Whilst the Pentagon arms for a confrontation with America’s enemies abroad - notably China and Russia - as John Podesta, formerly senior counselor to President Barack Obama and founder of the Center for American Progress, put it in rather melodramatic terms: the failure of Build Back Better has “doomed humanity”.Īnd this Washington drama has a villain: Joe Manchin. As the world swelters under extreme heat, Washington - in certain respects still the command center of global power - has declared that it has other, more pressing concerns to attend to, such as inflation - as though there were any meaningful trade off - or passing a gargantuan defense bill. The death of Build Back Better is yet another failure of the American political class to respond to the multiple global crises of our current moment - climate, pandemic, immigration, financial instability, global inequality and economic risk - that I’ve been calling the polycrisis. (Bill Clinton managed to increase taxes on the rich, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, and create a health-care benefit for poor children.) In addition to losing its chance to address any domestic social need in an enduring way, the administration is also having imperiled its global leadership on climate change and a global corporate minimum tax, two measures that hinged on Biden getting his own country’s house in order. But the collapse of negotiations in Congress … will ensure he achieves nothing of the sort - not Roosevelt-size, not Obama-size, nor even Clinton-size. Joe Biden once dreamed of an FDR-size domestic-reform agenda. The US is now unlikely to meet the ambitious emissions targets - a 50-52 percent cut in CO2 emissions relative to 2005 - that the Biden administration announced to the world in the spring of 2021.Īs Jonathan Chait put it in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer : In November the betting is that the Democrats will lose control of Congress, which means that for progressive politics a historic window of opportunity has slammed shut. There is some talk that climate bits might be brought back in the autumn. Eighteen months of fruitless negotiation has come down to that. What was once a transformative, multitrillion-dollar agenda to face numerous long-standing crises in domestic policy has narrowed to an exceptionally narrow drug price reform, the main part of which-price negotiation in Medicare-doesn’t kick in until 2026, two years after the next presidential election, and a two-year extension on ACA subsidies that were set to expire at the end of the year. Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts and a longtime advocate for climate legislation, wrote on Twitter late Thursday.Īs David Dayan put it in the American Prospect : “Rage keeps me from tears,” Senator Edward J. Privately, Senate Democratic staff members seethed and sobbed on Thursday night, after more than a year of working nights and weekends to scale back, water down, trim and tailor the climate legislation … only to have it rejected inches from the finish line. Now it seems to have a stake planted squarely in its heart.Īs reported by the NYT, the mood in Washington was desperate: The last rites had first been pronounced in December last year. On Thursday last week, the Build Back Better package that was to define the first term of the Biden presidency with a combination of climate funding, health care measures and progressive taxation, was declared dead, for the second time.
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