I Guess Halloween Is A National Holiday

I noted last week that the conservative blogs and aggregators have been generally out to lunch covering the BIF-BBB crisis in the House. The only media that've done a consistent job have been Politico and The Hill, as long as you can filter out their wishful thinking. One question the conservatives haven't taken up at all is the obvious one: with the vote last Thursday a didn't happen, what's next? This morning's headline in The Washington Examiner, though, is Biden and Democrats divided over Thomas Jefferson's legacy.

I guess they took the weekend off to stock up on candy for the trick-or-treaters, huh? Where's Byron York? I had to go to The Hill to find any substance at all:

House Democrats are looking to pass both the social spending and bipartisan infrastructure bills as early as Tuesday, a leadership aide told The Hill.

. . . An aide for Democratic leadership told Axios that committees were notified by House leaders that they had to finish any changes on the spending bill by Sunday and that the House Rules Committee could meet as soon as Monday to mark it up.

But it's hard to imagine this is anything but wishful thinking. According to Politico,

The Democratic Party is desperately trying to figure out just how solid Joe Biden’s $1.75 trillion social spending framework really is.

Different factions of the party are arguing that the outline the president presented this week is not final, hoping to add back in still-disputed provisions on immigration reform, taxes, Medicare expansion, paid leave and prescription drug prices before the social spending package gets a vote.

The House has already released hundreds of pages of legislation to fully articulate Biden’s vision, the bulk of it devoted to climate change action and the social safety net. Yet even after the House passes its version of the bill, which could happen as soon as next week, some Democrats insist that it’s not the final word.

In other words, even if Speaker Pelosi imposes a cutoff on legislative language for a House version of BBB, she has no control over the Senate -- and indeed, no control over her own progressive caucus. The word is that they threw her out of their Thursday morning meeting last week:

Multiple sources confirmed to The Uprising that Pelosi was “kicked out” of the meeting by Progressive Caucus Chairwoman Pramila Jayapal.

“She got kicked out and said she was leaving anyway,” a Democratic staffer, who was granted anonymity to discuss the confidential meeting, said of Pelosi.

This suggests to me that Pelosi is simply continuing her "we're gonna work all weekend" story even as it steadily sheds its last vestiges of credibility. The problem is that there's simply no deal so far. The progressives and Sen Sanders aren't happy with the cut down "framework" and want things put back in. Sens Manchin and Sinema have made no specific commitment. President Biden has actually undercut Speaker Pelosi's effort to impose a settlement. Again, Politico:

As Biden prepared for the high-stakes meeting with House Democrats on Thursday, Jayapal made an urgent plea on a call with White House chief of staff Ron Klain: Don’t send the president to pressure liberals to vote Thursday on the Senate’s infrastructure bill without a more progressive social spending bill that’s fully done.

Klain pushed Jayapal, who leads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to vote for the infrastructure bill during the call, according to a source familiar with their conversation. Jayapal responded that she wanted to avoid sending Biden off to Europe on Thursday with a failed vote, according to multiple Democrats.

What happened next is a dizzying fall of dominos. Biden didn’t directly ask House Democrats to pass his bipartisan infrastructure bill, leaving Pelosi to make the request. Then Jayapal’s progressives dug in against the infrastructure vote that the speaker wanted to tee up — using the president’s lack of a request for cover.

In other words, it's highly doubtful that, even if Pelosi is able to get a House BBB bill with full legislative language that echoes the "framework", the progressives will buy into it. They'll demand more, which Sens Manchin and Sinema will veto. It's too early to call a cap on the dealmaking.

But the House is in session only for the first week in November, when it takes the following week off for a Veterans Day recess. Then it goes home again for Thanksgiving after only four days the following week. I question whether anything can be finalized in that period of time.

It's harder and harder to avoid thinking Speaker Pelosi is a lame duck. She knows this as well.