What I've Been Saying

As of yesterdy, it looks like Sen Schumer at least is still spinning blarney about a Senate vote on the BBB bill, now "the week of November 15". I feel confident this is just yet another version of "we're gonna work all weekend" that we've been hearing since September. How the results of yesterday's elections affect what changes, if any, are made to the BBB text or the schedule is hard to predict, but my guess is that Speaker Pelosi, Sen Schumer, and President Biden will simply double down on their exising positions. As of yesterday, Sen Manchin made his position clear:

Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) said he didn’t sign off on a framework for a $1.75 trillion social spending bill before it was released from the White House and that he didn’t think there was a “rush” to get a deal.

“No,” Manchin said, asked if he had signed off on the framework, adding that if he had, his current pushback wouldn’t be “genuine.”

“The White House knew exactly where I stood. There was a couple of concerns that we had that we needed to work through,” Manchin said.

. . . But Manchin indicated that while he thinks Democrats will ultimately pass something — saying they are “going to get something done” — he didn’t view the weeklong break, scheduled to start on Nov. 22, as a hard deadline.

“I’m not putting restraints on timing. I just think it’s going to take quite a while. ... I think time's going to be needed. We’re not in a rush right now,” Manchin said.

He added on Tuesday that he wants a Congressional Budget Office analysis on the impact and the costs of the bill and still didn’t support including Medicare expansion or paid leave in the bill.

Even so, later in the day, Manchin told CNN he

didn't rule out the ambitious time frame that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out earlier Tuesday: putting the bill on the chamber floor during the week of November 15. Manchin, who hours earlier had said it would take "quite a while" to get a deal, said Tuesday evening: "We have all next week. We're going to work into it next week -- as they are working. So if everyone works real hard, I've said, we can get it done before Thanksgiving. We're going to get something done."

But this is nothing new; Sen Manchin has been expressing vague optimism about how quickly they can come to a deal since September -- they just never quite come to the deal he wants. Meanwhile, Republicans have had little to say, I assume on the basis that if your adversaries are destroying each other, you shouldn't get in their way. However,

Tuesday on Fox Business Network’s “Mornings with Maria,” Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-TN) sounded off on the ongoing negotiations among Democrats for their infrastructure bill, which he described as a “hostage” bill.

Host Maria Bartiromo asked Hagerty if he expected a vote on the infrastructure package this week like the Democrats believe could happen.

Hagerty said he thinks it would be “very difficult” for the Democrats to get a vote in this week and suggested “it could well be” next year before Democrats could get a vote in.

But the conventional wisdom has been that if the negotiations for the bill last into 2022, the midterm election year calculations mean it has little chance at that point. The conventional wisdom had also been that the results of yesterday's elections would affect those calculations. The data is certainly in from yesterday's elections.

How this will affecst the actual Democrat strategy is yet to be seen. The link just above continues Sen Hagerty's assessment:

If you look at what the Democrats did and what they’ve been signaling all along, they created their hostage with the so-called infrastructure bill, but the whole point of this hostage was to use it as a way to force moderate Democrats like Joe Manchin, like Kyrsten Sinema and others to vote for this massive socialization of America tax and spending spree that they’ve been talking about.

It's generally recognized that this hostage strategy has failed, and Biden's agenda, stalled by the progressives on one hand but unpopular with the voters on the other, was a factor in the elections' outcome. As of yesterday, it was doubtful the Democrats could easily change course.

“I’ve watched all the attack ads on Terry McAuliffe and not a single one has talked about the [infrastructure bill] not passing. They’ve all been about other things,” Jayapal told reporters, acknowledging the Virginia race was more about state issues than far-left priorities.

Jayapal is one of many far-left members to have blocked the $1.2 trillion bipartisan vote on Thursday. After Manchin’s comments on Monday, however, she changed her position and now supports passing the infrastructure measure this week.

, , , But with the Virginia race closing on Democrats, it may be too late to pass legislation and appear to not be an obstructionist.

“Everything has an impact on everything,” admitted Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) “I think at the end of the day, what happens in Virginia is what the candidate stands for, the nature of the campaign, the degree to which the candidate is resonating with the people.”