‘Bad cop’: Seattle’s Pramila Jayapal emerges as key power player in Biden negotiations

With trillions of dollars and possibly President Joe Biden’s entire domestic agenda, US Democratic MP Pramila Jayapal stared at the leadership of her own party. She didn’t blink.

All Thursday, House spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi, D-California, said the House would vote on $ 1 trillion that day Non-partisan infrastructure law that is a small part of Biden’s agenda.

And all day Jayapal had said that she and most of the 96-member Congressional Progressive Caucus she led would not vote for the infrastructure bill unless it was paired with the rest of Biden’s agenda – a huge 3.5 trillion Dollar package to raise taxes on the rich, make community college free, offer childcare and paid family vacations, expand Medicare, and invest in programs to combat climate change.

On Thursday evening, one of the few moderate Democrats skeptical of the larger package told CNN that he was “1,000 percent” sure that the infrastructure bill would be passed that night. Moments later, Jayapal said she was sure there would be no vote and if so, it would not happen.

Jayapal was right. Pelosi realized she didn’t have the votes and never put the bill to a vote on Thursday night.

Jayapal, the third-term congresswoman from West Seattle, has become a key negotiator as Democrats seek razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate to pass the ambitious health, childcare, education and climate proposals that Biden ran continue and are critical to the success of his presidency.

Biden’s agenda is split into these two bills, and Jayapal, and the party’s newly excited and organized progressive wing, seeks to ensure that the smaller one doesn’t get away without the larger one.

“We made all these promises to voters across the country that we wanted to keep on this agenda, it’s not a crazy left-wing wish list,” Jayapal said in an interview on Friday. “I feel like we’ve lost so many voters in the Democratic Party because they don’t see us fighting for things that might be a little harder to cross the line.”

The key point: Both Biden and large majorities of Democrats in the House and Senate want to pass both bills.

The Senate passed the physical infrastructure package that increases spending on roads, local transport, and broadband internet. It was negotiated in part by two centrist Democrats, Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia and Senator Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona.

But Manchin and Sinema have shied away from the bigger bill. And since the Democrats only have a majority vote in the Senate and have no hopes of getting a single Republican vote for the bigger package, they can’t afford to lose either Senator.

In the meantime, Jayapal and her progressive faction have used the infrastructure law as leverage. Ultimately, they will support it, but they refuse to vote in favor until Manchin and Sinema (and the rest of the Senate) sign any form of the climate and social program package.

“If you vote for this other package,” said Jayapal, describing her tactic, “we will vote for your package. So it’s like a mutually assured success, things are connected. “

The negotiations continue. On Friday, Biden came to Congress to meet privately with House Democrats and expressed his confidence that they would ultimately pass both bills.

The most important centers of power now include not only Pelosi and the majority leader in the Senate, Chuck Schumer, not only the White House and the two refused senators, but also Jayapal and the faction she represents.

“Jayapal has had a masterclass in the exercise of power over the past few weeks,” wrote Brian Fallon, director of the progressive group Demand Justice and a former associate of Schumer and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Jayapal’s tactic of holding back support for one bill until it gets approval for the other worked “100%,” Fallon said.

“It allowed the Biden government to somehow withdraw,” he said. “You let Jayapal be the bad cop here, I think there is some kind of winking relationship when she makes these demands. I think the White House was happy to have her play that role. “

Jayapal declined on Friday to say what they might be willing to sacrifice from the larger bill to appease Manchin and Sinema. She wants to see a “final offer” from both senators first.

This is a relatively new development within the Democratic Party – the progressive wing of the party that flexes its muscles and doesn’t, Jayapal said, “be content with the smallest all the time.”

“It’s a big departure from normal business operations,” wrote Max Berger of the progressive group More Perfect Union this week. “Progressives have a veto of what Democrats decide in the House of Representatives. It is the beginning of an era of progressive governance that shifts power to working people. “

Jayapal, Fallon said, “has changed the momentum a little in Washington because the next time the House Progressive Caucus says we’re going to keep this up, people will believe them.”

Jayapal chairs the Progressive Caucus after serving as co-chair last year. When she entered Congress in 2017, she said, “There wasn’t a lot of collective action here.”

Since then, the caucus has increased its number and staff. A new set of rules was passed requiring members to vote with the caucus in certain situations.

“I feel like I’ve managed to bring the organizer mentality here and build a committee that thinks and acts collectively as a collective committee, the collective entity,” said Jayapal.

The past week, she said, has “slept very little” – maybe four or five hours a night while staying in touch with members and trying to negotiate her concerns. It was hard to tune into CNN or MSNBC without seeing them in the center of a crowd of reporters.

She’s always calling, texting, and meeting progressive members. She met with Pelosi in the speaker’s office earlier this week. She speaks “regularly” to the White House.

They are all, of course, still pushing for the same policy, even if there is disagreement about how to get there. Neither the President nor the Speaker have leaned or leaned on them, really calls for her voice.

“I’m sure the time will come,” she said. “But we have a lot of votes and we continue to represent the group.”