What disarray? Democrats are getting stuff done

Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.The House of Representatives finally voted Friday m [Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( The House of Representatives finally voted Friday morning to approve the “Build Back Better” bill — the Democratic omnibus containing money for family support, health care, climate and [lots and lots of other stuff](. Despite constant speculation about divisions within the party, the Democrats were remarkably united, with all but Representative [Jared Golden]( of Maine supporting what turned out to be the party consensus. The finish line is still weeks away; the Senate is expected to make significant changes, after which it will return to the House for what should be final passage. Still, the vote amounted to more vindication of the two-bill strategy the Democrats adopted, which has already produced an infrastructure bill signed into law with bipartisan support. It’s unlikely that either the most liberal or more moderate House Democrats would have voted for the bill on Friday without reasonable confidence that all 50 Democratic senators are willing to go along. The item most likely to be reduced or stripped out in the Senate is the increased deduction for state and local taxes, something that several of the relatively moderate Democrats from New York and New Jersey want to vote for even if it doesn’t end up in the final bill. This way, they’ll be able to tell their constituents that they fought hard for it, even if the result turns out to be less than they wanted. Originally, it was those moderates who didn’t want a House vote until both chambers had signed off on identical legislation. Eventually, they settled for a negotiated public deal that didn’t have full details. It seems likely that including SALT at this stage basically turned the House vote from a negative to a positive. As far as that two-bill strategy? It did take more trust among Democrats than [some outside observers]( thought was there. But not much more. The most liberal Democrats had originally demanded that both bills pass at the same time, but they eventually decided to settle for a sufficiently public commitment from the moderates, crucially including Senators Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Why? For one thing, it showed the [advantages of negotiations within the party](, where relationships appear for the most part to be fairly good and incentives align for teamwork. For another, the ideological split among Democrats is somewhat overrated. Yes, the House Progressive Caucus has serious policy differences with the moderate Democrats, but its members are also pragmatists who realize that Senator Bernie Sanders isn’t president and they don’t have the votes to get all their preferences enacted. The moderates may not quite be mainstream Democrats, but we’re not talking about old-style conservative Democrats, either. All of them are more liberal than the most liberal Republicans in Congress, and it’s not particularly close. That’s a huge difference from the 1980s, and even a significant difference from the Congresses in 2007-2010 when Nancy Pelosi was speaker for the first time. Silly Republican claims about “socialism” aside, the Democrats are indeed passing a very liberal agenda. Could the whole thing still fall apart? Sure. The House shouldn’t be a problem; after having voted yes on Friday (and in preliminary votes even earlier) there’s little incentive to kill the bill when it returns. But all it takes is a single Democratic senator to bring everything down. Still, it does seem unlikely that events would have reached this stage without some confidence that Manchin and Sinema would be on board, and one would imagine that those senators would have given more of an indication long before now if they intended to oppose final passage. Which gets back to the point about shared incentives: Even as both Manchin and Sinema have strong electoral incentives to establish themselves as clearly more moderate than the party, they also have incentives for the party to thrive overall. So it sure looks likely that some version of Build Back Better, modified by the Senate, will wind up passing. And if that happens, this will have been (for better or worse) one of the most productive Congresses in a long time. With one year remaining to do more. 1. Neil Lewis Jr. on [public opinion about climate](. 2. Chris Cioffi on still-lagging [congressional staff salaries](. 3. Zack Beauchamp on [threats of violence undermining democracy]( in the U.S. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Brooke Sutherland on the [supply chain problem.]( 5. And Dan Drezner has some international relations [book recommendations](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. 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