Jayapal Defends Breaking From Progressives' Two-Track Strategy on Build Back
Better
Ryan Grim and Sara Sirota
The Intercept
Jayapal Defends Breaking From Progressives' Two-Track Strategy on Build Back
Better
Pramila Jayapal slammed Joe Manchin's "lack of integrity." The Squad saw
through it all along.
It started as an accidental dare. As House leaders met on November 5 in an
effort to reach a final deal on both the Build Back Better Act and a
bipartisan infrastructure bill, House Majority Whip James Clyburn, D-S.C.,
suggested the Congressional Black Caucus could be helpful in ending an
impasse between a group of holdouts, led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer, and the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, led by Rep. Pramila Jayapal.
The suggestion was dismissed out of hand by Gottheimer's crew, Clyburn would
later tell allies, with the Black Caucus being written off as irrelevant in
a changing Congress. Once known as "the conscience of Congress," the caucus,
founded in 1971 by 13 members, drew its power from the legacy of the civil
rights movement and its ability to speak with one voice and vote as a bloc.
That unity had been chipped away over the past two election cycles, amid a
generational and ideological struggle that played out in party primaries.
Clyburn took the diss as a challenge. After the meeting, a livid Clyburn
summoned the CBC leadership, telling CBC Chair Joyce Beatty, Rep. Maxine
Waters, and others about the disrespect put on the name of the caucus. It
was incumbent on them to prove the doubters wrong, he said. How much
disrespect was real and how much he was ginning it up to motivate the CBC is
a matter of dispute, but the effect was clear. Beatty pledged the caucus
would move swiftly. Shortly before 2 p.m. she, Reps. Steven Horsford,
D-Nev.; Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas; and others left Clyburn's office and
told reporters that the caucus would support the effort to split the two
bills, though the caucus had yet to meet on the question.
Beatty quickly scheduled a caucus meeting and urged the group to back the
leadership strategy, telling members that the credibility of Clyburn and the
CBC was on the line. The meeting overlapped with another gathering of the
Congressional Progressive Caucus, which was debating the same questions,
with some members who served in both caucuses shuttling back and forth.
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, D-Mo., made a motion that the caucus unify behind
Clyburn and leadership, and Horsford, who'd also been in the Clyburn
meeting, seconded it. Reps. Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley, Bonnie Watson
Coleman, and Ilhan Omar all pushed back against the strategy, asking the
motion to be withdrawn, which it eventually was. No vote was held. "We were
adamant that there was no agreement, but they put out a statement anyway,"
said one CBC member.
Beatty journeyed from the CBC meeting to the CPC one, where the progressive
caucus was still gathered. She told reporters outside in the hallway that
she was acting on her own initiative, but was conspicuously accompanied by a
senior aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
She stood outside awkwardly as she was refused entry under the reasoning
that only CPC members could attend the meeting. "I think it was a mistake
for CPC not to be in better dialogue with CBC and joint strategy. Having
Joyce Beatty wait outside to address CPC was arrogant and wrong," said one
CPC member.
One nonmember was allowed to join by speaker phone, however: Joe Biden. A
week earlier, after lengthy negotiations with Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin
that had followed a successful CPC effort to hold the line and keep the two
bills paired, the Biden administration released a new framework, which
Manchin praised.
During the CPC meeting, Biden beseeched the caucus to give him a win on the
infrastructure bill, asking them to trust that he had a commitment from
Manchin to get Build Back Better done. The day before, Manchin had appeared
on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" and said he was in agreement with a $1.75 trillion
top line for the bill.
Progressives were also facing pressure from Democrats who blamed November
election losses on the infrastructure bill's delay, noted one progressive
House staffer who requested anonymity to speak freely with The Intercept.
Democratic Sens. Mark Warner and Tim Kaine of Virginia argued Terry
McAuliffe, the party's candidate, could have won the governor's race if the
framework was already signed into law.
"After the November elections, with establishment Democrats loudly blaming
progressives for their losses, every faction of the party apparatus was
arrayed against the CPC and determined to pass the bipartisan infrastructure
bill alone," the source said.
Even after Biden's call, according to people in the room, more than two
dozen Democrats were still willing to vote no, unwilling to trust Manchin's
word. Jayapal, however, made the case that the CPC had taken it as far as it
could and told those assembled that she was going to back the president's
play. Omar, the CPC whip, continued pushing for the caucus to hold the line,
but with the caucus chair siding with Biden, resistance crumbled.
Whether House Democrats had the votes still remained an open question,
however, and five members of the Squad - Omar, Bush, Alexandria
Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Jamaal Bowman - announced they would be
voting no. "I'm a no," Ocasio-Cortez told The Intercept that evening. "This
is bullshit."
Without those five, Pelosi needed Republican votes, and GOP leadership had
previously said it would force Democrats to pass the majority threshold on
their own before Republicans would help. But not long after the vote opened,
several moderate Republicans voted yes, assuring the bill's passage. Rep.
Ayanna Pressley ended up joining her Squad colleagues in their no votes.
In exchange for their votes, the CPC had won a commitment from Gottheimer's
crew that if a Congressional Budget Office analysis came in relatively close
to the White House assessment, they would vote to move the bill to the
Senate. Gottheimer's gang made good on that pledge, and by mid-November, the
bill was in the hands of the Senate. For the next month, Manchin negotiated
with the White House.
Those negotiations were only made possible by House progressives holding the
line, Jayapal noted, adding that the Senate had already acted without any
commitment from Manchin. "The Senate passed the infrastructure bill without
any commitment on the Build Back Better Act, and it fell to the progressive
caucus against the push of our own leadership, political pundits and
eventually the White House to hold the line," she said.
"I want to be very clear that I believe it was our insistence on holding the
line that got Senator Manchin to commit to a framework negotiated by the
president that I don't think Senator Manchin ever wanted to do in the first
place," Jayapal said. "I believe we were able to put him in a box with that
framework where he would either have to uphold his commitment to the
president or - and I do believe the president when he said to us and to me
personally that he got a commitment from Senator Manchin - or he'd have to
go back on his word."
The job of House progressives, she said, was to get both bills through the
House and get a commitment from Manchin, beyond which the responsibility lay
with the president to finish it. "We held the line not just once, but twice,
and even a third time for a very long day at the end to insist that we get
what we needed to pass both bills through the House and pass both bills
through the House we did," she said.
Last Wednesday, the White House issued a statement blaming Manchin for the
delay that The Hill's Steve Clemons says set Manchin off. On Sunday, he took
to Fox News and let the world know he was "done."
On Monday morning, Manchin called Jayapal to talk. Later, in a conference
call with reporters, she said that she had been blunt with Manchin. "That
lack of integrity is stunning," she said, particularly in a city where your
word is everything."
She said Manchin denied ever having made a commitment to Biden. "I don't
know what to make of that," she said. "I still believe the president got
that commitment."
"Either the president did not have a commitment, or the senator made a
commitment and went back. And I believe the president when he said he had a
commitment," she said.
Asked if she regretted the decision to break the two pieces of legislation
up and give away leverage, she said she has pondered it since. "This is the
question I've gone over in my head a million times," she said, concluding
that she didn't regret the decision because, she argued, there was no
particular tactic that could have overcome what she now believes was always
Manchin's plan to walk away.
"I don't believe the senator actually wanted to pass Build Back Better," she
said on the call. If Democrats had held the line again that evening and
blocked passage of the infrastructure bill, she argued, Manchin would have
used that moment as his excuse to bolt.
Ultimately, Biden and Pelosi pushed the progressive caucus to break with a
two-track strategy they themselves had previously endorsed, based on a
confidence in their own ability to move the final legislation through the
process, born of decades of experience inside the system - experience that
distorted their view of the situation and gave them an inflated sense of
their own personal power absent sufficient leverage. They were successfully
able to pressure Jayapal into going along, while the members of the Squad,
peering in from the outside, could see the firm contours of the structure
much more clearly.
It's impossible to know what would have happened in a counterfactual
situation, in which progressives would have continued to hold the
infrastructure bill as leverage. Jayapal argued the leverage wouldn't have
worked on Manchin; the infrastructure bill was much more of a priority to
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz. Yet the bipartisan bill was indeed something
Manchin wanted, both for his state and for his reelection. Jayapal said the
strategy worked as well as it could and "boxed him in" to supporting the
framework, after which it was up to the president to reel him in.
"I think he was looking for a way to not do it, and that would have been the
day that the Build Back Better Act died," Jayapal said, referring to
November 19, the day the infrastructure bill passed the House with majority
support from the CPC.
"That would have also been the day that we turned the country against us,"
she added, "so no. I don't have regrets."
Those who objected to the strategy in real time, however, saw Manchin's move
as the danger they predicted. "Alexandria warned it could happen," read an
email Ocasio-Cortez sent to reporters. "Yesterday, it did."
