Joe Manchin’s Choices on Family Policy
October 9, 2021
There is an interesting counterfactual scenario for the now-flailing Biden presidency, where the president responded to the initial success of his bipartisan infrastructure push — all those Republicans at the White House, signing up for billions in new spending — by immediately going out and saying, let’s do the same for family policy.
In this scenario, instead of letting his administration’s big ideas for helping families — paid parental leave, extending the expanded child tax credit, new spending on child care and preschool — get folded into the omnium gatherum of a multitrillion-dollar reconciliation bill, Biden would have invited every Senate Republican who has ever worked on family policy, from moderates like Mitt Romney and Bill Cassidy to populists like Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio, and hashed out a proposal that could win some Republican support.
