For months now, President Biden’s ambitious economic and social justice reforms have been whittled down and whittled down again. Each time a major policy package is put together, with hopes that it can pass with only 51 Senate votes via the budget reconciliation process, it ultimately runs afoul of Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

Last week, desperate for concrete policy achievements to lay before voters before the midterm elections, the Democrats settled on a dramatically smaller package of reforms, centered around lowering pharmaceutical drug prices for Medicare consumers, that the two recalcitrant senators appear more willing to sign off on. Then, a few days later, on July 27, after months of obstruction, Senator Manchin announced that he will now support a scaled-down version of Build Back Better that would still include both hundreds of billions of dollars of climate change legislation investments and also the health care package that is near and dear to his heart. Provided that