THE READOUT — Here’s the most important development that came from President JOE BIDEN’s five hours of meetings with 23 legislators in the Oval Office on Wednesday, according to a senior White House official: “Moderates agreed that they need to coalesce around an offer to the liberals.”
It might not sound like much. But given how dug in both sides have been, the White House views the commitment from the Manch-ema wing as “a real breakthrough.”
In a trio of meetings Biden first hosted Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER and Speaker NANCY PELOSI, then he brought in a bicameral group of centrist Democrats, and finally he gathered key progressives from both chambers. They snacked on individually wrapped cookies with the presidential seal. The president was loquacious, according to one senator present: “It’s Biden, so you know Joe does a fair amount of talking.” The last session ended just after 7 p.m.
The second meeting produced the most news. It started with the president pressing his 11 guests — including JOE MANCHIN, KYRSTEN SINEMA, STEPHANIE MURPHY and JOSH GOTTHEIMER — to give him a specific top-line number for the reconciliation bill. They all refused and instead argued Dems should nail down an agreed-upon list of revenue raisers that would determine the top line. Murphy came to the meeting with a 10-plus-page spreadsheet of ways to fund the bill.
Biden fished again for a top line. “Give me a number, and tell me what you can live with and what you can’t,” Manchin later quoted the president saying. But no luck.
“The president really wanted a top line and was clearly getting frustrated,” said a source briefed on the meeting. “He was very frustrated that they couldn’t announce a number today.” The source added that his boss’s “biggest takeaway” was that Biden acknowledged the top-line number would be less than $3.5 trillion.
WHAT THEY TALKED ABOUT: Almost every policy area in the bill was discussed, according to Sen. JON TESTER (D-Mont.), including housing, taxes, child care, health care and climate.
There was no breakthrough on climate. “I have big problems” with the climate provisions, Manchin said afterward. “Probably [the president] and I are in a different place on that.”
On the big health care standoff between Pelosi, who wants to shore up the Affordable Care Act, and BERNIE SANDERS, who wants to expand Medicare benefits, the centrists made it clear they were on team Pelosi. “They stressed to the president, ‘We’re behind the speaker in this instance,’” said the source. “There was enough in that room to kill Bernie Sanders’ idea.”
Finally, they also asked the president not to rush the reconciliation process and to use his influence in the House to pass BIF.
BIDEN’S ASSIGNMENT: The president sent them on their way with what, from the White House’s perspective, was the most important action item: Come up with a set of principles or framework for reconciliation that will persuade progressives to back down from their threat to kill BIF in the House on Monday. “The goal is to try to get a framework before the vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package,” Tester said after he left the White House.
In the final meeting — which included Reps. BARBARA LEE and PRAMILA JAYAPAL as well as Sanders and Sen. RON WYDEN — Biden faced a united front of progressives pleading with him to use his influence to delay the Monday vote.
“It’s weird if you are supposedly for a bill to insist on killing it,” one person in the room told Playbook. “The iron law of legislating is that if you have the votes you take the vote, and if you don't have the votes you delay the vote. That was done on BIF multiple times at the request of the moderate negotiators. It’s quite standard. It is NOT standard to insist on a vote when you know it will fail. Weird to call yourself a pragmatist and then kill the bill you say you want to pass by not giving negotiators more time.”
How did Biden respond to the requests for delay? “I hear ya,” the president told the progressives, according to Wyden. “I know a lot of you think that’s an arbitrary date. Let me think about it, and I’ll talk to Sen. Schumer and the speaker.”
Several Democratic lawmakers told us that any request to moderates to delay the vote would have to come from the president, not Pelosi.
LOOKING AHEAD: In the near term we see three possible scenarios, based on our conversations with numerous people in the Biden meetings Wednesday:
1) Centrists make a reconciliation counteroffer that’s robust enough to convince progressives to vote for the infrastructure bill early next week.
2) The offer from centrists comes up short, but Biden steps in and convinces the Gottheimer gang to agree to a vote delay until there’s a reconciliation deal.
3) The offer from centrists comes up short, the infrastructure vote goes forward, and progressives follow through on their promise to kill the bill. (Or we find out they were bluffing.)
