Four jagged pieces and a couple of weeks for the Democrats to piece them together

WASHINGTON – In a pivotal week, on a pivotal stretch for President Biden’s domestic agenda, Democrats in Congress are trying to piece together a jigsaw puzzle of four jagged pieces that may or may not fit together.

Making them work as a whole is critical to the party’s agenda and political outlook, and how quickly they can piece the puzzle together will determine whether the government suffers another costly and embarrassing shutdown – or worse, an initial one All-time default, which could trigger a global economic crisis.

Here are all the moving parts.

Part 1: State funding.

At two past midnight on Friday morning, the sections of government that operate at the discretion of Congress’s annual spending process will run out of money if a makeshift bill is not passed. October 1 is the start of the fiscal year, and with larger issues dominating their attention, the Democratic House and Senate have not completed any of the annual budget bills to fund the Department of Defense, Transportation, Health, and Social Welfare, state and home security , to name just a few.

This is not unusual. The individual subsidy bills usually only go through in winter. In the meantime, Congress is adopting “rolling resolutions” to keep departments open at current spending levels, with perhaps some adjustments for urgent priorities and emergencies such as responding to hurricanes and relocating Afghan refugees this year.

By Thursday, Congress could easily pass such a resolution to avoid a funding shortfall that could put federal employees on leave and force “essential” employees like those in the Transportation Security Administration to work without money. But on Monday, such an emergency solution was blocked by the Republicans in the Senate because they …

Part 2: The debt limit.

For decades, the federal government has worked with a legal limit on borrowing – in common parlance the debt limit. The national debt of $ 28 trillion is rising inexorably, not only because the government spends so much more than it collects in taxes, but also because parts of the government owe money to other parts, mostly most of the government after decades of borrowing money from social security.

In essence, raising the debt limit equates to settling your credit card bill at the end of the month, as a higher credit limit allows the Treasury Department to pay creditors, contractors, and agencies money already withdrawn from them in government bonds and notes, or contracts. It’s not for future commitments.

When the problem last surfaced in August 2019, Congress and President Donald J. Trump suspended the debt ceiling until July 31 of this year. On August 2, the Treasury Department reset the debt ceiling to $ 28.4 trillion, and the government broke through days later. Since then, the department has been shuffling money from account to account to make sure their bills are paid, but sometime in mid to late October, such “extraordinary measures” will be exhausted and the bills will go unpaid. This would be a shock to the international economy as the US national debt is a global safe haven for all types of cash and investments.

During Mr Trump’s presidency, Republicans and Democrats did not argue about raising the debt ceiling, in part because big spending increases for the coronavirus pandemic and other priorities were bipartisan – though that was not the case with the big tax cut in 2017.

This year, Republican leaders declared that the Democrats control the House, Senate and White House, they and they alone must raise the debt ceiling.

The Republicans have made it clear that they want to pass an ordinary bill to raise the debt ceiling, as they did on Monday. In order for the Democrats to do this unilaterally, they would most likely have to employ a budget process called reconciliation that protects fiscal measures from a filibuster.

This is a complex and time consuming process. Everything has to be done in the next two to three weeks to hit the still unknown but rapidly approaching “X-Date” when the government goes bankrupt. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen told Congress Tuesday that the deadline was October 18.

Part 3: Infrastructure.

In August, with rare bipartisan bragging rights, the Senate passed a $ 1 trillion bill to build or fortify roads, bridges, tunnels, transit and rural broadband networks. The 69 votes in favor included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, and 18 others from his party.

Then it got more complicated.

Nine conservative Democrats in the House of Representatives pushed for a quick vote on the bill and threatened to withhold their votes on the party’s $ 3.5 trillion budget until the Senate-approved infrastructure bill vacated their chamber.

The draft budget was needed to get Mr Biden’s sprawling social policy and climate change agenda past a Republican filibuster in the Senate through the reconciliation process. For example, spokeswoman Nancy Pelosi signed a deal with the nine moderates in a signature maneuver: vote for the budget decision to get the social policy law in motion, and she would take up the infrastructure law by September 27, three days before a large number existing traffic and infrastructure programs should exhaust their legal entitlement.

Ms. Pelosi hopes that the reconciliation package will also be operational by then. But that did not happen, and now Liberals in the House of Representatives are threatening to withhold their votes for the infrastructure measure.

September 27 came and went on Monday with no vote or agreement between factions, with the spokeswoman seeking approval from her moderates to postpone the action until Thursday. The question is whether enough Liberal Democrats will vote in the House of Representatives as they move on to the final details of …

Piece 4: Social policy reconciliation.

The very ambitious Democratic social policy law, which Mr Biden calls his “Build Back Better” plan, is packed with longstanding party priorities. The house has a blueprint 2,465-page version These include a variety of programs to combat climate change, the expansion of a generous tax break for children, a universal pre-kindergarten, greatly expanded access to the community college, more resources for care for the elderly and paid leave, and a Medicare expansion for visual, hearing and and dental care – all paid for by trillions of dollars in tax hikes for businesses and the rich.

Ms. Pelosi had hoped to vote on it this week, but she faced two problems: Currently, the Democrats most likely do not have the votes, and Senate Democratic leaders have yet to come up with a detailed bill that will have the support of every member their faction.

Several conservative Democrats in both chambers, including Senators Joe Manchin III from West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona, have said they cannot support the proposed plan. And because the Republicans have made it clear that they are united in their opposition, the Democrats cannot afford to lose a single vote of their party in the Senate.

The math is almost as daunting in the House of Representatives, where Democrats can afford to lose just three votes.

Mr Biden has been negotiating with the holdouts to see what they could support. But for the time being, the lack of agreement on the extensive plan blocks his progress – and also leaves the fate of the infrastructure measure uncertain.

On Monday afternoon, Ms. Pelosi signaled to the Democrats that a vote on the reconciliation plan would have to be postponed until the differences were resolved.