Last week’s enactment of the 2022 budget-reconciliation bill, also known as the Inflation Reduction Act, is being treated by many analysts as a major turning point in Joe Biden’s presidency. As recently as last month, when it looked like Congress might not pass reconciliation legislation this year, conventional wisdom in Washington suggested that Biden was a failing president who should even reconsider seeking a second term. But once the IRA unexpectedly secured sufficient support, Biden enjoyed an immediate reputational rebound as a master of legislative achievement; a few hyperbolic responses even compared him to Great Society-era Lyndon Johnson.
This wasn’t too surprising. Americans usually regard the president as the gravitational center around which the entire political universe revolves, responsible for almost everything — good and bad — that happens on his watch. But the events of the past few weeks demonstrate how much this view can distort the more complicated truth. What changed between July and August wasn’t Biden’s presidential acumen, but rather the behavior of a single key senator: Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
Despite the credit he received for its passage, Biden had little involvement in crafting the bill he happily signed into law last Tuesday. The policy areas addressed by the IRA reflected Manchin’s preferences more than those of the president or any other public official. It was Manchin who compelled Biden to settle for a bill much smaller in scope and cost than the White House originally favored, Manchin whose open skepticism earlier this summer had seemed to sink the prospects of reconciliation legislation passing at all, and Manchin (along with fellow moderate Kyrsten Sinema) who was responsible for many of the specific provisions included in the final product. He even forced a change in the bill’s name, pointedly abandoning a previous title that had echoed Biden’s “Build Back Better” campaign slogan in favor of a strategic rebranding.
