If Hillary Clinton’s 2016 election loss didn’t bring an end to Clintonism in the Democratic Party, Joe Biden’s first bill as president should have finished the job. Some 25 years after Bill Clinton staked his reputation on welfare reform, paring back social services of every make and model, President Biden signed into law the American Rescue Plan Act, which featured the broadest expansion of the welfare state in decades. Fourteen-hundred-dollar stimulus checks were sent to most Americans; federal unemployment insurance was enhanced; a new, substantial Child Tax Credit was enacted; funding for everything from health care to rental assistance was appropriated.
Now, part two of the two-part infrastructure package looks to build on that social welfare boomlet with everything from universal pre-K to child care, free community college, paid family and medical leave, and health care expansion ranging from home health care to dental, vision, and hearing coverage under Medicare. The strategy for squeaking that proposal through razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate, as laid out by the Democratic leadership for months, has been to marry it to the bipartisan infrastructure bill that recently passed the Senate. Everything that can be plausibly called the “Biden agenda” resides in the reconciliation bill, which would not be passed in anything like its current form—if at all—if the bipartisan bill didn’t depend on its passage, which is why House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has pledged to pass the reconciliation bill first, and the bipartisan bill immediately after, or even, most recently, to pass them simultaneously. The fate of each bill depends on the other.
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