Politics in Washington is full of playacting, but few recent charades have been as absurd as the extended negotiation between Democrats and Republicans over whether they can agree on a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
Now it seems to be approaching its inevitable end: Republicans now say they'll be making a counteroffer to the latest White House offer, even as everyone tells reporters how poorly negotiations are going.
All of which provides an excellent case study in how the two parties are motivated and constrained by their political incentives, regardless of what they might think about the substantive issue at hand.
Let's start by considering three possible outcomes of this effort. First, Congress could pass a meaningful infrastructure bill with support from members of both parties. This is what both sides say they want (though that isn't quite true, which we'll get to in a moment).
Second, Democrats could pass an infrastructure bill with zero Republican votes. This is probably what will end up happening, provided that Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), self-appointed guardians of bipartisan compromise, can be persuaded that the effort to win the support of Republicans was performed with sufficient enthusiasm.
Third, the bill could fail altogether, either because Manchin or Sinema pulls their support, or because a Democratic senator falls ill and can't vote for it in the 50-50 Senate, or for some other reason.
Here's where we get to the important part. This is how President Biden would rank those three outcomes in order of his own needs and desires:
- Bipartisan passage of the bill
- Democrats-only passage of the bill
- Failure of the bill
And here's how Republicans would rank those outcomes in order of their needs and desires:
- Failure of the bill
- Democrats-only passage of the bill
- Bipartisan passage of the bill
As you can see, they're precisely reversed. Which is a big problem if you're hoping for an agreement.
If the bill passes on a bipartisan basis, Biden gets a double victory: He can claim a big legislative win, and also tell voters that he has achieved his goal of bringing cooperation back to Washington. He'll have done what other presidents failed to do, breaking the partisan logjam and showering benefits on communities across the country for years to come.
Which is precisely why that's the least desirable outcome from the GOP's perspective: Biden will get the credit, and voters will be a little less likely to believe that Washington can't get anything done. That would be terrible for Republicans, since dysfunction and gridlock increase voter dissatisfaction and produce a big win for the opposition party in midterm elections.
If the bill fails, on the other hand, it's a huge win for the GOP, a black eye for Biden, and proof that Democratic rule isn't delivering for people. They show their own partisans that they're mounting an effective opposition, and show everyone else that Biden is ineffectual and weak.
While Republicans can't guarantee that outcome (since Democrats can still pass the bill through the reconciliation process with a simple majority), by withholding their votes they reduce the margin for error Democrats have down to zero.
In sum, bipartisanship is in Biden's interest, but it is most assuredly not in Republicans' interest. They must surely be tickled pink about the fact that reporters constantly grill the White House about whether the president is being sufficiently bipartisan, but seldom ask Republicans what they're doing to compromise and seek cooperation.
Hold on, you might say: Why am I not giving Republicans more credit for sincerely wanting infrastructure to happen? Don't their constituents need better roads and sewer systems and broadband? Wouldn't they like to see those people's lives improved?
Sure they would. But if their sincere desire for infrastructure held any real power for them--if it was more than just "I guess we could do that, but I'm not going to put much effort into it"--then they would have done it when Donald Trump was president.
After all, in the first two years of Trump's presidency they had control of both houses of Congress. But they didn't pass an infrastructure bill. They and Trump kept claiming they would--to the point where "Infrastructure Week" became a running joke--but they never did it. Once they passed their big tax cut for corporations and the wealthy, they stopped bothering to do much legislating at all.
So while they might have policy preferences within a bill if it's going to pass anyway--one Republican senator might rather focus on fixing crumbling bridges, while another wants investment in ports--they're perfectly fine with there being no infrastructure bill at all. They certainly don't want those bridges and roads fixed so badly that they'll give Democrats a big political win in order to make it happen.
That's what this comes down to: There is no outcome, substantive or political, that Republicans would rather have than to see the infrastructure bill go down in flames. Democrats could let them write every word of it, and that would still be true.
Which is why there will be no bipartisanship on this subject. And on every other important piece of legislation during the Biden presidency, the calculation will be just the same.
