Day: September 29, 2021

Before she was elected to the Kansas state Senate and before she was elected governor, Laura Kelly needed a nudge to run. Both times she got it from a friend, neighbor and fellow rare woman in politics: Kathleen Sebelius, a former Kansas governor herself and secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration.

It was the whisper network at work. The not-so-secret support system has put thousands of women in power at every level of government, slowly changing the face of a profession once the sole domain of men. But for all its successes — women now account for a third of state lawmakers, more than a quarter of the U.S. House of Representatives and nearly as much of the Senate — women in many states have yet to shatter the highest glass ceiling: the governorships.

Today, just nine women hold the title, with power split among six Democrats and three Republicans. Four of those women took over the role by succession, most recently in New York, where Kathy Hochul became the state’s first female governor in August after Andrew Cuomo resigned over sexual harassment allegations.

Now there’s growing urgency among leaders in both major parties around bolstering the chances of women running in the 2022 gubernatorial elections, when voters in 36 states will pick their next state executive. The nation could be left with fewer female governors if vulnerable Democratic women don’t hang onto their seats and Republicans fail to pick up power in multiple states where women are expected to be on the ballot.

Whatever happens hinges on whether both parties follow through on their pledges to recruit more women to run for statewide office — and whether that whisper network can give the final nudge.

“Women who decide to run have to work very hard at convincing people that they are tough enough to deal with the complexities of the job and balance that out with not appearing to be too aggressive, because that tends to turn people off too,” Kelly, a Democrat, said in an interview. “It’s a real balancing act and not an easy one. You just don’t have a whole lot of people out there who want to put themselves in that position.”

The struggle across parties for women to rise to the top within states speaks to the inherent bias against women that persists in politics. Research shows that women have to be more likeable, raise more money and generally work harder than their male counterparts in order to win. That’s why both the Democratic and Republican parties have vowed to invest more money and resources into supporting women gunning for governor in 2022.

But their strategies differ. Democrats tend to be more explicit with their dollars and messaging about the importance of electing women while Republicans take a more subtle approach that’s still similarly focused on building a pipeline of qualified women holding federal and state-level positions.

Some of the most vulnerable Democratic governors also happen to be women. Kelly is one of them. Republicans have flagged Kansas, where nearly two thirds of voters voted Republican in the 2020 presidential race, as a pickup opportunity and she’s bracing for a bruising reelection fight.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and Maine Gov. Janet Mills also face formidable challengers and tough reelection odds. And Oregon Gov. Kate Brown is term limited, potentially reducing the tally for the Democratic Party by at least one.

That’s why the Democratic Governors Association is pouring more dollars into a fund that supports female Democratic gubernatorial candidates. This year, the Women Governors Fund has a fundraising goal of $5 million — five times what it raised at its inception in 2018 — and will be overseen by Brown and New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham. The two will travel the country and lead fundraisers for the fund.

But the fund has limits. It can only be used to support women who make it out of their primaries, and $5 million doesn’t go very far in the campaign finance world, especially as it gets more expensive to run with every cycle. The cost of the 2018 Oregon governor’s race that Brown won in 2018, for example, exceeded $37 million, approximately double the previous record of $18 million set in 2010 by Democrat John Kitzhaber and Republican Chris Dudley.

“We have several extremely talented, very hardworking female incumbents that we need to reelect,” Brown, who has served as Oregon’s governor since 2015, said in an interview. “I’m hoping that we will be able to increase our numbers.”

Brown, who is the second woman to serve as Oregon’s governor, said she’s had multiple conversations with women mulling runs, like Jennifer McClellan, who lost this year’s Virginia primary to former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, and Nellie Gorbea, who is running for governor in Rhode Island.

When she was a caucus leader in the Oregon Legislature, Brown said, “Women used to say to me, ‘I’m not qualified, I’ve got too much on my plate.’ And men just wake up and run for Congress without any preparedness. I say that to be funny, but there is some level of truth to that.”

There have long been institutional barriers that have held women back in politics. But politicians and strategists contend part of the reason why women remain so underrepresented in governor’s mansions is that they are more likely to see themselves fitting into state or federal legislatures — a job that requires cooperation and consensus — rather than as a top executive acting unilaterally.

A woman, of course, has never been elected president. And that mindset may also be reflected by the paltry number of female Fortune 500 CEOs: Just 8.1 percent, or 41 out of the 500 biggest businesses are run by women, and that’s a record high.

Forty-four women have served as governors in the U.S., according to data from the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University. Thirty were first elected in their own right; three replaced their husbands and 11 became governor by constitutional succession, six of whom then later won full terms. Nineteen states have never had a woman governor.

Many women became governors because of extenuating circumstances rather than outright winning, like Hochul in New York.

There’s also a long history of women stepping into the role to fill in for their deceased husbands. The first woman governor was Nellie Tayloe Ross, a Democrat from Wyoming, who won a special election to replace her husband in 1925. Ross remains the only woman to ever serve as governor of Wyoming.

It wasn’t until 1975 that a woman was elected governor: Ella Grasso, a Democrat from Connecticut.

The record number of women serving simultaneously is nine, and was first achieved in 2004 and again this year. Of the current governors, seven are white women. Neither a Black woman nor a Native American woman has ever been elected governor.

Recently, there’s been an uptick in women being elected to statewide office, which Democratic groups credit to years of work recruiting and supporting women interested in politics. Typically, women are far more likely to run as Democrats than as Republicans.

“It was not just a flash in the pan, we see that as a sea change and a moment we can build upon,” said Jessica Mackler, vice president of federal and gubernatorial campaigns at EMILY’s List, which works to elect women who support abortion rights. EMILY’s List is looking toward 2022 by “continuing to invest in the rising stars that will be the candidates for governor and other offices.”

She added that they’re excited about opportunities in Arizona, a state where multiple women on both sides of the aisle have declared gubernatorial runs, and Georgia, where Stacey Abrams may make a second attempt after losing by 1.4 percentage points in 2018.

Republican operatives say they’re equally serious about recruiting women for office as Democrats. And 2020 was a banner year for the party: Two-thirds of the 27 newly elected female House members were Republicans.

Republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders is widely expected to take the Arkansas governorship next year. And the stakes are high in Arizona, where several Republican women have declared runs, including state Treasurer Kimberly Yee, Secretary of the Arizona Board of Regents Karrin Taylor Robson and former TV anchor Kari Lake. On the Democratic side, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs is mounting her own campaign.

There’s no pot of funds at the Republican Governors Association specifically earmarked for supporting women. But party leaders say they’re committed to building out the bench of female candidates.

The Republican State Leadership Committee, which works to elect Republicans to state offices, is putting a “concentrated effort” to working with caucuses and teams in states to recruit candidates and support their runs, with an emphasis on finding qualified women, said Kamilah Prince, director of recruitment and training for the RSLC. They have also partnered with groups such as the Women’s Public Leadership Network to hold workshops for female politicians to help them through challenges that may hold them back from public office, such as balancing child care needs with their careers.

Fifty-four percent of women candidates supported by the RSLC were successful in 2020. And the group knows that recruiting and training female candidates for down ballot races could lead to more female GOP governors in the future: Ten of 27 current Republican governors previously served as lieutenant governors. Today, there are six female Republican lieutenant governors.

Olivia Perez-Cubas, vice president of communications for GOP group Winning for Women, pointed out that 11 of the 15 seats flipped by Republicans in the House in 2020 were Republican women.

“That’s proof that when we invest in strong, qualified female candidates, they win,” Perez-Cubas said. “As the number of Republican women in both state and federal offices increase, the bench for female governors will inevitably grow.”

In July, the CEO of the biotech giant Illumina flew to D.C., checked into a hotel room off M Street and tried to conduct a routine piece of business: Persuading the Federal Trade Commission to let his company buy a cancer startup.

But nobody from the FTC would meet with him.

In the Obama and Trump eras, a pilgrimage to Washington was a tried-and-true strategy for CEOs seeking to resolve antitrust logjams — often yielding a flurry of meetings between commissioners and companies like Google, T-Mobile and Apple. But as Illumina’s Francis deSouza learned, that was a different FTC.

Under new FTC Chair Lina Khan, the century-old regulatory agency long accustomed to blessing corporate mergers is veering back to its original trustbusting mission and becoming markedly less friendly to the businesses it regulates. The shift has inspired cheers from her fellow progressives while unsettling many GOP lawmakers, the agency’s two Republican commissioners and even some longtime FTC employees, according to interviews with more than 20 FTC employees, commission alumni and people on Capitol Hill.

The 32-year-old law professor’s most prominent target is the tech industry, whose biggest players swelled to behemoth size on the commission’s watch. Nearly a decade after the commission overruled its own attorneys and declined to file an antitrust suit against Google, Khan is trying to prove that the agency is capable of taking on the nation’s wealthiest companies, including in Silicon Valley.

Some executives from other industries, like deSouza, say they’re being caught in the crossfire.

“There is an anti-big-company, anti-tech sentiment,” deSouza said of the FTC’s refusal to meet with him. “We’re the baby in the bathwater.”

Khan: ‘We can deliver’

President Joe Biden’s decision to elevate Khan as the FTC’s chair on June 15 stunned many in D.C. Those included some of the nearly two dozen Republican senators who had voted hours earlier to confirm the outspoken anti-monopolist, thinking she would be just one of the agency’s five commissioners.

The choice elated progressives who say the FTC, an antitrust and consumer agency created during Woodrow Wilson’s administration, has lost its antitrust firepower since the Reagan era.

Khan, a self-described FTC history nerd, has been outspoken in criticizing the agency. For decades, she told Congress this month, commissioners of both parties had pursued a philosophy that “recommended enforcers err on the side of inaction, on the assumption that monopoly power would be disciplined by the free market.”

Those days are over, she said in a memo to her employees last week that laid out her priorities: “American consumers, workers, and honest businesses depend on the Commission to champion a fair and thriving economy for all, and I am confident that we can deliver.” She said her top priority is taking on a massive wave of proposed mergers and other forms of “rampant consolidation.”

The other changes that Khan has pushed target a wide range of corporate behavior, from employee non-compete agreements to warranties that prevent customers from repairing their own electronic devices. Some steps the FTC has approved in 3-2 party-line votes have also enhanced Khan’s own authority. For instance, letting her approve antitrust subpoenas without agreement from the other commissioners.

“With only a few months on the job, Lina Khan has proven she is committed to strengthening competition policy and taking on monopolies,” said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel. Klobuchar is drafting legislation that could give the FTC more resources to take on anti-competitive behavior.

But GOP critics like Utah Sen. Mike Lee accuse Khan of mounting a “progressive putsch.” Others, including the agency’s two Republican commissioners, say she is risking a repeat of the 1970s when a congressional backlash against alleged FTC overreach hobbled the commission’s authority.

“I am very concerned about giving the agency more power under current leadership,” Republican Commissioner Christine Wilson told the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing Tuesday. Under Khan, she said, “decades of tradition have been thrown out the window to the detriment of our decision making and consumers.”

Facebook and Amazon have demanded — unsuccessfully — that Khan abstain from decisions on their companies, citing her history of work and statements criticizing tech monopolies. The Wall Street Journal has published at least six editorials and four op-eds on Khan since mid-June, including one editorial that dismissed her as “a 32-year-old academic who has no experience running anything.”

“American business should get ready. The Khan FTC is coming after you,” the July opinion piece said.

She is also taking fire from sources closer to home. Even some people in the Biden administration grumbled this month after POLITICO reported that Khan’s newly appointed top antitrust adviser, Shaoul Sussman, had predicted to an Israeli newspaper last spring that Congress will break up Google and Facebook.

Some of the FTC’s 1,100 employees, meanwhile, complain that Khan has largely walled herself from rank-and-file staff and clamped down on decision-making, while limiting what the staff is allowed to say in public.

“She doesn’t care at all what we think,” one longtime staffer said in an interview, requesting anonymity to speak openly about their boss. The person added that during a Zoom meet-and-greet with staff in August, Khan read from a prepared statement and only took one or two questions. “There’s just no respect there.”

The FTC declined a request to interview Khan. The new chair hasn’t done any media interviews — except for a roundtable with reporters in July after her first congressional appearance — nor spoken publicly aside from the commission’s three open meetings so far. After the agency initially said Khan would give her maiden speech at a prominent international antitrust conference that begins Wednesday at Fordham University in New York, the FTC backpedaled and said she would attend the conference to meet with European competition heads but wouldn’t be speaking.

At the same time, Khan has sought to tamp down accusations that she’s politicizing a traditionally bipartisan agency. In her letters to lawmakers in early September, she noted that several of the initiatives she has led, such as investigating and suing big tech platforms like Facebook, “were also priorities identified by the Trump administration.”

Khan’s aim is to revive the FTC’s original role as a zealous enforcer, said Matt Stoller, a friend and former colleague of Khan’s at the antimonopoly group Open Markets. That’s an FTC people haven’t seen in a while, he said.

In the 1980s and ‘90s, FTC chairs “defanged the commission, put economists in charge and made it an agent of monopolists,” said Stoller, now director of research at the anti-monopoly group American Economic Liberties Project. “The Big Tech giants are all creations of those shifts. What Lina is doing is going back to the pre-1980s model.”

‘They want to do everything’

The FTC’s internal changes began soon after Khan moved in.

One was a blanket moratorium on public engagements by FTC employees, causing scheduling headaches for several American Bar Association conferences where the staffers had been slated to speak. That order, still in place three months later, also barred the FTC’s economists from publishing their research.

Such a temporary pause on outside communications isn’t unusual when the FTC gets a new chair, allowing the agency to adjust to the new boss’ priorities. But Khan’s chief of staff, Jen Howard, caused internal grumbling by ordering the employees to withdraw even from already-approved engagements. Her rationale was that the agency is too busy.

Khan has also declined to allow staff attorneys to brief her on cases, instead requiring their division managers to attend — a move that some staffers have perceived as a snub. Khan’s predecessor, Trump-nominated Republican Joe Simons, had a reputation for being especially deferential to the staff, making Khan’s reversals appear particularly abrupt.

And for all the talk of bold action, Khan has been slow to hire her own staff, bringing in only one adviser — Sussman — and a paralegal plus naming new competition and consumer protection chiefs so far. That shortage of trusted employees, coupled with what former colleagues describe as Khan’s eagerness to delve into the weeds of cases, has led to slow action on rulemakings she has identified as a priority for the agency.

“They don’t have enough people to run the trains,” a former FTC employee said. “They want to do everything but don’t have the personnel and they don’t trust anybody else to do anything.”

Change has always come slowly at the FTC, in part because of the staff’s longevity and the high turnover of their politically appointed bosses. Longtime staffers have a term for that, former FTC chief technologist Ashkan Soltani said: They call themselves the “Weebies,” as in “we will be here after you go.”

Soltani recalled that he got significant pushback from the staff in 2014, when he set out to create a dedicated group of technology experts within the agency to consult on cases.

“There is a view among some of the staff at the agency that the commissioners and chief technologists come and go, but the staff has been there throughout,” Soltani said. “And for better or worse they are the ones who make the calls as to what the agency does.”

Some top staffers are actively looking to leave the agency, three former FTC staffers who have heard from job-seeking colleagues said — a trend some at the agency believe is being encouraged by companies under investigation and their law firms. Such a brain drain would worsen FTC’s difficulties: It’s already hemorrhaging money, a problem it blames on its record amounts of litigation, and has about 600 fewer staffers than it did in 1979.

Many complaints about Khan from both inside and outside the building revolve around her age — she’s the youngest chair in the agency’s history — and the fact that she has never practiced law. Her supporters see that as a coded attack on her as a young Asian American woman (Khan is of Pakistani descent).

In fact, she has spent years as an influential figure in the tech antitrust world, starting with a Yale Law Journal article that she wrote as a student in 2017 that spawned a broader rethinking of how regulators should approach dominant tech companies like Amazon.

She later served as a House Judiciary Committee aide during the panel’s 16-month antitrust probe of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook. Together with her fellow Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu — now a member of Biden’s National Economic Council — she has led a legal movement that critics label “hipster antitrust,” which argues that the government should challenge corporate power to prevent any company from exerting too much economic or political control.

Khan’s allies say she is facing a backlash from a business establishment that became accustomed to getting its way at the agency.

“The antitrust bar that represents the defense side has always felt an entitlement to the chair of the FTC, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican,” said Ed Mierzwinski, who oversees the nonprofit advocacy group U.S. PIRG’s federal consumer program and has worked with the FTC since the 1980s. “It’s great to see the president pick someone outside Big Law.”

Republicans: FTC abandoning its traditions

Khan is also getting public complaints from Wilson and fellow Republican Commissioner Noah Phillips, who have voted no on nearly all the votes she has led as chair.

Those included the decision in August to file a new antitrust suit against Facebook, replacing a Trump-era lawsuit that a federal judge had tossed out.

Khan and her fellow Democrats have also repealed an Obama-era policy statement that had limited the commission’s ability to challenge anti-competitive behavior. In mid-September, they rescinded Trump-era guidelines that Democrats called overly favorable to so-called vertical mergers, which unite companies in the same industry that aren’t direct competitors. (Think AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner, or Amazon’s proposal to buy MGM Studios.)

Republicans fear that Khan is setting the stage for an even more momentous change — a repudiation of a decades-old antitrust doctrine, beloved by economists and federal judges, that looks to rising consumer prices as the yardstick for whether a market lacks competition.

Khan and other critics of this “consumer welfare” standard call it ill-suited to the online age, when companies like Facebook and Google earn enormous fortunes while offering products for free or low cost. (Amazon, Khan wrote in her 2017 law review article, “has evaded government scrutiny in part through fervently devoting its business strategy and rhetoric to reducing prices for consumers.”) But the doctrine’s defenders say shredding it would allow massive government intervention in the economy.

Beyond losing on all these votes, the FTC Republicans say they’ve started feeling a chill on the information they receive from the agency’s staff.

“We have lost a window into what staff is doing,” Wilson said at a July congressional hearing, accusing Khan of jettisoning “long-standing norms and procedures.”

Wilson went even further in September, complaining on Twitter that she’d been unable to find out what questions the FTC staff had sent to some companies seeking merger approvals. Instead, she said, she asked the companies themselves for copies.

“So much for a new era of transparency at the @FTC,” Wilson tweeted.

Howard, Khan’s chief of staff, responded on Twitter with an eyeroll emoji. But on Tuesday, the FTC announced new merger review procedures that include ensuring that such information requests are “securely accessible to all Commissioners.”

As chair, Khan gets to fill key positions at the agency with staffers who report to her directly. Some chairs have interpreted the agency’s chain of command loosely, allowing any commissioner to request briefings on case updates. Others have banned staff from providing information to the minority party’s commissioners without explicit approval.

In response to Wilson’s complaints, the agency pointed to testimony by Democratic Commissioner Rohit Chopra that he routinely received less information on ongoing cases while he was a minority commissioner during the Trump years than he does now with Democrats in charge.

Course correction?

The FTC’s risk aversion can be traced to a Carter-era dust-up known as “Kidvid,” in which the agency sparked a political backlash by seeking to create rules for television advertising directed at children. Under pressure from advertisers and business groups, Congress significantly curtailed the FTC’s rulemaking authority.

With the agency’s powers and budget slashed, then-President Ronald Reagan’s FTC chair — the first economist, rather than lawyer, to helm the agency — greatly expanded the role of economics in the commission’s work and moved toward industry self-regulation.

To this day, agency staffers and alumni have “deeply, deeply personal” feelings about Kidvid and its aftermath, said Stoller — Khan’s former colleague — which helps explain some of the visceral reactions to the new chair.

“It’s like the FTC was born again at that moment,” Stoller said. “Everything after was moral and correct and everything before was crazy and radical.”

DeSouza, the Illumina CEO, argued that the FTC is overcorrecting to make up for its past mistakes with the tech industry, such as opting not to challenge Facebook’s $1 billion purchase of Instagram in 2012. The FTC’s suit against Facebook now seeks to unwind that deal.

The FTC is also being aggressive in challenging llumina’s attempt to buy Grail, a startup it had spun off in 2015. Illumina controls roughly 70 percent of the market for DNA sequencing technology, while Grail has developed a blood test to detect 50 types of early-stage cancer.

“I’ve been asked whether this is like Facebook-Instagram,” deSouza said in an interview in a conference room at the Jefferson Hotel in Washington. “This isn’t like that.”

The FTC confirmed to POLITICO that deSouza’s hoped-for meetings with the agency never happened, but declined to comment on why.

But Khan’s admirers say the agency is finally back on the right track.

“The FTC is pushing as hard as they can right now, which is what we have needed for so long,” said Charlotte Slaiman, competition policy director for the advocacy group Public Knowledge, during POLITICO’s Tech Summit this month. She added: “I expect great things from the FTC.”

Julia Arciga contributed to this report.

The Senate is expected to vote as early as Wednesday on a revamped spending bill that would forestall a government shutdown at the end of the week after Democrats ditched action on the debt limit amid staunch Republican resistance.

The standalone continuing resolution comes after Senate Republicans refused to fast-track a package on Tuesday that pairs government funding with suspension of the debt ceiling through the midterms next year. Several GOP senators have said they will support a bill to prevent a shutdown and deliver disaster aid to storm-battered states, as long as the package does not lift the cap on how much the government can borrow.

Senate leaders circulated the legislation on Tuesday night, launching an expedited process to check for last-minute opposition. The House could also take up the stopgap spending bill on Wednesday, once it clears the upper chamber. The bill would fund the government through Dec. 3, according to a copy obtained by POLITICO.

If the House and Senate pass the spending bill before midnight on Thursday, Congress would stave off the more immediate crisis of a federal funding lapse. But the move pushes off action to prevent the Treasury Department from defaulting on its loans — a breaking point the nation could reach in less than three weeks.

While Senate Democrats have insisted on a bipartisan vote to avert the debt cliff, they are not willing to risk a government shutdown over the issue.

“I have no doubt that Democrats aren’t going to let the government shut down, and we’re not defaulting on the debt,” said Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.). “Even if Republicans want to flirt with it, we don’t.”

The revised funding package does not include extra money for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system. Israel has requested, and the Biden administration backs, $1 billion to replenish hundreds of Iron Dome interceptors that knocked down rockets fired from Gaza in a standoff between Israel and Hamas this spring.

House Democrats initially included the Iron Dome funding in the stopgap they passed last week, but the money was stripped amid progressive resistance.

Senate Minority Whip John Thune said Republicans may want to add back the money for Israel’s missile defense system in the short-term funding bill.

“So we’ll see what they agree to and what comes back on the hotline,” he said. “Stripping out the debt ceiling obviously makes this much easier.”

House Appropriations Chair Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) said she was waiting on Senate Democratic leaders to decide next steps on avoiding a lapse in federal cash after GOP senators blocked the House-passed continuing resolution and debt limit suspension on Monday night.

“We will see what the Senate does,” DeLauro said after the Senate’s failed vote. “The goal is not to shut the government down. We can’t shut the government down. So we’ll see where the Senate goes and what our direction is from there.”

The last-minute continuing resolution comes as the Biden administration has warned federal agencies to brush up on their contingency plans in case federal funds dry up. The annual appropriations process has taken a backseat this year as Democrats have sought to pass trillions of dollars for policy priorities without GOP votes and both parties push to send a bipartisan infrastructure deal to the president’s desk.

House Democrats have passed a number of their annual spending bills along party lines, but Senate appropriations action has remained at a standstill. Republican appropriators in the upper chamber want to cement a bipartisan agreement on overall funding levels for the military and non-defense programs before marking up individual spending bills.

Any government funding deal for the new fiscal year that begins on Oct. 1 will require bicameral, bipartisan agreement, including support from at least 10 Republican senators.

Before resorting to the easier route for preventing a shutdown this week, Democratic leaders discussed with President Joe Biden their options for raising the debt limit through the same budget reconciliation process they are using to pass a multitrillion-dollar social spending bill without GOP votes.

Top Democrats have insisted, however, that they are not pursuing the budget maneuver to handle the debt limit. Such a process could take weeks, putting Democrats in uncharted territory on a host of procedural issues the Senate parliamentarian would have to weigh.

Jennifer Scholtes and Connor O’Brien contributed to this report.

Progressive leaders on Tuesday declared that a majority of their 100-member caucus still plans to tank President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill this week without a firm commitment that party leaders can finish their broader social spending package.

And now they have a key ally across the Capitol: Sen. Bernie Sanders.

“I hope that if there is no agreement here in the Senate, we’ve got to maintain the dual track and it should be defeated,” Sanders (I-Vt.) said Tuesday, following up his remarks with tweets urging House progressives to vote against the infrastructure bill sans a broader agreement.

Liberal Democrats in the House are vowing to oppose the vote Thursday without key details about what the Senate’s most vocal centrists will support — information that was still not immediately anticipated after Biden’s high-stakes meetings with both Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona on Tuesday.

With just two days left for Speaker Nancy Pelosi to lock down commitments on the infrastructure bill, Democratic leaders remain far short of the votes needed for passage. And Manchin and Sinema have yet to say what maximum price tag they would support for the spending bill, the one thing top Democrats think could help unlock progressive support for the infrastructure bill.

“They need to tell us what they don’t agree with. And we need to be able to actually negotiate it,” said Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.).

Sanders’ comments cap off a day of frenetic activity in the Capitol that revealed deep divisions among key Democrats in the two chambers, just as party leaders are struggling to solve a host of critical issues, from finding enough votes for Biden’s two most important domestic bills to settling how to fund the government and avoid default.

And Democratic leaders’ problems don’t just lie with progressives.

While Sinema has been privately engaging with a group of House lawmakers — including Jayapal — Manchin has been largely mum about his support for the party’s sprawling bill with a price tag of up to $3.5 trillion. The public silence from both has been infuriating House Democrats in all corners of the caucus.

“This is a problem. This is not a negotiation. This is bickering over process,” said Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who was one of several moderates in a closed-door meeting of the New Democrat Coalition that griped that Senate centrists are still refusing party leaders’ demands for a topline number.

While Himes said he would not oppose the Senate infrastructure bill on Thursday, he said: “I honestly don’t blame the progressives for worrying that Manchin’s number is zero. … Right now, one side has put some cards on the table, and the other side hasn’t put any.”

Progressives in the caucus say they need to see both Manchin and Sinema spell out what they’re willing to support — both for the price tag and key policy elements — in a formalized way. Without that, Jayapal told reporters she expects the vote on Thursday will need to be delayed once again because of liberal opposition.

To help offset that potential progressive rebellion, a pair of key senators who helped craft the Senate infrastructure compromise — Sinema and GOP Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio — have begun whipping some House lawmakers, according to people familiar with the discussions.

Meanwhile, Pelosi and her leadership team, while not formally whipping, are continuing to work all corners of the caucus as the hours tick down to the critical vote Thursday.

Walking into the House chamber on Tuesday, Pelosi largely brushed off Sanders’ directive to progressives.

“Everybody has to do what they have to do and I respect that,” Pelosi said. “We’re doing our work.”

But it was clear that many House Democrats, including key leadership allies, remain deeply unhappy with the process so far, particularly after Pelosi officially decoupled the two domestic bills this week, reversing a monthslong vow to progressives to pass infrastructure and the broader spending bill in tandem.

“My father told me when I was growing up, there’s a fine line between a good guy and a goddamn fool. I don’t want to be rolled,” said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.). “I think a lot of us want to make sure we have an assurance that, in fact, there’s going to be a reconciliation bill.”

“I’m not a yes until we have assurances that it will pass,” echoed Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.).

Pelosi and her leadership team — as well as progressive and moderate leaders — have been working furiously behind the scenes on a compromise that all corners of the party can back. They hope a so-called “framework” can be enough for Jayapal and her caucus to back the vote Thursday, helping leadership and the White House avoid a humiliating defeat.

An agreement with Manchin and Sinema would be “critical” to resolving the deadlock in the House, said House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).

“I think it would give confidence to a lot of people in the House and around the country,” Hoyer told reporters Tuesday, reiterating that the House wouldn’t take up any social spending plan that the Senate couldn’t support. “What we’re hoping this week is to get a number and a framework.”

Jayapal released a statement reiterating the CPC’s position on Tuesday afternoon after an hour-long meeting with the progressive caucus, which was held the day after Pelosi stunned many liberals by announcing Monday night that the House would proceed with an infrastructure vote even as the party’s broader spending bill slipped past this week.

During the CPC’s call on Tuesday, not a single progressive member spoke up to say they would support the vote without the broader spending bill — staying firm on the caucus’s earlier position, according to people listening.

Democrats expect an intense whipping operation from Pelosi and her leadership team for the infrastructure plan, but it hasn’t formally begun yet. Many lawmakers have pegged their hopes on Biden nailing down a commitment from Manchin, thereby prying more progressive commitments loose.

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn told reporters on Tuesday afternoon he is “not ready” to start the vote-counting process.

“I don’t know when that is but I think I’ll feel it,” he added.

Jayapal continues to maintain that dozens of progressives — as many as 60 — would be willing to block Biden’s infrastructure bill Thursday. She suggested that number could even be growing on Tuesday afternoon, with the Senate’s centrists refusing to negotiate.

But there are others within the caucus who say they can’t go that far with the president’s agenda on the line.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that keeping things moving helps us, even though it’s got some risks that some folks will say, ‘Hey I got what I want, I won’t keep going,’” said Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.).

The White House said Tuesday that President Joe Biden opposes changing the filibuster to suspend or raise the debt ceiling, closing off a break-the-glass option to avoid financial calamity.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed that Biden’s position on reforming the filibuster has not changed as Democrats search for options to deal with the approaching debt ceiling deadline amid persistent refusal from Senate Republicans to step in and help. Earlier in the day, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned congressional leaders that her department could run out of money by Oct. 18, triggering a disastrous default on the government’s debt that would cripple the entire U.S. economy.

“At that point, we expect Treasury would be left with very limited resources that would be depleted quickly,” the secretary wrote. “It is uncertain whether we could continue to meet all the nation’s commitments after that date.”

Questions about how the debt ceiling will be raised have been festering for months. But they have taken on increasing urgency as Senate Republicans continue to filibuster a debt increase even as the deadline for default approaches.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said that Democrats should raise the ceiling alone, but he has also closed off all avenues for them to do so, save one: an amended reconciliation bill that would occupy a fair chunk of Senate floor time before Democrats could pass it by party-line vote.

Democrats in Congress are at odds over whether they have enough time to do that and the next steps forward. The party tried to pass a debt limit hike alongside a measure to fund the government last week. But that was filibustered by Senate Republicans.

On Tuesday, Democrats sought unanimous consent to pass a debt ceiling hike by a simple majority vote. Republicans objected to that too, further angering White House officials who were already chafing at their refusal to fall in line on a vote they’ve been trying to portray as almost pro forma.

Biden has coordinated his approach with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, but has publicly deferred to the congressional leaders on how to maneuver out of the jam. On Monday evening, they discussed possibly raising the debt ceiling through budget reconciliation, something White House officials had been saying they were loath to do.

One other option: The Senate could vote to change their own rules so that a bill that raises or suspends the debt limit is not subject to a filibuster. Lawmakers have made similar rules changes for the confirmation of judicial nominees and Cabinet officials. But it would require all 50 Democrats to support such a measure as well as Vice President Kamala Harris’ sign off. Biden’s opposition to such a change would effectively doom it.

For now, Republicans, who argue they want to see the debt ceiling raised — and believe it will get done, just not by them — contend Democrats have had weeks to prepare to go it alone. GOP leaders also broadened their political and process argument, suggesting that if Democrats are comfortable using reconciliation to pass a massive social spending bill on their own, they should do the same on the debt ceiling.

“We obviously wanted to do this in a bipartisan fashion,” Psaki told reporters Tuesday. “It’s also our hope that if Sen. McConnell isn’t going to help us avoid a default and a shutdown, at least he’ll get out of the way and let Democrats do it alone.”