completely different incentives than the left does. 

Those concerns were further heightened when Manchin put out a statement last night listing an array of problems with the Democrats’ reconciliation package, including its overall cost and impact on inflation. This gave progressives even more to think about and solidified the opposition to the bipartisan infrastructure bill for the time being.

We asked Pelosi about her plans and she said this: “One hour at a time.” Pelosi said it was her plan to bring up infrastructure today — but she didn’t say anything more. Senior House Democrats and leadership aides have repeated this line as well. The infrastructure bill is slated to be voted on today. This is the schedule until it’s not the schedule. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn keeps saying he’s not whipping the bill. And when Pelosi is confident something will pass, she says it loudly and proudly.

Here’s the reality: If Pelosi decides to pause the process here, it’s not fatal in any way shape or form. It’s not great, of course, but it’s not a mortal blow to Biden’s agenda. It just means Democrats will have to return to infrastructure when reconciliation is more fully formed. 

Also real — As of Wednesday night, the votes aren’t there to pass the infrastructure bill. House Democrats will tell you this in public and private. We cannot imagine Biden will visit Capitol Hill today unless Democrats are very close to passing the infrastructure bill. They are not very close right now. 

Congress has to respond to some massive challenges over the next 20 days — raising the debt limit chief among them — and having infrastructure and reconciliation linger out there isn’t ideal for Democrats. But it’s not tragic. It may provide Democrats with a wake-up call to try to finish both measures together. These two bills are linked — no matter what some Democrats want to say. 

We’ve always thought completion of Biden’s agenda would slip until the October-November-December time period. That looks like what could happen here.

Yet everyone also knows that perception and momentum are everything in politics. So postponing a vote on the infrastructure bill would be a blow to Biden and Democrats. Lately, they’ve taken a lot of hits, and Republicans will whack them hard over this — especially with the debt-limit issue hanging out there. But it doesn’t mean that Biden and Democrats couldn’t rebound from this.

It’s tough to pass FDR-sized programs without FDR-sized majorities.

PUNCHBOWL NEWS’ 5 QUESTIONS

Our lingering questions about D.C.’s crises, confrontations and confusions

As we enter fall, the 2022 midterms are just over 400 days away. A closely watched gubernatorial election in Virginia is just over a month away. Democrats are fighting bitterly amongst themselves over infrastructure and social programs, while Republicans stand to the side and dream of being back in the majority.

In the midst of all this intense legislative activity, the busiest period we’ve seen in years, we keep coming back to these questions:

1) What is the Democrats’ plan to raise the debt limit? We’re uncomfortably close to defaulting on the nation’s $28 trillion-plus debt, and no one in the senior levels of the federal government — especially among Democrats — seems to have a clear idea how this will be resolved. For those of us who experienced the 2011 debt crisis firsthand, this situation is starting to feel eerily similar. We mean that in the sense that the political leadership in both parties is more interested in scoring narrow partisan points than in coming up with a compromise solution — at least right now.

There are just 19 days until the Treasury Department exhausts its ability to obtain new loans. For the moment, we know the GOP’s plan to handle this — they’re going to make Democrats do it alone. So what is the Democrats’ plan? The House passed “a clean” debt limit hike yesterday on a virtual party-line vote, but that’s going nowhere fast thanks to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s opposition. Speaker Nancy Pelosi suggested that some of her members want to mint a $1 trillion coin, a completely unrealistic idea first floated a decade ago. But seriously, if Democrats are against using the budget reconciliation process to raise the debt limit — and instead just want to rely on shame, moral suasion, cloture votes and pressure from Wall Street to shift Republicans — we’re all in for a very long couple weeks.

2) Is there a debt limit deal to be had? What makes this crisis more worrisome than the 2011 and 2013 debt showdowns in some ways is that then Speaker John Boehner had a price. Boehner always said it was his goal to lift the debt limit, but he needed then President Barack Obama to cut spending or tweak Obamacare. McConnell doesn’t have a price. At least not yet. Will McConnell start negotiating at some point? If so, what will he want? Democrats keep thinking he will. Yet they also thought that about Merrick Garland’s nomination for the Supreme Court in 2016, and we know how that ended up.

3) Does anyone remember the disapproval resolution? In 2011, Congress agreed to a novel mechanism to raise the debt limit: the Republican House and Democratic Senate agreed to a provision that allowed the Obama administration to lift the debt limit and then Congress could vote to disapprove it. But, of course, even if a disapproval resolution passed Congress, the president could veto it, so it truly meant nothing. This seems like an easy out. Is anyone ready for “Disapproval Resolution 2021?”

4) Are the differences between Democratic progressives and Sinemanchin bridgebable? It’s been fascinating to watch the interplay between Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Democratic progressives in the House and Senate as party leaders try to hammer out a multi-tier deal over the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package and the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill. The level of anger among progressives at the two senators is growing hourly. And in many ways, it’s more personal than the usual partisan rivalries; family feuds are always the most intense. Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin complained during a CNN interview about the enigmatic pair: “What is it that you want? What is your final goal?”

For his part, Manchin seems equally exasperated with his more liberal colleagues. Following another face-to-face session Wednesday with President Joe Biden at the White House, Manchin released that long, kind of extraordinary statement we just mentioned. It was part pure exasperation with fellow Democrats, part political manifesto. “Respectfully, as I have said for months, I can’t support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March [2020],” Manchin declared. “At some point, all of us, regardless of party[,] must ask the simple question — how much is enough?”

More Manchin: “If there is one final lesson that will continue to guide me in this difficult debate ahead[,] it is this: America is a great nation but great nations throughout history have been weakened by careless spending and bad policies. Now, more than ever, we must work together to avoid these fatal mistakes so that we may fulfill our greatest responsibility as elected leaders and pass on a better America to the next generation.”

This whole statement infuriated progressives, including many supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), some of who responded by linking to a January story where Manchin called for as much as $4 trillion in new infrastructure spending — as long as it was “paid for” somehow.

Bernie vs. Manchin is pretty much the whole story of Democrats during the 117th Congress, especially in the Senate. Manchin says he doesn’t want to “reengineer the social and economic fabric of the nation,” while Sanders and other progressives say that’s exactly what Democrats must do. And now. It’s sometimes hard to even fathom how these two can be in the same caucus and successfully co-exist. It feels like they’re reaching the point where that may not be able to happen anymore.

5) What will 2022 look like? Democrats are going to spend the rest of 2021 pushing the reconciliation and infrastructure package through Congress. Or trying to do so, anyway. Then in December, they have another government funding fight to deal with. But what will the election year look like for congressional Democrats? What kind of policies will their party think it needs to pursue as the midterms draw closer and closer? Will President Joe Biden’s numbers continue to slide, and will Democrats feel as if they need to put distance between themselves and him? What will happen to the U.S. economy, which is always the key to any election? Will there be a Supreme Court vacancy? Or will there be Supreme Court decisions that force Democrats into legislating, such as abortion, guns or immigration? How much is 2022 truly like 2010, when a GOP wave swept away a Democratic majority in Congress?

Also: Here’s a new letter from Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) about the Democratic reconciliation bill and how it treats marriages tax-wise. Romney, as expected, thinks it’s a problem. There are 32 signatories.

PUNCHBOWL NEWS COCKTAILS & CONVERSATIONS

Punchbowl News hosted a small invite-only event for some of our most engaged premium subscribers as part of our "Cocktails & Conversation" series. The event was in partnership with Sazerac House and attendees socialized with the Punchbowl News team and other members of the premium community. Join our community today for more exclusive events and opportunities. 

A big thank you to Sazerac’s Elizabeth Wise and Laura Pinsky for partnering on the event. 

Raising a glass: Katie Harbath of Anchor Change, Mike Parrish of Bayer, Justin Ailes of CRE Finance Council, Kelley Hudak of Cassidy & Associates, Christopher Hatcher of Williams & Jensen, Jessi Leigh Swenson of National Partnership for Women & Families, Stephen Myrow of Beacon Policy Advisors and more!

FRONTS

Democrats looking to "rescue" or "save" Biden’s agenda

MOMENTS

10 a.m.: President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will get their intelligence briefing.

10:30 a.m.: The Senate will begin its vote on the government funding bill.

10:45 a.m.: Speaker Nancy Pelosi will hold her weekly news conference.

11:30 a.m.: House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will hold his weekly news conference.

1 p.m.: Jen Psaki will brief.

CLIP FILE

NYT

→ “Activists take vaccine demands, and a mountain of fake bones, to the home of Biden’s chief of staff,” by Sheryl Gay Stolberg

→ “Trump Super PAC Removes Corey Lewandowski After Sexual Harassment Claim,” by Maggie Haberman

 WaPo

→ “​​Democrats worry a loss in Virginia could set off a cascade of election troubles,” by Michael Scherer and Sean Sullivan

→ “Biden sticks to his dealmaking strategy, as some Democrats want him to do more to bring holdouts on board,” by Seung Min Kim

→ “Democrats promised to slash drug prices. Now internal clashes are standing in the way,” by Mike DeBonis

→ Paul Kane: “Balk! Congressional Baseball Game comes across as tone deaf as Congress comes close to whiffing on its big deadlines”

WSJ

→ “Powell Says Supply-Chain Bottlenecks Could Lead to Somewhat Longer Interval of High Inflation,” by Nick Timiraos

→ WSJ Editorial Board: “Moment of Truth for the Moderates”

AP

→ “Democrats divided: Progressives, centrists say trust is gone,” by Alan Fram

→ “House panel subpoenas organizers of Jan. 6 Trump rally,” by Mary Clare Jalonick, Eric Tucker and Jill Colvin

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Editorial photos provided by Getty Images