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House progressives delayed the infrastructure bill to protect the rest of Biden’s multitrillion-dollar agenda. Did it work?
Jayapal is the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. On “Maddow,” she had outlined a risky strategy that she and some of her members had undertaken to defend the Build Back Better Act, the most ambitious component of what Biden has called his Build Back Better Agenda. The original version of the bill, which took shape throughout the summer, proposed authorizing 3.5 trillion dollars over ten years to fund climate-change amelioration, paid family and medical leave, child tax credits, universal pre-K, free community college, affordable housing, and improvements to Medicare, Medicaid, and the Affordable Care Act, among other things. It would also create a pathway to citizenship for some undocumented immigrants, raise taxes on rich companies and individuals, and allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices. For Jayapal, the bill represented “the most incredible opportunity to pass transformational policies that we’ve ever had.”
The bill was loathed by Republicans and by business organizations such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the drug-industry trade group PhRMA, both of which described it as an “existential” threat. Thanks to the budget-reconciliation process, Democrats could pass the bill on their own, but just barely: the Party’s narrow majorities in both chambers of Congress meant that a single Democratic senator or four representatives could stymie the bill. By mid-September, some House Democrats had already expressed reluctance. In the Senate, Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, a fiscal conservative from a coal-rich state that voted for Trump by a thirty-nine-point margin, and Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, a Party-shirking centrist, had publicly objected to a $3.5-trillion revenue-and-spending top line.
On September 22nd, a few hours before Jayapal was due at the White House, I visited her office on the third floor of the Rayburn building. A Mylar birthday balloon drifted behind her desk. Jayapal, wearing a gray jacket with black-and-white piping, suggested that, even though the reconciliation bill was broadly popular, including among many swing-district Democrats, there were signs of a determined effort from within her own Party to sink it. The prospect that most concerned her was the possibility that another pillar of Biden’s post-pandemic legislative agenda, a $1.2-trillion infrastructure bill, which Sinema had helped negotiate, and Manchin strongly supported, would be used as a means to kill the B.B.B.A. Jayapal was worried that, once the infrastructure bill was law, her moderate colleagues would let the reconciliation bill wither and die in a legislative limbo.
The clearest sign of this strategy, in her mind, was a promise that Josh Gottheimer, of New Jersey, and eight other moderate House Democrats had extracted from Pelosi shortly after the infrastructure bill passed the Senate, with bipartisan support, in August. In exchange for their votes on a budget resolution, the first step in the reconciliation process, Pelosi had guaranteed Gottheimer and the others that the House would pass the infrastructure bill by September 27th. Gottheimer insisted that the deadline was meant to get much-needed infrastructure projects under way—and not part of a larger plan to bring down the reconciliation bill—but Jayapal saw the deadline as arbitrary at best, and possibly a trap. Bernie Sanders, of Vermont, and ten other senators had released a letter saying that they had a “clear commitment that the two pieces of the package would move together along a dual track.” Passing infrastructure first, they wrote, “would be in violation of that agreement.” As Jayapal had explained to Maddow, she and several dozen members of the C.P.C. had vowed to vote down the smaller bill unless the Senate first passed the B.B.B.A. Keeping the two bills linked, Jayapal told me, “is what brings everyone to the table.”
That evening, Jayapal, who was elected to the House in 2016, visited the Oval Office for the first time. She was one of ten congressional progressives invited to the meeting, including Sanders and Barbara Lee, of California, and the first to arrive. Once everyone was assembled, Biden announced that he had a tradition of singing for birthdays, and proceeded to lead the lawmakers in a serenade for Jayapal. “The five senators had to sing, the five House members had to sing,” she told me afterward. Sanders, too? “Bernie sang! And the President sang, quite beautifully.”
The meeting lasted nearly two hours. Jayapal says that Biden opened with a favorite theme: that people around the world are watching to see if the American government can still function. “Can we get things done?” he said. “Can democracy work?” When it came time for the members of Congress to speak, Sanders asked the President to help postpone the September 27th vote, a proposal that he and Jayapal had discussed before the meeting. With the infrastructure deadline imminent, and nothing like a final version of the B.B.B.A. ready, Biden’s blessing would allow Gottheimer and the other moderates to back away from demanding a vote that Pelosi couldn’t win. Jayapal suggested that Gottheimer just needed “a face-saving way to get out of it.”
Jayapal had endorsed Sanders during the 2020 Presidential primary, but she emphasized to Biden that the progressives’ refusal to vote on infrastructure was in service of the President’s wider aims. “I said, ‘We are trying to deliver both bills to you, but if we don’t we cannot leave part of the agenda behind.’ ” She believes the message got through. “He was very sympathetic,” she said, “and he understood the peril of having no commitment” on the reconciliation bill.
At that point, Jayapal, who was born in India and immigrated to the U.S. at the age of sixteen to attend Georgetown, noted that she and Lee were two of fewer than a hundred women of color who had ever served in Congress. “I said, ‘The idea that you can go from having nothing in your pocket to being in the United States Congress is something that should be available for every American. This bill is going to do that. It’s going to transform America.’ ”
She got choked up while she was saying this to Biden, and news of her tears quickly made it into Politico, which quoted an unnamed source suggesting she had been “overwhelmed” and “feeling the pressure.” “That was such sexist bullshit,” Jayapal said of the comment the next day. “People don’t like women in power.”
The C.P.C.’s show of strength came as a surprise. Not since the Democratic Study Group, an organization of liberal House members who helped steer civil-rights legislation through the blockade of Southern Democrats in the nineteen-sixties, had a group of left-leaning members of Congress acted with such concentrated force. The C.P.C. was founded three decades ago, but, as recently as 2015, The American Prospect described the caucus as “a fragile informal coalition that has lacked the same kind of leadership, money, publications, communications strategy, or clout” as its predecessor. Jayapal told me that when she first joined, “People got together, and they got mad at what was happening, but there wasn’t infrastructure built for the caucus to be strong.”
Jayapal was elected to lead the C.P.C. in 2018. She and her co-chair, Mark Pocan, a congressman from Wisconsin, believed that the caucus could wield real power. In 2019, they raised dues, instituted staff-level meetings, and increased the number of staffers from one to five. The following year, the caucus approved new rules that required members to vote with the C.P.C. at least two-thirds of the time. After Jayapal became the sole chair, this January, the caucus began circulating weekly talking points and coördinating more closely with the Senate. Jayapal also organized a monthly meeting with the leaders of unions and activist groups, including MoveOn, Indivisible, and the Service Employees International Union. In the past, the caucus had found its negotiating position weakened when outside groups signed on too quickly in support of bills favored by Pelosi and the rest of House leadership. “I was, like, ‘Look, we can’t have a situation where the Speaker gets you to come out for something when the Progressive Caucus is still trying to negotiate,’ ” Jayapal said.
Despite these changes, the caucus, which currently includes ninety-six members, lost some of its early skirmishes over Biden’s legislative agenda. Originally, progressives had called for a single bill on the order of six trillion dollars to fund “hard infrastructure,” like roads, bridges, and broadband, as well as “human infrastructure” in five policy areas: child and elder care, affordable housing, health care and drug pricing, climate investments, and immigration reform. Katie Porter, a congresswoman from California and the deputy chair of the C.P.C., whose office in Washington is garlanded with a gold-letter banner that reads “Smash the Patriarchy,” told me that separating the bills “laid some of the early groundwork for some of the divisiveness that we’re seeing now.” She also suggested that the manner in which the provisions were parcelled out into each bill was distinctly gendered. “We know that about ninety per cent of those infrastructure jobs will go to men,” she said. “So, if we just deliver that, we don’t deliver jobs and economic support for women, for health care, for senior care. We’re really saying that some in our economy get help, and some have to wait.”
On June 24th, after a fitful negotiating process led by Sinema and Rob Portman, a Republican senator from Ohio, a bipartisan group of ten senators visited the White House to announce, with Biden, what would become known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Framework, or BIF. The bill, which would add five hundred and fifty billion dollars in new spending for, among other things, a network of electric-vehicle chargers, climate-change resilience, and replacing lead drinking-water pipes, was celebrated by its authors as proof that, as Jon Tester, a Democratic senator from Montana, put it, “we aren’t just a hot mess here.” To progressives, however, the Republicans’ support for infrastructure looked like a shrewd attempt to scuttle the larger spending bill. Earlier that month, John Thune, of South Dakota, the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, had said, “The stars are kind of lining up for an infrastructure bill. And if you do do something bipartisan on that, then I think doing something partisan on reconciliation—in some ways, with certain Democrats—it gets a lot harder.”
Before the BIF was announced, Jayapal suggested to Pelosi that the House should wait to pass any infrastructure bill until it could also vote on reconciliation. “She was not happy when I said that,” Jayapal told me. “She said, ‘You have to trust the President.’ I said, ‘I trust the President. This is the President’s agenda. I don’t trust everybody that would need to vote for it in the Senate.’ ” A spokesperson for Pelosi disputed Jayapal’s account, saying that the dual-track strategy had emerged in the Speaker’s conversations with Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader. In any event, on the day the BIF agreement was announced at the White House, Pelosi said, “There ain’t no infrastructure bill without the reconciliation bill.” Later that afternoon, speaking to reporters, Biden seemed to agree: “If this is the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it. It’s in tandem.” Biden’s statement infuriated Republicans. “If he’s gonna tie them together, he can forget it!” Lindsey Graham, who’d signed on to support the BIF, told Politico. “That’s extortion!” Biden attempted to calm Republicans by insisting that he was not threatening a veto. On August 10th, sixty-nine senators, including Graham, voted to pass the infrastructure bill.
Throughout the summer and into the fall, Jayapal said, Pelosi consistently supported linking the two bills. But pressure was building for the Speaker to hold a vote on infrastructure. In late August, Stephanie Murphy, a Florida congresswoman and co-chair of the moderate Blue Dog Coalition, criticized Democratic leaders for their efforts “to hold a good bipartisan bill hostage—and strong-arm their fellow Democrats.” In Virginia, where the gubernatorial election had been seen by some as a proxy for national trends, the Democratic candidate, Terry McAuliffe, said it was time for Congress to “stop their little chitty-chat up there” and “get this infrastructure bill passed for America.”
Jayapal believed that Pelosi’s commitment to the dual-track strategy was only as dependable as the C.P.C.’s whip count. On June 14th, the caucus leaders had asked their members whether they would vote for the BIF as a stand-alone bill. More than half said that they wouldn’t. By late September, Jayapal was saying that the number was “probably somewhere around sixty.” She refused to make the names public, she told me, because “the minute you go public, you tell leadership who’s on that list. You tell the Chamber. You tell whoever’s trying to defeat it, and then they try to bring them down.” Jayapal kept a column on her tracking spreadsheet to indicate, as she put it, “who are the people that stay strong or get squishy depending on pressure.”
The three factors most likely to change votes, she said, were Pelosi, the President, and the labor unions. “Part of my conversation with people to see what their comfort level is, is to say, ‘O.K., so you’re saying you’re a no. If the Chamber or building trades come out and say they really want this bill, will you still be a no? If the Speaker suddenly decides to start whipping on it, do you still feel like you’re going to be a no?’ ” As a result of this “obsessive” whipping, Jayapal said she had at least thirty votes that were “incredibly strong.” Given that Republicans in the Problem Solvers Caucus, which Gottheimer co-chairs, and which officially supported the BIF, were expected to provide no more than twenty votes, she was certain the bill could not pass the House. “The Speaker really appreciates votes,” Jayapal told me. “Everyone says it, and they’re right: she’s a master vote counter. But I’m a damned good vote counter, too.”
On September 25th, two days before the promised infrastructure vote, Jayapal was participating in a virtual meeting of the House Budget Committee when her husband, Steve Williamson, a labor organizer, started feeling chest pains. He went to urgent care, where doctors determined that he was having a heart attack. They transferred him to an emergency room at a local hospital, but COVID protocols meant that Jayapal couldn’t go with him. The next morning, she was due to appear on “State of the Union,” with Jake Tapper, on CNN. She called her husband and asked if she should cancel. “Steve was, like, ‘No, you have to do it,’ ” Jayapal recalled. “ ‘You’re working on something that’s going to benefit the whole country.’ And so I buttoned up everything.” Before she arrived at the studio, she put drops in her eyes to mask the redness. After Tapper’s show, she appeared on “Face the Nation.” “Steve was watching the whole thing,” Jayapal said. “He was telling all the nurses, ‘Hey, that’s my wife!’ ”
That weekend, Pelosi made it clear that she did not intend to break her promise to Gottheimer and the other moderates. In a pair of public letters to her colleagues, she announced that the House would pass both bills in the coming week, and that the infrastructure vote would take place on Thursday, three days after the original deadline. Steny Hoyer, the House Majority Leader, later told me that the plan was to use the delay to find enough agreement on the reconciliation bill that progressives would vote for infrastructure.
On Monday, September 27th, I spoke to Jayapal in a windowed niche off the House floor. She said it was hard to see a deal coming together that week, but she couldn’t rule it out. “Things around here are weird,” she said. “Nobody does anything. They sit on their bums for nine months and do nothing. And then, in three days, you achieve more than you ever thought was possible.”
To encourage her members, Jayapal had been coördinating what she called a “chorus of support” from outside groups, soliciting letters signed by dozens of activist organizations and unions. She also warned Gottheimer that she was not bluffing about her whip count. “I told Josh that he was going to lose,” she told me. “I said, ‘If you pull back on this yourself, and give us a few more weeks, we’ll lift you up and say this is really smart negotiating.’ ”
Gottheimer, recalling the exchange, told me, “I said the same kind of thing to her: if you proceed with infrastructure, which passed the Senate and is sitting in the House awaiting action, then I’ll help get the votes for reconciliation.”
By Thursday, September 30th, negotiations on the reconciliation bill were still under way. But Pelosi and the White House believed that it was possible to get an agreement with Manchin and Sinema in time to hold a vote on infrastructure later that day. That morning, at her weekly press conference, the Speaker had said, “That’s our culture. We go in it to win it.” Pelosi, who had long made a point not to hold votes that she could lose, added, “Let me just tell you about negotiating. At the end, that’s when you really have to weigh in. You cannot tire. You cannot concede. This is the fun part.” On her way out of the room, she teased the assembled press: “Think positively, O.K.?”
Throughout the Capitol, reporters scrambled for evidence of an impending deal. That afternoon, Politico reported on a secret agreement between Manchin and Schumer from July, which outlined what the West Virginia senator could accept in a reconciliation bill. Sinema released a statement suggesting that she had been clear with Schumer since August about her “detailed concerns and priorities, including dollar figures.” Meanwhile, Pelosi met with a procession of coalitions, including members of the Progressive, New Democrat, and Blue Dog caucuses. On CNN, Gottheimer said that he was “a thousand per cent” confident that the BIF would pass before the end of the day.
Later that evening, reporters in the Senate found Manchin and Sinema huddled in Manchin’s Senate hideaway, a red-carpeted sitting room in the Capitol basement, talking to emissaries from the White House. Politico reported that Pelosi was beginning to turn the screws, urging her union allies to pressure progressives into voting for the BIF. In a letter to House members, Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote, “This important legislation makes the largest long-term investment in our infrastructure and competitiveness in nearly a century. It’s a critical first step in moving our country forward.” The Speaker was also reportedly considering starting the infrastructure vote on the House floor, essentially daring progressives to follow through with their threat. Jayapal, speaking to members in a virtual C.P.C. meeting, said that if the BIF came to a vote, they should vote “no” early as a show of intent—and not to boast if they blocked the bill.
The outcome of the showdown remained uncertain until a few minutes before ten o’clock, when Manchin told reporters he didn’t see a deal happening that night. An hour later, Hoyer’s office announced that there would be no more votes that day. Commenting on the narrow margins in both chambers, he told me later, “Close is not good enough. You’ve got to have the horseshoe on the pin.”
But Pelosi had another trick to play. To preserve the possibility of technically fulfilling her promise to Gottheimer and the moderates, the Speaker had sent her members home for the night without adjourning the House. For the rest of the country, the sun would rise on October 1st, but on the House floor it would still be September 30th. Back at the Capitol the next morning, word came that the President was going to visit the House later that afternoon. A number of lawmakers believed that any resolution would require his personal involvement. Outside of a House Democratic caucus meeting that morning, Dean Phillips, a congressman from Minnesota, compared the situation to a schoolhouse dispute, and said, “the principal is about to come to the room.” A few hours before Biden arrived, I met Jayapal again, in her office. She did not expect the President to announce a deal. She’d been in regular contact with White House officials, including Ron Klain, the chief of staff, and had received assurances that she would be one of their first calls “once they felt there was something good enough to present.”
A few hours later, in a closed meeting of the Democratic caucus—lawmakers were required to leave their phones outside the room—Biden made it clear to everyone where he stood. The bad news for progressives was that even a $2.5-trillion top line for the B.B.B.A. seemed optimistic. The good news, though, was that Biden had acknowledged three times that there was no chance the infrastructure bill would pass the House without an agreement on reconciliation. The President’s refusal to push for a BIF vote was widely interpreted as an implicit endorsement of the progressives’ position, and it meant that Pelosi was forced to break her promise to the moderates. (A White House spokesperson later told me, “In his countless discussions with Democratic lawmakers—of every perspective—about the Build Back Better agenda and the bipartisan infrastructure bill, the President has been clear that he does not, even implicitly, support this strategy. Any notion to the contrary is a misperception.”)
After the vote was postponed, Gottheimer attacked the Speaker for breaching “her firm, public commitment.” Sinema called the progressives’ stand an “ineffective stunt to gain leverage over a separate proposal.” Punchbowl News placed Jayapal at the top of its power matrix, saying that she had “put herself on the map this week.” For members of the C.P.C., Biden’s address offered a moment of collective jubilation. Jayapal said, “People were so pumped up about the victory and how they stayed strong.”
In mid-October, Jayapal returned to the White House for a one-on-one breakfast with the President. Over eggs Florentine and fresh fruit, they discussed the terms of the emerging deal. “He went through, basically, all the major programs in the bill, the amounts, the conditions,” she told me. “I was taking notes in my notebook. When he was finished, he said, ‘What do you think?’ And I went back through and told him, ‘Here’s where this would be a problem,’ or ‘This is good,’ or ‘Can we get more for this?’ ” Before she left, she asked Biden whether they could take a photograph together, to send to her mother in India. Biden agreed, and later that day had an assistant ask for Jayapal’s mother’s phone number, so that he could call and say hello. (On hearing this, Jayapal’s husband, who has fully recovered, told her, “Man, he’s working you.”)
The same day, Jayapal met with Manchin for the first time. She gave him sea-salt chocolate from Seattle; Manchin joked that he should have brought her moonshine from West Virginia. The meeting, she says, was less a negotiation than an airing of views. “I had one side of the page that was for things that we agreed on, and one side of the page for things that we did not agree on,” she said. “We disagreed on a number of things, but he was very easy to talk to, and clearly believes in himself as a negotiator.” Jayapal told Manchin that she’d had an abortion when she was thirty-nine years old, and asked him not to put the Hyde Amendment, which blocks the use of federal funding for abortion services, in the reconciliation bill. “I said, ‘It’s already the law. I’m not asking to repeal it in this bill. Why do we need to put it in?’ ” But she also said that the meeting had been helpful: “I got a better understanding of his state. When he goes home, people don’t think we should be doing this. They don’t want it.”
The next day, Jayapal went back to the White House, this time with some of her progressive colleagues, to meet Biden, Kamala Harris, and Janet Yellen, the Treasury Secretary. Throughout the negotiations, progressives had insisted that they wanted a final Senate vote on reconciliation before they would vote on infrastructure. Jayapal told Biden, “We just want to make sure that nothing gets undermined in the Senate.” The President, she told me, “leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, and looked straight at me. He said, ‘I’m not going to bring you a deal unless I am confident it will pass the Senate.’ ”
On the morning of October 28th, Biden did bring a deal, or something close to it. In a visit to the House Democratic caucus, he presented a framework for a bill that would spend around $1.75 trillion on a list of provisions that included universal pre-K, child-care and senior-care subsidies, clean-energy tax credits and climate-resilience investments, affordable housing, and expansions of Medicare and the A.C.A. To pay for these programs, the framework proposed, among other things, a new minimum corporate tax, a stock-buybacks tax, and a “surtax” on the incomes of the wealthiest 0.02 per cent of Americans. The framework did not include several items that the White House had originally asked for, such as free community college, paid family and medical leave, Medicare drug-pricing, and a key climate measure known as the Clean Electricity Performance Program. Other provisions, such as the child tax credits, were scaled back drastically.
With Biden looking on, Pelosi told her caucus that she intended to hold a vote on the infrastructure bill that day. A few hours later, Jayapal announced that C.P.C. members “enthusiastically” endorsed Biden’s framework. “Anybody that says it’s a hollowed-out husk is just wrong,” she told me. “The scale of this is enormous. I mean, this is 1.75 trillion dollars on top of another 1.2 trillion. And, when you think about what’s in this bill, I don’t think it will be hard to sell it.” Nevertheless, in a replay of the previous month’s standoff, Jayapal and other progressives once again refused to go along with Pelosi’s plan. In a significant change of tactics, Jayapal announced that she and her colleagues were no longer asking for a Senate vote on the reconciliation bill. Now, as she said in a statement that afternoon, they wanted an agreement among “218 Representatives and all 50 senators in the Democratic Caucus” on the text of the B.B.B.A., which had been released by House leadership a few hours earlier, and they wanted to vote on the two bills at the same time.
To explain the C.P.C.’s sudden willingness to entrust the fate of the B.B.B.A. to the Senate, some observers speculated that Jayapal and her colleagues were worried about being blamed for a loss in the Virginia governor’s race. Others wondered whether some manner of private assurances had been given, noting that Jayapal had met with Sinema on the day of Biden’s second visit to the Capitol. Still others suggested that the change was a response to the growing frustration among House Democrats, coupled with the C.P.C.’s long-standing desire not to be seen as the Freedom Caucus of the left.
The day after Biden’s visit, I put the question to Jayapal directly. She said that many members of the C.P.C. had been moved by the framework, the release of the legislative text, and by Biden’s pledge to pass the bill into law. “Just three weeks ago, we did not have a framework or bill text, we did not have the President saying that he was confident he could get fifty votes, and he didn’t have us on board,” she said. She declined to discuss the substance of her meeting with Sinema, but did allow that it was “a very good conversation that was very, very helpful for me.” (Another C.P.C. member told me that Jayapal had reported privately that Sinema was on board with the White House framework.) Jayapal also suggested that there was not much more progressives could hope to gain by drawing out the process any longer. “Everybody understands that this thing has been negotiated to death,” she said. “At some point, we gotta just get this done. And I think we are at that point.”
Still, the size and scope of the proposed House bill—a quarter trillion dollars more than what Manchin had initially told Schumer he would support, but much less than the original $3.5-trillion proposal—seemed to prove the abiding limits of progressive power in Congress. The shared desires of the C.P.C., the Speaker of the House, and the President of the United States proved no match for the preferences of two senators who, however different, appeared to find a similar political advantage in thwarting their own Party. Frustration over this situation was not limited to the House: one afternoon in late September, while watching a scrum of reporters chase Manchin outside the Capitol, I heard one Democratic senator say to another, “He’s getting all that fucking attention, and meanwhile he’s totally fucking us over.”
On Friday, November 5th, it looked as though the House was finally ready to pass both the BIF and a revised version of the B.B.B.A., which now included a Medicare drug-pricing measure, Medicare hearing coverage, four weeks of paid leave, and a state-and-local-tax deduction that had previously been opposed by some progressives. That morning, however, a group of moderates, including Gottheimer and Murphy, made their own determined stand. The group told Pelosi that at least six Democrats were not going to vote for the reconciliation bill until they received cost and revenue estimates from the Congressional Budget Office, which everyone understood would take at least a week. Jayapal, in an attempt to call the moderates’ bluff, suggested that progressives would continue to hold up the infrastructure bill until the House passed the B.B.B.A. “If our six colleagues still want to wait for a CBO score,” she said in a statement, “we would agree to give them that time—after which point we can vote on both bills together.”
About an hour later, Pelosi announced that, later that evening, the House would vote on the BIF and the rule governing debate on the B.B.B.A. But it would not vote to pass the reconciliation bill itself. This plan, which had been devised by the Congressional Black Caucus, was described as a way to break the impasse. It also looked like an attempt by House leadership to back the C.P.C. into a corner. About forty progressives gathered in a committee room in the Longworth Building, just south of the Capitol. “People were just furious that six people would be trying to hold this up over some C.B.O. scores,” Jayapal told me later. At the same time, some of Jayapal’s members were losing their resolve to hold up the infrastructure bill for a third time. A group of caucus members who had previously supported her strategy, including Joe Neguse, of Colorado; Deborah Dingell, of Michigan; Ro Khanna, of California; and Jamie Raskin, of Maryland, expressed a willingness to find a compromise.
While Pelosi was still talking, Jayapal spoke to Biden and told him that there were twenty caucus members, including herself, ready to vote against the BIF. In a separate call, Biden spoke to the progressive caucus on speakerphone. He asked them not to delay the infrastructure vote any longer, and promised to act as a guarantor for any promises made by the moderates to vote for the reconciliation bill. “He said, ‘I need this,’ ” Jayapal recalled. According to a C.P.C. member who was in the room, the President also suggested that, if the caucus blocked the BIF again, then perhaps it was not in the cards to get either bill done. “He said, ‘Look, maybe we just don’t do any of this, and I move on,” the member said. “That was a big deal. I think some people were, like, ‘Maybe he’s had it.’ ”
When I first spoke to Jayapal, on the day after her birthday, I’d asked her what would happen if she and the C.P.C. found themselves at odds with the President and the Speaker. “Obviously,” she had said, “if everybody else were aligned, and we were not, that’s the hardest position.” On Friday, the pressure was too much to withstand. Jayapal admits that she was deeply frustrated. Nevertheless, she told me, “I had to keep myself in a place where I could think strategically. I really was focussed on what was the best possible outcome for Build Back Better, because that’s always what we wanted.” After her phone call with Biden, she joined Neguse and a handful of progressives who had gone to Murphy’s office to broker a deal for the C.P.C.’s votes on the infrastructure bill. In exchange, Gottheimer, Murphy, and three other moderates agreed to vote for the B.B.B.A. rule that night, and to vote for the bill itself by November 15th, so long as “fiscal information” from the C.B.O. matched the numbers in the White House framework. In the end, Jayapal said, “It was my judgment that the jiujitsu move here was to get the commitment, to not delay this anymore, and to pass it through.”
Over the next two hours, all but six progressives would vote for the BIF—thirteen Republicans made up the deficit—and every Democrat in the House voted for the rule to advance the B.B.B.A. Immediately after agreeing to the deal, Jayapal called Biden to let him know. She joked that the President would definitely have to call her mother now. In Bangalore, less than an hour later, Jayapal’s mother was just getting back from her morning walk when she got a call from an unknown number. She answered, and a voice on the line said, “Please hold for the President of the United States.”
For many progressives, the resolution of the BIF drama was a disappointment. Mark Pocan, who voted for the bill, described the day’s events as a “clusterfuck”; Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, announcing her vote on Friday, said, “I’m a no. This is bullshit.” Though Jayapal insists, accurately, that the BIF would not have passed without the help of her twenty holdouts, the C.P.C. was ultimately unable to dictate terms to the Senate or to secure a House vote on the two bills in tandem. Now, with the BIF awaiting Biden’s signature, and the fate of the reconciliation bill still unknown, the question remains: What did the C.P.C.’s tactics achieve? According to Gottheimer, the progressives accomplished “nothing”: “We are in exactly the same place, if not a worse place than we would have been if we had voted in early August” for infrastructure, he told me in October. Hoyer, who called Jayapal “a good pol,” said he did not believe that the C.P.C.’s standoff had helped the reconciliation bill. “I think the premise underlying the progressives’ position is not accurate,” he said. “I don’t think either Sinema or Manchin care about tit for tat. Neither one are subject, I think, to that kind of negotiation or pressure.”
Progressives, of course, see it differently. “I think if we had voted for BIF in August,” Khanna told me, “then you could have had a framework that would have been written just by a couple of senators, or the moderates” in the House. Jayapal noted that the C.P.C.’s tactics gave the caucus a seat at the table throughout the negotiations, and were crucial in helping it secure funding for most of its five priority policy areas. But she also says that the past two months have convinced her that the C.P.C. kept the reconciliation bill alive. “Back in August, we were kind of hoping that this was the right strategy to leverage the BIF against the Build Back Better Act, but we didn’t know whether that was going to work out,” she told me on Saturday. “I can tell you that, based on the public statements, first with the Senate, and now with the House—the moving goalposts, all of that—it’s very clear to me that this was the only strategy that was going to deliver Build Back Better.”
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