President Biden had to choose and he went with the progressives

WASHINGTON – For well over a year now, President Joe Biden's vaunted negotiating style largely boiled down to this: I'm with you.

After he vanquished Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary, he brought the liberal icon's ardent supporters into the fold by embracing much of the senator's platform even as he ran on unifying the country. When moderate Democrats came to call, he used the tones of centrism to assure them of his conciliatory bona fides.

But when Biden ventured to the Capitol on Friday to help House Democrats out of their thicket, he had to choose sides. He effectively chose the left.

"The way he is governing doesn't reflect the skills I know he must have from his years as a legislator," said Rep. Stephanie Murphy, D-Fla., who had been one of the moderates demanding an immediate vote on a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill, convinced that was what the president wanted — or at least needed. She called Biden's refusal to push harder for legislation he had embraced "disappointing and frustrating."

"I'm not clear why he came up to the Hill," she grumbled.

Since the president claimed his party's nomination last year, he has nurtured the fragile peace between his party's fractious center and left by convincing both sides he is their ally. Unified first by their shared disdain for former President Donald Trump, and then by Biden's adoption of an expansive platform, the two factions remained in harmony into this year. They responded to the pandemic by passing a sweeping stimulus package in the spring.

Now the two factions are at loggerheads — one flexing its power but as yet empty-handed, the other feeling betrayed, both claiming they have the president on their side — and the outcome of their battle over Biden's proposals could determine Democrats' fate in the midterms and the success of his presidency.

But liberals feared that moderate Democrats would vote for the infrastructure bill, claim victory and peel away from the social policy measure, so they refused to support the smaller infrastructure bill until the larger social policy package had been passed.

Heading into last week, both the moderates and the progressives felt as if they had ironclad promises: the moderates, that a vote on infrastructure would happen before October; the liberals, that the bill, a crucial part of Biden's domestic agenda, was inextricably twinned with their higher priority, the more expansive measure addressing climate change and the frayed social safety net.

The liberals, however, used their larger numbers to blockade the infrastructure bill — and they said they did it for Biden. Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of the left-wing leaders of the blockade, stood before reporters last week and said the blockaders were the ones "trying to make sure that the president has a success."

"If we pass the infrastructure bill alone, we are not even accomplishing 10% of his agenda," said Omar, the vote-counter in the Congressional Progressive Caucus, a bloc of Democrats nearly 100 strong, who showed their cohesion in last week's showdown.

This enraged both the nine centrist lawmakers who had forced Speaker Nancy Pelosi to promise an infrastructure vote by the end of September, and a larger, quieter group of backbench House Democrats, many from swing districts, who were eager for the president to sign the public works bill and start trumpeting the funding for roads, bridges and broadband in their districts, at a time when Biden's approval ratings were sagging.

"We were elected to achieve reasonable, common-sense solutions for the American people — not to obstruct from the far wings," Gottheimer fumed in a statement released late Friday. "This far-left faction is willing to put the president's entire agenda, including this historic bipartisan infrastructure package, at risk. They've put civility and bipartisan governing at risk."

Given the range of the party's suburbanites-to-socialists coalition, it may have been inevitable that Biden would eventually anger one wing of his party. What was striking, and perhaps equally surprising to both blocs, was that he alienated the moderates who had propelled him to the nomination while delighting the progressives who vociferously opposed him in the primary.

The president is not backing off the public works measure so treasured by the moderates.

But as he told House Democrats on Friday, he believes it's "just reality" that the infrastructure legislation will not pass without assurances from two centrist senators, Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., that they will support the more wide-ranging bill.

Although, as Biden conceded in the Capitol, that will not happen until the more expansive bill is pared back to meet the two senators' approval.

Together, they are in trouble, which deepens with every new demand by Manchin and Sinema that pulls the social policy bill further from the liberals' vision. If the two factions cannot agree on that measure, Biden might end up with nothing — a catastrophic blow for his party and its leader.

Biden is eager to sign both bills. One of his aides Friday likened them to children he loves equally.