Yuval Levin asks at National Review Online where congressional Democrats are heading with their policy agenda.
I think the Democrats are going to end up raising the debt ceiling on their own, in a stand-alone reconciliation bill they will push in parallel to their ongoing efforts to pass a massive social-spending reconciliation measure. They can do that alongside their ongoing work on the larger bill, though it will require revising the reconciliation instructions for the year. Section 304 of the 1974 law that created the current budget process allows for this, though it is no simple matter. Among other things, it would expose the Democrats to an extra round of votes on uncomfortable amendments (a so-called “vote-a-rama” in the Senate). And it will also take time. Back when I was a lowly House Budget Committee staffer, my boss used to say that complicated bicameral maneuvers like this would take “more than a week but less than a month.” That seems about right here. That means they do have time to do this, and claims to the contrary at this point are so much spin. But it also means they should start fairly soon.
The Democrats don’t want to do this, not only because they don’t want that extra round of votes but also because they believe it would require them to settle on an amount by which to raise the debt ceiling before they have come to any agreement among their party factions about how much to spend on the larger reconciliation and on what. …
… Second, Senate passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill has badly undermined the Democrats’ capacity to pursue their more partisan progressive agenda. That doesn’t mean it will doom that agenda, of course, but it has harmed it. Separating actual infrastructure spending from the more ambitious progressive agenda has intensified the divisions between moderate and progressive Democrats, and has set their interests squarely against one another. …