Pat Buchanan: Biden casts his lot with liberal left

“We’ve got the president of the United States on our side,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.”

“Got 96% of the members of the Democratic caucus in the House on our side. We got all but two senators at this point in the Democratic caucus on our side. We’re going to win this thing.”

The socialist senator from Vermont may be overly optimistic about how the party deadlock on Capitol Hill unfolds. But about the balance of forces inside the party, and the direction where it is headed, Sanders is probably not wrong.

Progressive Democrats won the week.

President Biden confirmed it by casting his lot with the liberal left on the sequencing of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill and $3.5 trillion social safety net bill pending in Congress.

When Biden went to the Hill on Friday, it was thought he was coming to rescue and liberate the Senate-passed infrastructure bill being held hostage by progressives until they got their way on the larger bill.

Progressives had threatened to sink the roads-and-bridges bill in Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s House unless they received solid assurances both houses would simultaneously take up and approve the $3.5 trillion bill.

When Biden reached the Hill, however, he threw in with the hostage-takers. He asked for a delay in House passage of his own infrastructure bill until the demands of the progressives were addressed and met.

Pelosi agreed and has put off any House vote on the infrastructure bill until the end of October.

Biden had ditched the Biden Democrats and cast his lot with Sanders & Co. Let’s hold off voting on my own infrastructure bill until we also can deliver what the progressives demand of us, he was saying.

The real impediment blocking progress, Biden said, was two senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, who are blocking the resolution of the issue, which is that all Democrats should agree to enact both bills.

By capitulating to the progressives’ demand — which translates to, “Both bills or no bill!” — Biden revealed where he thinks the power in the party resides, where the future is and what he wants as his legacy.

The Build Back Better bill is truly the “transformative” legislation that The New York Times depicted as providing “a cradle-to-grave reweaving of a social safety net.”

It would provide family and medical leave for illness and the birth of a child, affordable child care during infancy, two years of universal prekindergarten, child credits and federal income tax credits, and two years in a community college.

This also would include established programs of welfare, Medicaid, aid to education, subsidized housing, rent supplements, school breakfasts and lunches, and food stamps.

If this bill does not die in the fall, what will America look like a few years hence?

Government will have expanded in both size and the numbers of employees, and in relation to a shrinking private sector. A panoply of new programs will expand eternally with the cost growing inexorably. The dependency of U.S. citizens on their government will grow.

Hopefully, Manchin and Sinema will employ the leverage they have to prevent the worst of the damage this historically high level of spending — with inflation already rising above 5% — will do.

But as to whether the Democrats are a Bernie party or a Biden party, Joe settled that Friday with his capitulation.