I still think it looks good. Really, really good. But we’ve also learned a couple things that give me pause.
The SNAP requirements are even less damaging than I, at least, thought last night; I didn’t realize that SNAP already had a work requirement for most folks up to age 49, and this bill will simply edge that figure up to 55 over the next couple years before sunsetting in 2030. And even among that population there are carve-outs for vets and homeless folks. So, stupid/cruel though the provision obvious is, the pool of people who will suffer there is considerably smaller than I’d realized.
Ditto the IRS cut/redirection, which totals just $1.4 billion out of the $80 billion newly allotted to expanded IRS enforcement. Okay.
The streamlined environmental reviews are scary to me, but I’m nowhere near expert on the subject so will await someone who is to educate us here on DKos in the days to come as to what we might expect the impacts here to be.
The Vandals scored a victory on student loans, whose moratorium will now end in August. But Biden’s initiative faces an uphill battle at SCOTUS anyway.
The Manchin natural gas pipeline approval was the first of two negative surprises. This is atrocious, of course. But as always with Manchin, we remind ourselves that he’s a (nominally) Democratic Senator from West Virginia, at least for the next couple years. And he more or less let through much of Biden’s astonishing slate progressive legislative victories. So we swallow hard and offer up a prayer of thanks that the bill will get through the Senate.
(We haven’t heard Sinema’s name this week, btw. You know that’s bugging her.)
Here’s the one that really hurts:
The bill also requires Congress to approve 12 annual spending bills or face a snapback to spending limits from the previous year, which would mean a 1% cut.
Okay, now the train has reached the station. So you’re telling me that every year for the next decade that there’s a Democrat in the White House and the Republicans control either house of Congress they can refuse to pass a budget and guarantee that federal spending will decline by 1% the following year?
Well, there you go. That provision alone, if I’m understanding it correctly, is far away the biggest Republican victory here. That is painful, and could be truly fiscally damaging, and I’m wondering now why the media hasn’t made more of this in this first evening of coverage of the current bill.
OTOH, maybe the language would guarantee that military spending would decline by 1% each of those years as well. That could prove to be a significant disincentive to Republican fiscal sabotage of Democratic administrations.
And then there’s the entire long list of measures the Vandals wanted to pass in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling. Virtually none of which got through. That still looks like an enormous victory for Biden, and still suggests to me that the invisible ‘10th planet’ exerting silent influence on these affairs is the GOP’s oligarch masters, who do not share their puppets’ views of the potential fallout from a US default.
What else? As expected, the far right of Congress is apoplectic and soon to be revealed as surprisingly impotent. The far left of Congress, such as it is, is unhappy with some of the deal’s provisions but no doubt recognizes how immeasurably worse this all could have gone. The bill will pass with ease, and we will have readily surmounted one of the largest hurdles on our way to a Democratic landslide in November 2024.
