All of a sudden, Democrats have a whole host of achievements to boast about during the midterms

Biden has reason to celebrate this week. Just in the nick of time, he’s been able to prove that his party can get things done

Biden has reason to celebrate this week (AP)

As Senate Democrats prepared to pass the keystone legislation now known as the Inflation Reduction Act, they began to coalesce around a simple message: We get things done. And for once, they have a case.

President Joe Biden’s approval ratings are below sea level, but he’s had a remarkably productive few months. First, Senate Democrats – led by Kyrsten Sinema and Chris Murphy – passed a bipartisan gun safety reform measure. There wasn’t much time for enthusiasm about the victory when it happened, because the House voted on it the same day that the Supreme Court overruled Roe v Wade. But the bill remains the first piece of gun legislation to pass Congress since 1994. That’s a significant achievement.

Next, the Senate passed legislation to support the semiconductor industry. Shortly after that vote, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senator Joe Manchin announced that after an arduous year of negotiations, they had reached an agreement to tackle climate change, continue Obamacare subsidies, and lower prescription drug prices.

And as if that weren’t enough, the Senate last week passed the PACT Act, which would allow veterans who suffered health complications from burn pits to receive health care benefits. On that one, Republicans wound up looking like they were throwing a temper tantrum, with 25 of them switching their votes from ‘yes’ to ‘no’ before the bill ultimately passed with 86 votes (all 11 ‘no’ votes came from the GOP).

All of this comes after Biden signed last year’s bipartisan infrastructure bill – getting one up on his predecessor, who declared seemingly every week “infrastructure week” without notching up any achievements to match.

To pass multiple bills in a city that moves at a snail’s pace is no mean feat, but it’s even more impressive given the current internal politics of the Democratic Party. While many of those bills appealed to a broad political consensus, they did little to satisfy the sorts of progressive voters who might have preferred to vote for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders but ultimately sucked it up to vote for Biden.

At a time when frustration at Biden’s supposedly halting agenda is running high, the Inflation Reduction Act lets Democrats show voters who care about climate change or drug prices that they care about what matters to them too.

Senator Mark Warner, a moderate from Virginia, told your reporter that the Inflation Reduction Act was important – but only one component of a much broader agenda that’s already underway. “I think it’s important,” he said, “but I think it’s going to be more the cumulative effect of the infrastructure bill, the CHIPS bill, this bill.”

Incidentally, Warner played a key part in saving the legislation. When Republican Minority Whip John Thune tried creating a carve-out for taxation of certain private equities as a sweetener to Senator Kyrsten Sinema — a measure that could have killed the bill — it was Warner who proposed a substitute amendment. (That’s another case for Democrats to make: If voters are pleased with how they tackled climate change and prescription drugs, they should elect more blue Senators so that Manchin and Sinema will no longer hold sway.)

Similarly, Senator Sherrod Brown, a progressive from Ohio, said that the legislation shows Democrats can beat back powerful industries. “I mean, this is the first time when you think about this. We took on the drug companies who never lose, we took on the oil companies who rarely lose, and we took on Wall Street, and we were winning on all three,” he told me, without even mentioning that his party also beat the gun lobby.

Senator Gary Peters, the current chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, specifically highlighted the latest bill’s prescription drug provisions: “Something that folks really will be excited about is the fact that we can bring down drug prices in this country, and dealing with the opportunity for Medicare to be able to negotiate for lower prices. If you look at polling it’s the number one issue for most people in the country right now.”

Of course, this isn’t to say all Democrats or all progressives will be happy. Sanders expressed his dissatisfaction with the bill, which he insisted “will in fact have a minimal impact on inflation”. Republicans immediately began promoting Sanders’s complaints on social media, and they’ll be playing them ad nauseam this fall.

Meanwhile, the Democrats’ next step is to get the legislation through the House, which is expected to pass it this Friday. Sanders’s comments could exert some pull on progressives, who have said some nice things about the bill while sticking to a wait-and-see approach. Still, Democrats will be able to tell voters they passed extraordinarily difficult legislation despite partisan gridlock – and that this would not be possible if Republicans controlled either House of Congress.

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