Essential Politics: Biden strikes back

Usually, August is quiet in D.C., as lawmakers go home to their districts, presidents retreat to pristine, heavily secured beachfronts and Washington’s political class heads for Martha’s Vineyard. But over his first two years in office, no month has been as consequential for President Biden.

Last summer’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan blew up not only President Biden’s planned vacation but also damaged a presidency that had been running smoothly up to that point, cratering the public’s confidence in a leader who’d been elected on a promise of experience and competency.

For 12 months, Biden struggled. His ambitious legislative agenda floundered. His response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine received bipartisan backing, but led to spiking gas prices and soaring inflation. His approval rating fell below 40%, and Democrats appeared certain to limp into the fall midterm campaign season.

This August may have changed all that. While Biden was sidelined with COVID-19, Democrats in the Senate rallied, passing several bills that had seemed all but dead. As Biden’s allies on the Hill finalized their deals, the administration announced that the president had authorized a CIA drone strike that killed the leader of Al Qaeda. Then, on Friday, the Labor Department released a July jobs report that exceeded even the White House’s expectations. Oh, and on Monday, FBI agents searched former President Trump’s Florida estate, signaling that Biden’s predecessor and likely 2024 challenger may be facing deeper legal trouble than anyone realized.

Democrats, beleaguered no more, are leaving town for the summer recess with a spring in their step. Welcome to the Essential Politics newsletter. I’m Eli Stokols, a White House reporter for The Times, and I’m as surprised as everyone else.

Did Joe Manchin just save Biden and Democrats? And perhaps the planet?

Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.), the owner of a coal plant in his home state and a frequent beneficiary of political contributions from the fossil fuel industry, authored the legislation that, if passed by the House in the days ahead, will amount to the largest government effort ever to combat climate change. Democrats in the White House and on Capitol Hill noticed the irony.

But Manchin, who killed an even larger legislative effort last year that included Biden’s climate initiatives and numerous tax subsidies and credits for working families, made it clear for months that it was going to be his way or no way at all.

As recently as mid-July, the latter seemed far more likely. Manchin’s talks with Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) had again broken down. Schumer made that apparently final impasse public, leaving Democratic senators resigned to passing a budget bill that bore little resemblance to their initial plans.

Up in arms about the prospect of Congress ignoring Biden’s proposals to hasten the private sector’s transition to cleaner energy sources, several Democrats urged the president to declare climate change a national emergency. But he held off. Manchin and Schumer, unbeknownst to many of their colleagues, resumed discussions on July 18, just four days after their talks appeared to have failed.

After the Senate’s passage of the $700-billion Inflation Reduction Act on Sunday, the White House took a jubilant and very public victory lap, even tweeting memes of Biden as “Dark Brandon,” inspired by a subset of very online supporters of Trump. Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, tweeted (and immediately retweeted) a list of major accomplishments over the last 10 days. Klain also cited the passage of the bipartisan CHIPS bill, which will spend billions to subsidize domestic semiconductor manufacturing and science research, and the Senate’s approval of the $280-billion PACT Act, which will provide healthcare and benefits for veterans injured by wartime exposure to toxins. Biden signed the CHIPS bill Tuesday and is set to sign the PACT Act today.

But the Senate’s passage of the Manchin-written IRA topped Klain’s list for good reason. The legislation, in addition to directing $369 billion toward climate initiatives, would allow Medicare to negotiate prescription drug prices. It will also raise taxes on corporations to reduce the deficit, delivering significant chunks of Biden’s ambitious agenda.

Remarkably, Biden’s biggest win in a year came after he removed himself almost completely from the negotiations. And it only came after most of Manchin’s Democratic colleagues had given up on him. Manchin “never reacts well to pressure,” one senior administration official told me. “Every time progressives or the White House pushed him, he’d go the other way. But when everyone had written him off, that pressure abated. And it created the environment for him to be open to finally getting this done.”

When it rains, it pours

During a recent meeting with a senior Biden aide in the West Wing, I asked what made the White House optimistic about Democrats’ chances in the midterm elections in the fall. This was right around the time the Manchin-Schumer talks were sputtering.

Gas prices, the official said, were finally coming down. Aware the press might not cover falling gas prices with the same avidity as it had the uptick, White House aides had been tweeting furiously about the drop.

The official also pointed to private polling showing that a majority of Americans had gone back to believing Republicans generally were more extreme than Democrats — likely a reaction to the Supreme Court’s June ruling in Dobbs vs. Jackson that overturned federal protections for abortion.

In short, the political environment was already starting to change in mid-July. If inflation eased, swing voters alarmed by rising costs might consider other factors when they filled out ballots in October and November.

And if the House approves the Inflation Reduction Act, as it’s expected to do as early as Friday, Biden will have delivered on a number of priorities likely to animate Democratic voters. Over the last 12 months, Biden’s inability to move his domestic agenda around Manchin — and the failure of quixotic efforts to circumvent the filibuster to protect voting rights and reproductive rights — frustrated those who had expected more out a Democratic president and Senate majority they helped elect in 2020.

In a matter of weeks, Senate Democrats will have helped Biden shatter any lingering perceptions of fecklessness. The narrative has already shifted from Biden lamenting about the limits on his power. Now the story is about how much Democrats have done with the narrowest possible Senate majority, and the laundry list of accomplishments they have to run on this fall.

The latest from the campaign trail

— As if all of the above weren’t enough, another major development this month put some wind in Democratic sails. Last week, voters in deep-red Kansas decisively rejected an initiative seeking to outlaw abortion statewide. The surprisingly strong turnout — over half of the state’s voters cast ballots, “unprecedented for a primary,” our Jenny Jarvie and Melanie Mason wrote — offered a first indication for the fall about the galvanizing power of the abortion issue and the broad support for abortion rights among Democrats and Republicans alike.

— As David Lauter lays out here, the upheaval after the Supreme Court’s abortion ruling “has played a significant role in reshaping the political landscape” and giving Democrats a slight edge on the generic ballot.

— In Tuesday’s primary election action, Wisconsin Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes won the Democratic Senate primary and will face two-term Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. As the Associated Press reports, it’s expected to be one of the country’s most competitive races as the parties battle for control of the U.S. Senate.

The view from Washington

— OK, back to the FBI’s search of Trump’s home for a minute. This news Monday night was a shocker, even though it had long ago been reported that Trump took classified materials with him to Mar-a-Lago and the National Archives was trying to get them back. The search itself, which couldn’t happen unless the government met a high burden of proof to obtain a warrant, doesn’t guarantee that charges are forthcoming against the former president. But if the documents offer more proof of seditious conspiracy related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, all bets are off. What’s clear: Trump’s and many Republicans’ suggestions that the search was political in nature and evidence of some sort of state overreach are flat-out wrong. In a democracy, yes, a police raid can happen to anyone — if a judge agrees that investigators have probable cause to obtain a warrant.

— Although Biden and Democrats can rightly run on a bevy of legislative accomplishments, it’s fair to say they have largely ignored one issue that Trump and Republicans continue to use to galvanize their supporters: immigration. And as Andrea Castillo reports, backlogs of immigrants seeking green cards continue to build as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has put even more pressure on an overloaded system that hasn’t been reformed in three decades. “The system all but buckled under pandemic closures,” Andrea wrote.

— Vice President Kamala Harris broke the Senate’s 50-50 tie on Sunday and helped advance the Inflation Reduction Act to the House. But beyond her largely ceremonial role in such instances, she has an opportunity to lead the administration’s charge in another area of unfinished business: abortion rights. The issue offers Harris “a political opportunity” at a moment when Biden’s 2024 aspirations remain an open question and Harris is no slam dunk to be anointed as his successor, Noah Bierman writes.

The view from California

— As the L.A. mayor’s race chugs along, Karen Bass and Rick Caruso are carefully wooing a number of important constituencies, some of which are wary of the optics of staged campaign events and, as Julia Wick writes in this smart dispatch from the trail, “the delicate line between building important relationships with would-be leaders and appearing to show public support for their candidacies.”

— As a native Southern Californian who was home visiting my folks in Irvine last week, I’m ending with a small point of personal privilege. Disclaimer: I’m an Angels fan (please sell the team, Arte!) who grew up listening to every ballgame I could find on the television or radio. I’ve never bled Dodger Blue, but I listened to the Dodgers because of Vin Scully and his indelible voice. As Bill Plaschke wrote in his tremendous tribute to Scully, who died last week at 94: “He was the soundtrack of a city, the muse of millions, the voice of home.” Indeed. His voice was the soundtrack to my summers, too, the sound of the game itself.

Sign up for our California Politics newsletter to get the best of The Times’ state politics reporting.