President Biden and congressional Democrats have piled many of their top legislative priorities into a mammoth bill that currently totals over $3 trillion dollars of social and economic policy change. While Democrats are now skirmishing over the details, if they can agree on the bill, they can bypass a Republican filibuster of it in the Senate by making use of an arcane parliamentary process known as “reconciliation.”
Like Biden, many recent presidents have favored omnibus measures. But not all mammoth bills are alike. And some are more prone to fail than others.
Here’s what you need to know about promise and pitfalls of omnibus measures.
Omnibus bills come in different flavors
Sometimes omnibus bills “share the hurt.” Take for example measures that would close or realign the mission of obsolete military bases. When that happens, it’s easier for a legislator to vote for a bill that would close a base in his or her district or state if they can argue that the bill was needed to make government more efficient and that many other legislators’ districts are seeing bases closed.
Another kind of omnibus bill puts together a winning coalition, one issue at a time. Here the bill includes items that the president wants, but that would almost certainly fail in stand-alone bills. By bundling the president’s priority with measures that some legislators intensely want, leaders can secure enough votes for the package.
Right now, the Biden bill lacks both of these features, which hurts its chances.
Congress passed a stopgap spending bill. That’ll cost taxpayers.
Would the items in an omnibus bill pass individually or not?
In a classic 1972 article, the statistician Joseph Kadane discussed the strategic aspects of creating omnibus bills as opposed to splitting a spending package into component parts.
Kadane draws a distinction between “separable” and “non-separable” vote choices. Policy items are separable if legislators’ support for the omnibus bill stays the same if an item gets added that would be supported as a stand-alone bill. Items within the bill are non-separable if legislators would vote differently on an item on its own than they would if it were bundled with everything else in the bill. For example, if a bill that included both farm subsidies (appealing to conservatives) and food stamps (appealing to liberals) would pass, but each item would fail if voted on in isolation, then farm subsidies and food stamps are non-separable.
Biden’s package brings together non-separable items
The Biden package offers funding for many disparate items — including universal preschool, subsidized tuition at community colleges, expanded medical coverage under the Affordable Care Act, funding to combat global warning — as well as an increased minimum wage for certain classes of workers and authorization for Medicare to negotiate drug costs. And it has funding targeted to minorities, such as investments in historically Black colleges. Liberals within the Democratic Party insist that all these must be included. But they disagree with Democratic moderates over how to fund the bill.
At a different time, these items might well be separable: A legislator’s vote for one would not rule out support for others. But with a huge spending tag and a need to figure out how to pay for it all, lawmakers are more likely to see these as non-separable: Each item increases the highly visible price tag, and so can’t be considered individually on its own merits.
When lawmakers view items as non-separable, it can become much more difficult to put together a package that can pass. Democratic moderates say they are reluctant to sign onto the bill, believing that so much has been tossed into it that voters will blame them for “tax and spend” politics while Republicans will claim the bill is bankrupting the country. Ordinary voters, especially Democrats, like the individual items. But because the bill is such a grab-bag of highly varied items, arguments for or against its individual parts get lost in the fight over how much to spend.
Linking two omnibus bills compounds the challenge
Congress is considering not just one omnibus bill, but two. This past summer, House Democrats, led by moderates, coalesced around passing a physical infrastructure bill that Republicans had agreed to support. That bill is about “hard” infrastructure, such as major new investments in the country’s aging roads, bridges, pipes, ports and Internet connections. Liberals demanded that the House first pass Biden’s social policy package. By yoking the fate of the two packages together, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) turned separable votes into non-separable voting choices: Democrats could no longer evaluate the two measures on their own merits. That potentially dooms both.
That’s probably why Pelosi appears to be willing to decouple the bills: If neither bill passes, it could dramatically hurt the Democrats in the 2022 midterm elections, threatening the party’s congressional majority. House Democratic leaders are now saying they’ll move ahead with the vote on infrastructure while continuing to negotiate the contours of the massive reconciliation bill.
Biden surely learned from President Barack Obama’s experience that Republicans would not support anything that might give him a win. Biden may well fear that whatever he fails to do before the midterms will never happen, since the Republicans could take over the House and regain the Senate in 2022.
Channeling Harry S. Truman
So what are Democratic leaders to do? They could give up on relying on reconciliation bills’ special protection from being filibustered. Instead, they could split the omnibus bill into pieces, take the most popular items, and have the Senate vote on those one-by-one.
Republicans will surely filibuster most if not all of those single-issue bills. In response, Democrats could echo the rhetoric of President Harry S. Truman in 1948. Truman campaigned against the “Do Nothing” Congress. Biden could campaign against the “Do Nothing Senate!” in 2022.
But that strategy only makes sense if Democrats believe that voters would blame Republicans — not Democrats — for blocking those popular policies.
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Bernard Grofman is the Jack W. Peltason Chair of Democracy Studies and distinguished professor of political science at the University of California, Irvine.