On infrastructure (and not-really-infrastructure): Why linking and de-linking bills can matter

 Let's deal with something less bloody than Afghanistan this morning.  To link, or not to link?  That is the plagiarized question.  Whether 'tis smarter to pass a bipartisan bill first, or suffer the bad doggerel of blog post begun before the caffeine hits the professor's bloodstream, and oh, enough of this.  OK.  Here's the deal.  Remember I said passing anything was going to be hard?  Yeah, it's hard.

There are two bills in Congress.  There is a bipartisan infrastructure bill, passing through the House and Senate through... regular... order.  [Checks notes.]  Um, yeah.  Also, your weather report suggests a danger of porcine droppings from the flying pigs currently occupying US airspace.  I am being particular in my wording  This is an "infrastructure" bill.  That means physical structures, but also expanded in generally accepted ways, such as broadband because work is conducted over the internet, meaning that it now serves purposes similar to roads.  Does anyone remember that terrible phrase, "the information superhighway?"  I'm glad I have not heard that in a while, but it does demonstrate why we generally consider high speed internet to be a component of infrastructure.

By "regular order," I mean that the bill is being passed using normal rules, no tricks.  That means it is subject to a Senate filibuster, and cloture rules.  Hence, it requires 60 votes to invoke cloture, meaning that in the 50-50 Senate, at least 10 Republicans are needed.  See that pig up there?  Launched by a catapult.  I have no idea what sicko glued wings on it, but dude.  This country is getting weirder and weirder.

Then there is a thing that you should not, in any way, call an "infrastructure" bill.  There is no such thing as "human" infrastructure.  That's just a big, ole' spending bill.  You may like some provisions in it.  You may like many of them.  That does not make those provisions "infrastructure."  Words have meaning.  Structure.  You know what that word means, right?  Infra-.  Prefix, meaning below or within.  In the case of structure, it means within.  In the context of a nation, it means the structures within.  Internal structures.  Here is an example of a policy that you probably like that cannot, in any way, be called infrastructure if the word has any meaning.  Child care.  Why not?  Because it isn't a structure.  That's just social spending.  So that second bill is not a thing to which I will refer in any way as "infrastructure."  It's just a spending bill.  Yet, it uses the budget reconciliation procedure.  That way, there is a built-in time limit to debate in the Senate.  Thus, there is no need for a cloture vote, and the 60 vote threshold is not the important threshold.  The threshold is 50+1.  Manchin becomes the pivot point, in voting jargon.  No, you can't threaten him, cajole him, or anything like that.  Also, you cannot include non-budgetary provisions, nor bullshit the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, into letting you include non-budgetary provisions because they have indirect effects on the budget.  It doesn't work that way.  But, if the Democrats can hold everyone in the Senate together, including Manchin and Sinema, they can pass spending items and tax changes while telling Republicans to go lick Trump's knob.

His door knob!  What?!  What did you think I meant?!  There's a pandemic on.  Let's be sanitary!

Anyway, so that's two bills.  I warned you this would be difficult, and it is difficult.  So what's the problem?  The big challenge has been the question of linking the bills.  Huh?!

OK, this looks weird and obscure.  Who cares?  Why does this matter?  It is actually important.  It has to do with the negotiation process and leverage.  Have you ever tried to negotiate for anything?  Tried to buy something?  A house, car... something less expensive?  You need to be able to walk away.  Your negotiation strength comes from the ability to walk away.  If you cannot walk away, you got nothin'.  You're stuck, and you take whatever you are handed.

Watch how this works, in the canonical game of "divide the dollar."  We have one dollar to divide.  I make a take-it-or-leave-it offer.  You either accept my offer, or decline it.  If you accept my offer, you get the offer.  If you decline it, we both get nothing, and the dollar disappears.  What am I going to do?  Obviously, I'm going to offer you a penny.  You get a penny, or zero.  If you are rational, you take the penny.  In principle, you may decline the penny out of spite, but let's scale up.  Let's say we are talking about a million bucks.  I offer you $100,000, and retain $900,000 for myself.  If you accept, you get 100K.  Decline, and the whole pot disappears.  Are you really going to throw away 100K out of spite?  I don't think so.  No way.  I call bullshit.  If you're truly, truly rich, you can afford to turn up your nose at 100K, but statistically, most people cannot.  You're taking that money, and you know it, fuck your pride.  The lesson?  This is what happens when you don't have the capacity to walk away because walking away leaves you with nothing.

So I turn this around.  If I can put you in the position where I construct the offer, and you either take the whole thing or get nothing, I get basically whatever I want out of you.

See how this works?

Now, here's the situation in Congress.  You have some variation in positions in Congress.  You have your wacko far lefties.  You have Pelosi.  Pelosi is pretty damned far to the left by any mathematical estimation, but she is also a strategic mastermind.  Then, you have a handful of centrists and kind of centrists.  Ignore the moonbats.  Pelosi can distract them with... I'd say "shiny things," but bats are mostly blind.  I dunno... echo-locate-y things.  Whatever.  If Pelosi (and really, the ideological left) could say to the centrists in the party, take-it-or-leave-it to everything in both bills, then those centrists lose the power to negotiate on anything.

The centrists want the bipartisan bill, but there is a lot in the lefty reconciliation bill that they don't like.  If the bipartisan bill passes first, then all that remains is the contentious bill, and they must be appeased for the reconciliation bill to pass.  Their threats become credible.  They can walk away, because they already have a lot of what they want.  There's more that they would like, but the added value of the additional provisions is lower, and that added value is put up against provisions they don't like.  So, they have a credible threat to walk away, and hence, they have leverage.  They can demand the removal of provisions they don't like, or the inclusion of sweeteners.

On the other hand, if the whole thing is a package deal, take it or leave it, then getting the bipartisan bill requires giving the far left everything they want on the reconciliation bill.  They lose leverage.

This is all about leverage.

How much can the centrists gain?  By de-linking the bills, that depends on how much they press their advantage, and how smart they are about it.  I keep seeing commentary about how the centrists in this caucus never really win.

Um... bullshit.  Sorry, let me amend that.

Fucking bullshit.  Does anyone but me remember the ACA?  Am I the only one who remembers every concession Pelosi and Reid had to give to the centrists to get that thing over the line?  First they pissed off the left by taking single payer off the table.  Then they threw away the public option.  The left totally lost their shit when that happened.  Then, Bart Stupak led a group of about 12 pro-life Democrats to demand abortion restrictions on healthcare coverage.  Oooh, the left got pissed at that, but Pelosi counted the votes, and she had to give it to them.

The only reason that got taken out of the final bill was that eventually, the House had to pass an unamended version of the Senate's bill, which didn't have Stupak's provision, because Ted Kennedy died.  Massachusetts held a special election to replace him, which was won by a Republican-- Scott Brown-- and that brought the Democrats down to 59 votes in the Senate.  So, the only way for the Democrats to pass the ACA was for the House to pass the unamended Senate version and skip the House-Senate reconciliation process, then pass a budget reconciliation bill with a few changes, but since Stupak's provisions weren't budgetary, they couldn't be included in that.

That was actually the only time the centrists had to eat it on the ACA.  The idea that Pelosi just steamrolls them and makes them give her their lunch money... no.  That's not how it works.  Pelosi is the best because she understands math and reality.  What I wrote in my last book, Incremental Polarization: A Unified Spatial Theory of Legislative Elections, Parties & Roll Call Voting, is that she uses "preference-preserving influence."  Members of Congress are sometimes cross-pressured.  They have policy preferences which sometimes conflict with their electoral pressure.  That creates a collective action problem.  She solves the collective action problem, and gets members to vote with their own policy preferences, frequently against their own electoral interests, when it is necessary to pass big, important bills.  She's not bullying them to vote for bills they hate.  It doesn't work that way.  It didn't work that way on the ACA, and it won't work that way now.

So what about this batch?  What will they get?  What will they try to get?  I don't know!  But permitting the bipartisan bill and the reconciliation bill to be "linked" means they get squat.  Why?  'Cuz they can't walk away.  The first step to getting anything is the separation, so that they have a credible threat to walk away.

Then the question becomes figuring out what they want.

We then notice that coherent policy demands are not being made in the same way as they were in the case of the ACA.  What would that suggest?  Either a lack of any coherent strategy (always a possibility!) or smaller, more particularized demands.  Either way, that's why the strategic matter of linking and delinking bills matters.

And I was too busy yesterday to post some jazz.  Oops.  So jazz today.  Gabor Gado, "Reconstruction," from Orthodoxia.