Thread by @charles_gaba

Annnnnd there he goes: Manchin Van Pelt yanks (most of) the football away...again.
acasignups.net/22/07/15/annnn…

As an aside, for everyone who said Dems were suckers for giving up their leverage on Manchin by voting for the Infrastructure Bill before the BBB bill passed: Manchin's erratic behavior should prove that he would've just as easily let the BIF die as well if he had to.

Splitting the larger bill in half as leverage to get him to vote for one before agreeing to the other made sense on paper, and I supported it at the time, but it assumed that Manchin wouldn't have just said "then neither one passes." I'm now convinced that he would have.

This is also another strong argument for killing the filibuster--not only would you only need 50 votes (+VP) for any bill, you also wouldn't have to cram a whole bunch of them together into a massive omnibus package like BIF or BBB.

Massive bills like that tend to get incredibly messy and confusing to the average person, even if they include a whole bunch of good stuff. If you pass the individual provisions separately (or at least have that as an option) it's a lot easier to explain what they do.

For instance, here's @RepUnderwood's #HR369, the Health Care Affordability Act of 2021...aka the #AmRescuePlan subsidies if they were made permanent.

The entire text is less than one page, and what it does is simple & clear:
congress.gov/bill/117th-con…

#HR369 does exactly two things:

1. Makes ACA subsidies more generous;
2. Removes the max income cut-off for subsidy eligibility.

That's it.

If both the House *and* Senate could pass that w/a simple majority, it wouldn't need to be buried in a massive, 2,000 page behemoth.

That doesn't mean it *would* pass standalone--it might be baked into a larger package anyway--but it wouldn't *have* to. With the filibuster you can only get 1 or 2 "simple majority" bills through the Senate each session, so they cram as much into each as they can.