Passing big spending programs isn't supposed to be easy

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( One down, one to go. That is: The infrastructure portion of the two-bill Democratic spending program has now passed, and the other big spending bill — with family assistance, climate measures, health care and more — is still moving through Congress. There’s a tendency to think that infrastructure is inherently non-controversial. That mistake creates a misleading conversation: The questions about why it seemed so hard for Congress to pass the infrastructure bill that [succeeded]( in the House of Representatives on Friday after [moving out of the Senate]( in August, and the earlier failure of President Donald Trump’s infrastructure initiative, are about how something so obviously popular didn’t just pass automatically. Yeah, no. Whether the federal government (or any government at all) should finance what were once called internal improvements, and if so which ones, have regularly generated serious policy divisions [since the founding of the republic.]( Those divisions have often corresponded with major cleavages within the parties, whether it was conservatives against moderates in Dwight Eisenhower’s Republican Party during the 1950s or pro-growth liberals against environmentalists and others in Jimmy Carter’s Democratic Party two decades later. Nor is it unusual for those who support such spending to attempt to cloak it in broader and presumably harder-to-oppose national-purpose oratory, as with those who used the Cold War to [launch]( the interstate highway system during the Eisenhower era. Indeed, the idea that “infrastructure” is an unambiguous and uncontroversial good thing was always a way to sell a particular set of policies; efforts by the current Democrats to package virtually everything they wanted under that umbrella may have wound up overburdening the concept, but it’s very much in keeping with the whole idea of infrastructure to begin with. At any rate, spinning things as infrastructure may have fooled some pundits, but it was unlikely to confuse those who actually don’t think government should spend money on roads, or bridges, or broadband, or trains, or strengthening health-insurance markets, or subsidizing child care, or one or more of the dozens and dozens of things that are found in both the bill that has now passed and the one still pending. It should therefore be no surprise that many Republicans sincerely opposed any of this spending; Republican opposition to Trump’s infrastructure initiative might have doomed it even if his administration had been less inept. Nor is it shocking that various groups of Democrats strongly differ on which items are actually the core of their own infrastructure agenda, and that it takes legislative skill and perseverance to pass any of this stuff. We still don’t know whether the second bill will pass, or, if it does, which provisions will survive the final bargaining process. It still does appear, however, that House and Senate Democrats do want to get it done. If that’s the case, there’s [nothing]( that should prevent it from happening. It was reassuring that House Democrats demonstrated last week that they were willing to take “yes” for an answer. The House Progressive Caucus [traded in]( its absolute insistence on passing the second spending package, dubbed Build Back Better, before voting on the infrastructure bill for assurances that the two-bill strategy has already done what it needed to do. Moderate Democrats in the House had resisted a vote on the second bill without commitments from the Senate, fearing the possibility that they might end up having to defend a vote for the (unpopular) costs, only to have that bill die. But they apparently realized that most of the things that the House may include in the Build Back Better bill only to have them stripped out by the Senate were actually pretty popular, so they committed to voting for it. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, meanwhile, had apparently wanted to pass the infrastructure legislation without needing any Republican support, but she eventually brought the bill to a [vote](knowing that she would need at least a few Republicans (she got 13) to make up for defections from the most liberal corner of her party — accepting that the goal was passage, not looking strong. For that matter, it appeared that the six progressives who voted against passage would probably have been willing to support the bill if their votes had been needed. None of this guarantees passage of the Build Back Better initiative. If Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the most conservative Democrat in Congress, doesn’t want a bill — or, for that matter, any other Democratic senator — we aren’t going to have a bill. But so far it appears that Manchin is mostly interested in exercising his considerable leverage on the size and contents of Build Back Better, not in killing it. If that’s the case, Biden should prepare for another signing ceremony. 1. Seth Masket on [learning — or not — from the off-year elections](. 2. Robert E. Erikson, Andrew Gelman and Robert Y. Shapiro on [what moves voters in off-year elections](. 3. Clarence Lusane at the Monkey Cage [on Colin Powell](. 4. Alex Samuels, Geoffrey Skelley and Mackenzie Wilkes on [voters in Virginia](. 5. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Alexis Leondis on [panicky holiday shopping](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. Before it’s here, it’s on the Bloomberg Terminal. Find out more about how the Terminal delivers information and analysis that financial professionals can’t find anywhere else. [Learn more](. You received this message because you are subscribed to Bloomberg's Early Returns newsletter. [Unsubscribe]( | [Bloomberg.com]( | [Contact Us]( [Ads Powered By Liveintent]( | [Ad Choices]( Bloomberg L.P. 731 Lexington, New York, NY, 10022