We can see American democracy at work. Or, on the contrary, the expression of his convulsions. The Congress was the scene of a rare agitation, Thursday, September 30, while several essential files were simultaneously under discussion in the Senate and the House of Representatives. Backstage negotiations, crisis meetings, quickly discharged phones, White House advisers on the move, overheated media: this feverish day was not a simple classic version of the clash between Democrats and Republicans. This time, internal divisions among Democrats have captured attention and jeopardized the calculations of the Biden administration.
“It’s confusing, this sausage making at the Capitol”, recognized Jen Psaki, the spokesperson for the White House, using an expression prized by experts in parliamentary life. The differences between moderates and progressives, known for a long time, would be less glaring if the majority available to the party were not so fragile: 220 Democrats against 212 Republicans in the House and equality (50-50) in the Senate, with one vote in addition, that of the vice-president, Kamala Harris.
This is how Joe Biden’s entire socio-economic agenda ended up at the mercy of two centrist senators, Joe Manchin (West Virginia) and Kyrsten Sinema (Arizona). Beyond this arithmetic, the stake for the Democrats is to take advantage of a political opening that will not be repeated: to give a historical meaning to the Biden presidency, by reformulating the terms of the American welfare state. . An issue lost sight of on Capitol Hill, at the mercy of shopkeepers’ negotiations.
Republican senators miraculously rediscover the virtues of budget sobriety, after costly tax measures but so favorable to the rich under the previous presidency
The first part of the negotiations, the most pressing, was budgetary. The vote in the two Chambers of a provisional finance law, signed in the evening by Joe Biden, made it possible to postpone to December 3 the risk of a shutdown, the paralysis of the federal services, for lack of funds. The second project concerns the debt ceiling (set at 28.4 trillion dollars, approximately 24.5 trillion euros), which must be raised by October 18, under penalty of seeing the United States, for the first time, in a sovereign default situation.
The Democrats want the Republicans to bear sole responsibility for an obstruction, while they themselves had agreed, three times under Donald Trump, to raise this ceiling. For their part, the Republican senators rediscovered by miracle the virtues of budgetary sobriety, after the costly tax measures but so favorable to the rich under the previous presidency. They believe Democrats should take on their expensive projects on their own.
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