McManus: Dems produce Frankenbill

That doesn’t sound like the way legislating is supposed to happen. The world’s greatest deliberative body has turned into the world’s least deliberative body, with senators rummaging through the closets for ideas progressives and moderates can live with. The product is what aficionados call a “Frankenbill,” a creation stitched together from scraps of this and that.

It isn’t a thing of beauty. The version most recently unveiled by President Joe Biden abruptly abandoned some of his most cherished campaign promises: free community college, paid family leave.

And, of course, it hasn’t passed yet.

But it’s undeniably big; $1.85 trillion over 10 years is only half of what Biden asked for, but still gigantic. And it’s undeniably ambitious; it includes the biggest spending package on climate change in history and significant expansions of federal support for child care and early education.

One problem with legislating in haste, though, is that the authors may be left to repent at leisure. Whatever version of this bill survives will include provisions few voters have ever heard of. That will make those programs easy for the GOP to attack, especially if any run into start-up problems. Anybody remember the disastrous launch of Obamacare in 2013?

To be fair, Democratic leaders believed they didn’t have much choice. Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky made it clear that he did not want to give Biden any help; his 49 fellow GOP senators have remained unified as the party of no.

For all that, the bill isn’t as bad as it sounds, as a 19th century humorist once said of Wagner’s music.

Despite the appearance of being slapped together in a few weeks of frantic negotiation, parts of the bill have been sitting on Democrats’ shelves for years, waiting for the moment when they can be written into law. “There’s not much here that’s brand new,” Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution told me. “A lot of it is expansion of existing programs. And tax credits are pretty easy. There’s not too much the government can screw up.”

That’s on brand for Biden, who didn’t run for president as the candidate of new ideas. Biden ran as the candidate of old ideas; he promised to finish the work of the Obama administration. That’s most of what he’s doing now, just on a larger scale than many voters expected.

The provisions for universal prekindergarten education and federally subsidized child care are much bigger than anything the federal government has tried in those fields before. Implementing these programs, which depend on partnerships with willing state governments, may not be easy.

So there will be drama ahead over which programs succeed and which fail, and which can survive Republican attempts to repeal them.

Biden, who likes to compare his presidency with the era of Franklin D. Roosevelt, can console himself with this: Some of FDR’s New Deal programs didn’t work, and several didn’t survive the 1930s. “The country demands bold, persistent experimentation,” Roosevelt said in 1932. “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another.”

The question for Democrats is whether bold ideas are what Americans want now. FDR began his experimentation at the bottom of the Depression, and voters rewarded his party for decades after. Whether they will respond similarly this time is something Democrats will learn in 12 months in the election of 2022.