The Democratic Civil War Has a Winner: Donald Trump

First, the good news. The government did not shut down at midnight. New COVID infections in the United States have fallen twenty-five per cent over the past couple weeks. Vaccine mandates by large companies and government agencies, many of them imposed at President Biden’s behest, seem to be working—without vaccine-refusenik workers quitting en masse, as threatened. As recent weeks go for the Biden Administration, this one was not terrible.

Then again, not shutting down the government because you managed to pass and sign a bill pushing the problem off until early December is hardly an accomplishment for the ages. President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi have promised—and not yet delivered—a House vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that passed the Senate this summer. That vote was blocked by members of their own party, which cannot agree on the size and specifics of the three-and-a-half-trillion-dollar budget-reconciliation-and-everything-else bill that Biden has proposed as the centerpiece of his Presidency. The long-predicted Democratic civil war between progressives and moderates has begun.

The two leaders threw all the political capital they had at reaching a deal by their own self-imposed deadline, and couldn’t get there. Biden personally involved himself in hours of talks with the feuding Democratic factions, and gave extraordinary time to a lone senator, Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, who never publicly explained her position. A surprise Presidential visit to the annual Congressional Baseball Game did not close the deal, nor did an absolute insistence on a Thursday vote that never took place. Pelosi, relentless and ever optimistic, was adamant that there would be a vote and that she would win it, until long after even fellow Democratic leaders had given up this line. But, at the end of a long week of the Speaker not getting her way, one Washington axiom still applies: it’s never a good idea to bet against Nancy Pelosi. If and when she closes a deal on the budget-reconciliation measure, whose price tag of three and a half trillion dollars was never going to last, and brings the infrastructure bill to the floor—a roughly trillion-dollar measure that got the votes of nineteen Senate Republicans as well as those of all of that chamber’s Democrats—the week’s many delays will be forgotten.

Harder to forget will be the intensifying divisions revealed by this week’s haggling—the House-Senate divide, the progressive-moderate divide, the everyone-versus-Joe-Manchin-and-Kyrsten-Sinema divide. (“Biden bets it all on unlocking the Manchinema puzzle,” as one headline put it. Punchbowl News prefers “Sinemanchin.”) It’s sure to get nastier before the deal gets done. Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, a House moderate, said on CNN that his car was older than some of the progressives holding up the vote on the infrastructure bill. The progressives, meanwhile, were not in an accommodating mood. “We’re pushing…