Democrats’ two-bill plan seems to be working

[Bloomberg]( Follow Us [Get the newsletter]( Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe.]( The Democrats’ clever-but-convoluted two-bill scheme for passing a large part of their agenda still has plenty of obstacles ahead, but it’s going so well right now that Republicans are [complaining]( about how unified their opponents have become. At this rate, no one is going to know what Will Rogers was talking about when he said (famously), “I am not a member of any organized political party, I am a Democrat.” With the final Senate passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill [scheduled]( for Tuesday, Majority Leader Chuck Schumer should be pretty happy. It appears that Republican support for the bipartisan bill has held, and there’s been no public sign of Democratic opposition to either that bill or the second, larger one that they’ll try to pass using the reconciliation procedure. The next step is to pass a budget resolution, and the Senate is planning to move to that on Tuesday and pass it later this week. After that? The budget resolution only lays out the [broad outlines]( of what the second bill will look like. The next step is to fill in the details, which is the work of the various Senate committees that don’t necessarily need to abide by the intentions of the budget committee (which was responsible for writing the resolution). Nor will the real fights necessarily take place at the committee level. We can expect at least one serious round of negotiations between committee approval and Senate floor action, with Schumer accommodating all 50 Democrats — since all of their votes are needed for passage. And that’s before the House gets involved. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said that the House won’t vote on the bipartisan bill until the Senate delivers the reconciliation bill, and so far that too seems to be on track. Jonathan Chait [argues]( that the House Progressive Caucus has plenty of leverage here, and he’s correct, but the truth is that both the most and least liberal Democrats have leverage over each other. It appears that it will play out this way: President Joe Biden along with House and Senate leadership will make the opening bid and try to set the basic outlines of the reconciliation bill; the moderate liberals such as Senator Joe Manchin can negotiate that offer down to something they can live with; and the most liberal group in the House will have the clout to make sure that the bill actually passes. What’s less clear is what, if anything, Manchin wants beyond the big thing that he’s getting, the bipartisan bill. It’s true that the most liberal group doesn’t care much about that proposal, which gives them leverage to force the reconciliation bill through. But the plan being contemplated right now gives them more — perhaps far more — than they’d need to make the two-bill strategy worthwhile. That could give the more moderate group the ability to trim the reconciliation bill quite a bit — and that, in turn, means the various wings of the party could still fail to reach a compromise. And of course, given the tiny margins Democrats hold in both chambers, it wouldn’t take a large faction to derail things. One stubborn senator, or fewer than half a dozen representatives, will do. Still, there are no obvious dealbreaker provisions so far, it seems like Democrats in both chambers want to make this work and the two-bill plan provides incentives for everyone to stay on board. And while the size of the bill may make some moderate liberals nervous, it also means that there are a lot of Democrats with something they really want in one bill or the other. 1. Rachel Tecott at the Monkey Cage on [failing to build a strong Afghan army](. 2. Dan Drezner on [U.S. conservatives and Hungary](. 3. Elise Spenner talks with Rick Hasen about [election law, public scholarship and more](. 4. Phillip Longman on [Biden and rail infrastructure](. 5. Jack Goldsmith on [Biden and the eviction moratorium](. 6. Good one [on elections and politics]( from Perry Bacon Jr., although I’ll dissent somewhat from his third point — it’s true in general that governing doesn’t necessarily have a direct effect on election outcomes, but I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence that an incumbent party can survive a recession. 7. And new polling from Civiqs on [attitudes about Jan. 6](. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. [Click here to subscribe](. Also subscribe to [Bloomberg All Access]( and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. 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