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He provided the deciding vote on two of the biggest liberal priorities of this era — blocking repeal of the Affordable Care Act in 2017 and on passage of the nearly $2 trillion stimulus bill this month — while also twice voting to convict an impeached president wildly popular in his home state.And while he may admire Mr. Byrd’s dedication to Senate tradition, Mr. Manchin has not emulated his predecessor by leveraging his power to focus relentlessly on steering spending projects back to West Virginia.

Mr. Manchin said President Biden warned him in a phone call that the progressive left in the House might balk if the bill were significantly trimmed. “I said, ‘Mr. President, all we’re trying to do is put some guard rails on this,’” he recalled.He was less happy about Vice President Kamala Harris’s effort to nudge him on the legislation by making an appearance on a television affiliate in West Virginia to promote the bill without forewarning him. The clip went viral and, Mr. Manchin said, prompted cleanup conversations with Mr. Biden and the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain.

Both Republicans and Democrats have also signaled support for legislation to strengthen the US supply chain in critical areas like public health and defense, and a number of Republican lawmakers recently attended a White House meeting to discuss possible legislative reforms

To pass their spending bill, Democrats are using a legislative maneuver called budget reconciliation -- which allows legislation directly impacting spending or revenues to advance in the Senate on a simple majority vote. In recent years, budget reconciliation has been used to advance policies that have little or no hope of securing bipartisan support. For example, Republicans used reconciliation in 2017 to advance their proposal to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, which didn't work in their favor.

If all goes according to plan for Senate Democrats, they'll be able to deliver a spending bill that Biden will sign into law sometime next week. Democrats will celebrate the accomplishment, but the win will ultimately cause long-term challenges and dissuade any Republicans who may have been open to working across the aisle from believing President Biden's calls for bipartisanship are genuine.

"It depends on when we get the paper from the Senate," Pelosi said on Monday. "It has to be very precise, and it takes time to do that. It has some changes that they have to precisely write. It could be that we get it tomorrow afternoon and then it has to go to Rules. And we'd take it up Wednesday morning at the latest."

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said Monday that the relief bill had not made its way back to the House yet. "I talked to Leader Schumer. He said as soon as they could get it ready, but it was complicated and they were working on it," Hoyer said when asked about the delay in sending the bill back to the House.

that a final vote on the bill could come Tuesday or Wednesday.

"We are very excited that this bill will pass imminently. If not today, it will be scheduled for a vote tomorrow," Clarke said

The Senate version of the bill largely mirrors the $1.9 trillion package first approved by the House and laid out by President Joe Biden in January.

The sweeping aid legislation originally passed the Democrat-controlled House at the end of February, but it needs to be taken up in the chamber again following changes made to the legislation in the Senate.

The nearly $2 trillion package includes a slate of Democratic priorities, including up to $1,400 stimulus checks to many Americans, and billions of dollars for states and municipalities, schools, small businesses and vaccine distribution. It also extends a 15% increase in food stamp benefits from June to September, helps low-income households cover rent, makes federal premium subsidies for Affordable Care Act policies more generous and gives $8.5 billion for struggling rural hospitals and health care providers.

Pelosi said she does not expect more Democrats to vote against the bill because of the changes that were made in the Senate, saying, "I think more will vote for it," and that she felt "sad" for Republicans who will vote against it

Asked about bipartisanship, Clark told Berman this is a "time of great divide" but said they'll find issues to work on together. She also said the lack of support by Republicans on certain measures was "stunning."

Progressive Democrats have expressed frustration over changes made to the legislation, but top progressives are not signaling that they will jeopardize its passage in the House.

"I don't think that the changes the Senate made were good policy or good politics," Jayapal said. "However, they were relatively minor in the grand scheme of things, with the exception of course in the $15 minimum wage."

An estimated 11.4 million workers will lose their unemployment benefits between mid-March and mid-April unless Congress passes its next coronavirus relief package quickly, a recent study by The Century Foundation found.

Biden needs a way to begin bringing the country together. The past two administrations -- in different ways and for different reasons -- have left a door open for him to do so.

But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time. It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this. At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.

The law stretches far beyond Covid-19 relief. There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations. There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.

I’m worried about a world in which we spend borrowed money with abandon.

As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.

There was a premise through American history that if you worked hard you would earn economic security. That’s not as true for millennials and Gen-Z, or many other people across America.

The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.

The Covid-19 relief law that was just enacted is one of the most important pieces of legislation of our lifetimes. As Eric Levitz writes in New York magazine, the poorest fifth of households will see their income rise by 20 percent; a family of four with one working and one unemployed parent will receive $12,460 in benefits. Child poverty will be cut in half.

This has been one of the most quietly consequential weeks in recent American politics.

There’s a billion for national service programs. Black farmers will receive over $4 billion in what looks like a step toward reparations.

There’s a huge expansion of health insurance subsidies. Many of these changes, like the child tax credit, may well become permanent.

As Michael Hendrix of the Manhattan Institute notes, America spent $4.8 trillion in today’s dollars fighting World War II. Over the past year, America has spent over $5.5 trillion fighting the pandemic.

the legislation is widely popular. Three-quarters of Americans support the law, including 60 percent of Republicans,

Somehow low-key Joe Biden gets yawns when he promotes progressive policies that would generate howls if promoted by a President Sanders or a President Warren.

This moment is like 1981, the dawn of the Reagan Revolution, except in reverse. It’s not just that government is heading in a new direction, it’s that the whole paradigm of the role of government in American life is shifting

Biden is not causing these tectonic plates to shift, but he is riding them

Reaganism was the right response to the stagflation of the 1970s, but Bidenism is a sensible response to a very different set of economic problems.

These realities have created a different emotional climate that the pandemic has magnified — a climate of insecurity and precarity. These realities have also produced an intellectual revolution.

It was assumed, even only a decade ago, that the Fed could not just print money with abandon. It was assumed that the government could not wrack up huge debt without spurring inflation and crippling debt payment costs. Both of these concerns have been thrown out the window by large numbers of thinkers

We are now experiencing monetary and fiscal policies that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. This is like the moment when the G.O.P. abandoned fiscal conservatism for the go-go excitement of supply-side economics

The role of government is being redefined. There is now an assumption that government should step in to reduce economic insecurity and inequality.

This is the Transfer State: government redistributing massive amounts of money by cutting checks to people, and having faith that they spend it in the right ways.

With the wind at their backs, Democrats are concluding that Biden’s decision to eschew bipartisanship to pass a relief package is better than Barack Obama’s attempts to attract it

Republicans have learned that in this new era it’s foolish to fight Democrats on redistribution policy, but they can win elections by fighting culture wars.

But income inequality, widespread child poverty and economic precarity are the problems of our time

It’s worth taking a risk to tackle all this.

At first Biden seemed like the third chapter of the Clinton/Obama center-left era. But this is something new.

“The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.

The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.

Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.

Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden.

And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.

“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,”

It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.

Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.

If the emergency theory seems despairing, the moderate theory seems like it could benefit from a little more strategic thinking, especially about what kind of legislation would prevent some future subversion of the vote. (A reform to the bafflingly complex Electoral Count Act of 1887 seems like a place to start.)

This is the point when I’m supposed to tell you which of these three approaches will actually Stop Trump and which will ignominiously fail. But the frustrating truth is that as adaptations to the unprecedented weirdness of the Trump phenomenon, all three attitudes — maximalist, moderate and deliberately inactive — seem somewhat reasonable.

"I am more impressed with Joe Biden than I ever thought I could be in the last few months,"

"In contrast to his immediate predecessor and President Obama, the Biden team's policy rollouts have been about as smooth, methodical and drama-free as you could expect, particularly given the polarized nature of our politics,"

"The Biden team," Jones added, "is effectively taking advantage of D.C.'s Trump hangover by just engaging in straightforward communications tactics."

"It reinforces the fact that governing actually does take experience and does take knowledge,

Biden clearly wants to do big things. On Wednesday, he made a case for a grand vision when it came to infrastructure. He drew on the past but looked to the future, and he swatted down GOP concerns about the size of the plan and criticism that he should focus on "traditional infrastructure" like roads, highways and bridges.

"We are America," the president said. "We don't just fix for today, we build for tomorrow

Biden has been acutely aware of attempting to establish his place in history, even though he's been in office fewer than 100 days. Last month, in fact, the 78-year-old met with historians at the White House. Biden wants to be a bridge to the transformation of the country — and this infrastructure proposal is clearly a big part of that.

"He sees this as an opportunity to deliver massive change, the literal infrastructure of the country," said Gurwin Ahuja, who worked in the Obama administration and was an early supporter of Biden's and worked on his campaign. "His general approach of not being distracted by the day to day is why he is president. It is the singular reason he was able to defeat so many candidates when he was running in the Democratic primary."

"It's the return of traditional politics in a way that neither Trump nor Obama were willing to do," Simmons said, noting that "the Obama people did really good things. I think that they did not sell them very well."

"It's a Kennedy and Johnson-type dynamic,"

"Lyndon Johnson was phenomenal at working Congress, because that's what he did. President Obama was phenomenal at inspiring the public, as did Kennedy."

"He's not giving up on bipartisanship," she noted, "but he is living in a cold and cruel reality. ... These are things Biden has learned the hard way and taken to heart."

Biden seems very aware of that need to show competence — and results. "We're at an inflection point in American democracy," Biden said Wednesday. "This is a moment where we prove whether or not democracy can deliver." And whether or not he can, too.

This has transformed policy design: These are now negotiations among Democrats, done with the intention of finding policies popular enough that Republican voters will back them, even if Republican politicians will not

iden still talks like he believes bipartisanship is possible in Congress, but his administration has put the onus on Republicans to prove it, and to do so on the administration’s terms. That, more than any other single factor, has unleashed Democrats’ legislative ambitions.

in general, the younger generation has sharply different views on the role of government, the worth of markets and the risks worth taking seriously.

the new generation of staff members see the world very differently. “There has been a lot more work done to try to understand what the roots of economic inequality are over the course of the last decade, and openness to thinking about power and power dynamics,

“The next generation of the economics profession is rebelling against its predecessors by being all about inequality in the same way that my generation rebelled against its predecessors by being all about incentives, and this is a good thing,” said Larry Summers,

Multiple economists, both inside and outside the Biden administration, told me that this is an administration in which economists and financiers are simply far less influential than they were in past administrations.

economists are one of many voices at the table, not the dominant voices. This partly reflects Biden himself: he’s less academically minded, and more naturally skeptical of the way economists view the world and human behavior, than either Obama or Clinton. But it goes deeper than tha

The backdrop for this administration is the failures of the past generation of economic advice. Fifteen years of financial crises, yawning inequality and repeated debt panics that never showed up in interest rates have taken the shine off economic expertise

But the core of this story is climate. “Many mainstream economists, even in the 1980s, recognized that the market wouldn’t cover everyone’s needs so you’d need some modest amount of public support to correct for that moderate market failure,” Felicia Wong, the president of the Roosevelt Institute, said. “But they never envisioned the climate crisis. This is not a failure of the market at the margins. This is the market incentivizing destruction.”

the scale of the climate disaster, and the speed at which it must be addressed, simply demands a different role for the government. “If you think across the big systems in our country — the transportation system being one, the power and energy system being another — in order to actually solve climate change, we’re going to have to transform those systems,”

Biden and his team see this as fundamentally a political problem. They view the idea that a carbon tax is the essential answer to the problem of climate change as being so divorced from political reality as to be actively dangerous.

it’s not just a messaging and narrative imperative,” he told me. “It has to be that Americans see and experience that the investments in building out a more resilient power grid actually improve their lives and create job opportunities for them, or their neighbors.”

Even beyond climate, political risks weigh more heavily on the Biden administration than they did on past administrations. This is another lesson learned from the Obama years

Democrats lost the House in 2010, effectively ending Obama’s legislative agenda, and then they lost the Senate in 2014, and then Donald Trump won the White House in 2016, and then Democrats lost the Supreme Court for a generation.

Many who served under Obama, and who now serve under Biden, believe that they were so focused on economic risks that they missed the political risks — and you can’t make good economic policy if you lose political power

Biden is a politician, in the truest sense of the word. Biden sees his role, in part, as sensing what the country wants, intuiting what people will and won’t accept, and then working within those boundaries.

In America, that’s often treated as a dirty business. We like the aesthetics of conviction, we believe leaders should follow their own counsel, we use “politician” as an epithet.

But Biden’s more traditional understanding of the politician’s job has given him the flexibility to change alongside the country

Stagnating wages and a warming world and Hurricane Katrina and a pandemic virus proved that there were scarier words in the English language than “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it

He’s emphasizing the irresponsibility of allowing social and economic problems to fester, as opposed to the irresponsibility of spending money on social and economic problems. His administration is defined by the fear that the government isn’t doing enough, not that it’s doing too much.

“Especially at those moments when this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African-American community stood up again for me,” Mr. Biden said. “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”

Many also pushed back against the singular focus on racial representation that has dominated debates over Mr. Biden’s transition team and cabinet picks. Having a cabinet that reflects the racial diversity of America is good, they said. But they added that Mr. Biden’s legacy on race would be judged on his willingness to pursue policy changes that address systemic racism — a standard he has set for himself.

Mr. Biden’s selection of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, the first Black woman on a major party ticket, was — with the campaign’s encouragement — taken as a symbolic affirmation of these commitments. Former President Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president, had to assure white America he would be a president for all races. But Mr. Biden repeatedly asserted that Black communities would get special attention in his administration.

Some Black leaders who have met with Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris during the transition have been frustrated by this sentiment, according to several people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Biden, the leader of the Democratic Party, is one of the few Democrats left who believes that the Republicans who reflexively opposed Mr. Obama’s every action and have been slow to acknowledge Mr. Biden’s legitimacy are simply an aberration.

“He can’t get stuck on healing hearts,” said Shakeima Chatman, 46, a real estate agent. “But he can institute policies and regulation.”What gave them hope: that Mr. Biden was comfortable among Black voters on the campaign trail and the loyalty he showed to Mr. Obama as his vice president.What worried them: that he favorably invoked segregationists in the name of bipartisanship, that he said Black people who did not support him “ain’t Black,” and that he told wealthy donors at a fund-raiser that “nothing would fundamentally change” if he was elected.For Black communities, it must.“Policies created these disparities,” said Cleo Scott Brown, who is 66. “Policy has to fix it.”

The Black/white ratio of high school completion improved dramatically between the 1940s and the early 1970s, after which it slowed, never reaching parity.

Understanding how and why not only reveals why America is so fractured today, but illuminates the path forward, toward a more perfect union.

In measure after measure, positive change for Black Americans was actually faster in the decades before the civil rights revolution than in the decades after

The life expectancy gap between Black and white Americans narrowed most rapidly between about 1905 and 1947, after which the rate of improvement was much more modest

The racial gap in homeownership steadily narrowed between 1900 and 1970, then stagnated, then reversed

Racial integration in K-12 education at the national level began much earlier than is often believed

It accelerated sharply in the wake of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education. But this trend leveled off in the early 1970s, followed by a modest trend toward resegregation.

Income by race converged at the greatest rate between 1940 and 1970.

However, as of 2018, Black/white income disparities were almost exactly the same as they were in 1968

Black Americans on the whole have experienced flat or downward mobility in recent decades.

What’s more, after the passage of civil rights legislation, those trends toward racial parity slowed, stopped and even reversed.

Long-run data on national trends in voting by race is patchy, but the South saw a dramatic increase in Black voter registration between 1940 and 1970, followed by decline and stagnation

nearly all of the gains toward equality with white voter turnout occurred between 1952 and 1964, before the Voting Rights Act passed, then almost entirely halted for the rest of the century.

These data reveal a too-slow but unmistakable climb toward racial parity throughout most of the century that begins to flatline around 1970 — a picture quite unlike the hockey stick of historical shorthand.

It was Black Americans’ undaunted faith in the promise of the American “we,” and their willingness to claim their place in it, against all odds, that won them progress between the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s and the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s. Collectively, these migrants and their children and grandchildren steadily narrowed the Black-white gap over those years.

Some six decades later all of those upward trends reversed, setting the United States on a downward course that has brought us to the multifaceted national crisis in which we find ourselves today, which bears a remarkable resemblance to the Gilded Age

Why was the last third of the 20th century characterized by a marked deceleration of progress, and in some cases even a reversal?

We have two answers to these questions.

Substantial progress toward white support for Black equality was made in the first half of the 20th century

The first is simple and familiar: White backlash

when push came to shove, many white Americans were reluctant to live up to those principles. Although clear majorities supported the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a national poll conducted shortly after its passage showed that 68 percent of Americans wanted moderation in its enforcement. In fact, many felt that the Johnson administration was moving too fast in implementing integration.

Lyndon B. Johnson’s rejection, in 1968, of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations of sweeping reforms to address racial inequality suggested that his fine-tuned political sensitivity had detected a sea change in white attitudes in the year since he — more than any previous president — had led the project of racial redress

as the century turned and the Gilded Age gave way to the Progressive Era, America experienced a remarkable moment of inflection that set the nation on an entirely new trajectory. A diverse group of reformers grabbed the reins of history and set a course toward greater economic equality, political bipartisanship, social cohesion and cultural communitarianism.

But if Black Americans’ advance toward parity with whites in many dimensions had been underway for decades before the Civil Rights revolution, why then, when the dam of legal exclusion finally broke, didn’t those trends accelerate toward full equality?

These interconnected phenomena can be summarized in a single meta-trend that we have come to call the “I-we-I” curve: An inverted U charting America’s gradual climb from self-centeredness to a sense of shared values, followed by a steep descent back into egoism over the next half century

The moment America took its foot off the gas in rectifying racial inequalities largely coincides with the moment America’s “we” decades gave way to the era of “I.”

hopes went unrealized as the whole nation shifted toward a less egalitarian ideal.

A central feature of America’s “I” decades has been a shift away from shared responsibilities toward individual rights and a culture of narcissism.

Contemporary identity politics characterizes an era that could well be described as a “War of the ‘We’s’.” This is a reality that predated the election of Donald Trump, though his presidency threw it into sharp relief.

It is difficult to say which came first — white backlash against racial realignment or the broader shift from “we” to “I.”

the fact that landmark civil rights legislation passed at the very peak of the I-we-I curve suggests that an expanding sense of “we” was a prerequisite for the dismantling of the color line. Without what the historian Bruce Schulman calls the “expansive, universalist vision” that America had been building toward in the preceding decades, it is hard to imagine that such watershed change — so long and so violently resisted — would have been possible.

By the late 1960s, though the work of widening was not nearly complete, America had come closer to an inclusive “we” than ever before. But just as that inclusion began to bear tangible fruit for Black Americans, much of that fruit began to die on the vine.

The lessons of America’s I-we-I century are thus twofold. First, we Americans have gotten ourselves out of a mess remarkably similar to the one we’re in now by rediscovering the spirit of community that has defined our nation from its inception

we” can be defined in more inclusive or exclusive terms. The “we” we were constructing in the first two-thirds of the last century was highly racialized, and thus contained the seeds of its own undoing. Any attempt we may make today to spark a new upswing must aim for a higher summit by being fully inclusive, fully egalitarian and genuinely accommodating of difference. Anything less will fall victim once again to its own internal inconsistencies.

One side of American politics considers the modern welfare state — a private-enterprise economy, but one in which society’s winners are taxed to pay for a social safety net — morally superior to the capitalism red in tooth and claw we had before the New Deal. It’s only right, this side believes, for the affluent to help the less fortunate.

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development. Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.

we have, for the most part, managed to agree on certain ground rules in the abortion controversy: it’s acceptable to express your opinion and to criticize the other side, but it’s not acceptable either to engage in violence or to encourage others to do so. What we need now is an extension of those ground rules to the wider national debate.

When people talk about partisan differences, they often seem to be implying that these differences are petty, matters that could be resolved with a bit of good will. But what we’re talking about here is a fundamental disagreement about the proper role of government.

Today’s G.O.P. sees much of what the modern federal government does as illegitimate; today’s Democratic Party does not

This deep divide in American political morality — for that’s what it amounts to — is a relatively recent development.

There’s no middle ground between these views. One side saw health reform, with its subsidized extension of coverage to the uninsured, as fulfilling a moral imperative: wealthy nations, it believed, have an obligation to provide all their citizens with essential care

The other side saw the same reform as a moral outrage, an assault on the right of Americans to spend their money as they choose.

We need to have leaders of both parties — or Mr. Obama alone if necessary — declare that both violence and any language hinting at the acceptability of violence are out of bounds. We all want reconciliation, but the road to that goal begins with an agreement that our differences will be settled by the rule of law.