This is one of those weeks when it feels like every single story is about Congress. Lawmakers are grappling with a government funding deadline, multiple infrastructure bill votes, a debt ceiling fight that shouldn’t be a fight at all, and more. If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering, “What the heck is going on?”
That’s why this coverage needs lots of “insider” beat reporting but lots of options for “outsiders” too. I’d humbly suggest that two types of stories could appear side by side on homepages: “Here’s the very latest on the infrastructure battle” next to “Why are lawmakers arguing over road construction at all?”
I liked the way John King set it up on “Inside Politics” Wednesday: “At issue? Well, just about everything,” he said. “The size of a giant Democratic spending plan; how that money is split up among a long list of Democratic policy goals; how to keep a promise to centrists to vote on a separate roads and bridges plan by Monday; and do that without infuriating progressives who insist both spending plans need to proceed at the same time.”
“So many moving parts…”
I asked CNN chief congressional correspondent Manu Raju: What’s the most challenging part about covering all of this legislative maneuvering? Here’s what he said:
“This is a highly complex and complicated story to cover. There are just so many moving parts in this negotiation, so many key players who have concerns both big and small — and so much uncertainty about what’s going to happen. There are private meetings and calls that are constantly happening. There are members walking through the Capitol whom you need to grab for the two minutes that they’re in the halls. So you have to be in the right place at the right time to stake someone out and hope they don’t take a different route. And with the rules in the Capitol, we can only grab members on camera in certain locations — making it trickier to calculate where to be in any given moment.”
There are multiple clashes happening at the same time, Raju pointed out: “Unlike the Affordable Care Act, which was another all-consuming debate to cover, that dealt with just one issue: health care. This debate over $5 trillion worth of legislation deals with every issue under the sun — not to mention an economic crisis waiting in the wings if the two sides can’t get a deal to hike the debt ceiling and avert a government shutdown. So there’s a fight within the Democratic Party over the Biden agenda — and a fight between the two parties over averting a catastrophe.”
“So many developments through the course of a day are happening at the exact same time in different wings of the Capitol — in both the House and the Senate — so we need to make a calculation about where to be at any given moment,” he added. “Because if you’re not reporting for every minute, you’re missing something.”
Raising the debt limit is about “reality”
Here’s how CNN’s Jake Tapper put it on Wednesday: “Republicans are refusing to vote to raise the limit on federal borrowing, also known as the debt ceiling, despite having done so under President Trump, and despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the debt was accrued before President Biden.”
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