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A demonstrator blocks Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, on December 7 to call for the continuation of the expanded child tax credit in the Build Back Better bill.

The child care plan: The bill includes an ambitious plan to help millions of families with children under age 6 get affordable child care for the first time, subsidizing most or all of the cost of their care at licensed providers. It’s also a plan that’s been the subject of intense debate, as I wrote recently — critics fear it could lead to shortages or drive up prices while supporters argue that an influx of federal money would improve a broken system.

The catch here is that the bill only fully funds this plan for three years — 2025 to 2027. In the three years before that, subsidies will gradually be expanded to more Americans. But in 2028, the subsidies vanish. So on paper, the childcare plan costs $273 billion over 10 years, per CBO, but a fully funded version would likely cost more than $600 billion.

Expanded pre-K: The bill also devotes about $109 billion to funding state expansions of pre-K programs — though here too, the federal money will vanish after six years, in 2028. The White House argues that this would provide “universal pre-K” but there are questions about whether they can truly make good on that promise, as my colleague Fabiola Cineas has written.

Paid leave: Finally, the House bill also has the federal government, working through private insurers, help fund paid leave for workers who become new parents or who are seriously ill. But Manchin has said he is opposed to including this at all, and the White House has already agreed to drop it, at his behest. So it seems this won’t end up in the final version.

Health care is the other major category of the bill’s new social spending. The biggest-ticket item is about $146 billion for in-home care for seniors and the disabled through Medicaid. The bill would also expand Medicare to cover hearing benefits, fund the subsidies that help people pay for Obamacare individual insurance plans for a few more years, allow the federal government to negotiate some prescription drug prices in the hopes of driving those prices down, and pay for coverage for low-income individuals in states that did not expand Medicaid.

The potential trouble ahead is that Manchin has said he’s not thrilled with the approach of funding many programs only for a few years (though this is not uncommon congressional budgeting practice). He said Democrats have relied on “shell games” and “budget gimmicks” to hide the true costs of their bill. If he holds firm on this, it could mean major changes to this part of the bill — certain programs may have to be dropped entirely.

Democrats have protected a lot of money to clean energy

Significantly, as Democrats have been forced to pare back the overall size of Build Back Better, they have protected the overall amount of money they’re devoting to climate: Nearly $500 billion over 10 years (about a quarter of the bill’s spending) is devoted to green energy or other measures meant to fight climate change.

The bulk of that money goes to tax credits meant to incentivize clean electricity and transportation as well as energy efficiency for property owners. And in contrast to their treatment of social policy programs, Democrats are not setting their new clean energy tax credits to expire after just a few years. The bill would create a tax regime for clean energy that would last the next 10 years. (More specifically, the bill would extend and enhance existing tax credits, which are often targeted to specific technologies, for the next five years, but it would create a new technology-neutral approach for such tax credits after that.) There’s also spending on reducing pollution, forest restoration, and other conservation programs.

Yet while the amount of money devoted to climate has stayed the same, the form of that spending has changed. At Manchin’s behest, Democrats have backed down from proposals that would be punitive toward dirty, emission-heavy energy. Most notably, they’ve abandoned what had been their centerpiece climate proposal: a “clean electricity payment program” that would make payments to utilities that rely on clean energy, while fining those that aren’t making progress toward reducing carbon emissions. That’s out. Loose talk of including a carbon tax of some kind never went anywhere, either.

The major punitive policy toward dirty energy that remains in the bill is a fee on methane emissions associated with oil and gas production and transmission. Though carbon dioxide emissions are mostly responsible for climate change, methane emissions play a significant role as well — they’re at least 80 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, my colleague Rebecca Leber recently wrote. Democrats hoped to discourage such emissions with a new fee, but they need Manchin’s approval, so they’re working to win him over. (He said Wednesday that Democrats have made “some good adjustments” on the methane fee but didn’t sound completely won over just yet.)

The big picture is that the climate provisions of the current bill fall short of what progressives hoped was possible earlier this year, but they’re still sweeping, important, and would be quite impressive for a Senate that needs a vote from Manchin — who represents a state where the coal industry is tremendously important and who himself has made millions from coal companies he founded.

But of course, nothing is final.

A tax hike for the very wealthy and corporations, a tax cut mostly benefiting wealthy blue staters

On the one hand, the Build Back Better Act would raise a great deal of revenue from higher taxes on some of the wealthiest people in the country and on corporations. On the other hand, the bill would massively cut taxes for many less wealthy but still quite well-off people — because of its changes to what’s known as the SALT (state and local tax) deduction.

The background here is that President Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill made a significant change limiting how much state and local taxes were deductible on federal tax returns. This meant a bigger tax bill for well-off people who live in places where taxes are high — usually blue states or cities. (The change mostly hits well- off people because they often itemize their taxes and pay higher rates.)

So House Democrats representing these high-tax areas (for instance, New Jersey) demanded a significant portion of the bill’s spending be devoted to rolling back this change over the next five years. This change would cost $229 billion in that span, making it of comparable size to Democrats’ childcare plan. “Roughly 98 percent of the benefit from the increase would accrue to those making more than $100,000 per year, with more than 80 percent going to those making over $200,000,” per the Committee for Responsible Federal Budget analysis.

Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images
New Jersey Rep. Mikie Sherrill advocates for inclusion of the state and local tax (SALT) deduction in the Build Back Better Act reconciliation bill, outside the US Capitol on December 8.

The Senate Democratic Caucus, which includes several Democrats in rural lower-tax states, is less “SALT-y,” and key senators have discussed scaling back this change. It isn’t clear where they’ll land yet. For now, though, one of the groups that benefits most clearly from the House-passed bill is wealthy people in blue states.

To be clear, though, the overall bill is no giveaway for the richest. Changes to taxes on high- income individuals would raise an estimated $640 billion more in revenue over the next decade, per CBO. This breaks down into about $252 billion from changes to the net investment income tax, $160 billion from limiting excess business losses, and $227 billion from a “surcharge” on wealthy individuals, estates, and trusts, which would apply to about the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans. These tax policies were crafted to please Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), who opposed plans to raise tax rates and preferred these somewhat more obscure workarounds.

Additionally, corporate tax changes would raise an estimated $813 billion more revenue over the next decade. This includes about $318 billion from a corporate alternative minimum tax, $124 billion from an excise tax on the repurchase of corporate stock, and $211 billion from changes to how foreign-derived income is taxed. All that totals to about $1.4 trillion in new revenue from taxes on corporations and the wealthy, far more than the SALT tax change will cost.

And there’s more

The social welfare state, climate, and tax changes make up the most significant chunks of the bill in dollar terms, but there’s, of course, a great more in it that would affect millions of people — far too much to fully outline here. The bill would also spend billions on housing, public health, higher education, and transportation projects, and it would tax e-cigarettes.

Democrats hope the bill will make significant changes to immigration policy too. They’ve been negotiating with the Senate parliamentarian to try to find a version of their proposed changes that she says can go through the special, filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process being used for this bill.

As my colleague Nicole Narea has written, the parliamentarian has also rejected the Democrats’ first two proposals — creating either a path to citizenship or a green card for millions of unauthorized immigrants. Their current plan would allow unauthorized immigrants to apply for temporary deportation protection that would let them work and last for five years. The proposal would also expand legal immigration, in part by “recapturing” millions of green cards that have gone unused in recent decades.

Theoretically, Democrats could override a ruling by the parliamentarian, but Manchin has said he will not do so. Even if Democrats’ proposals get a thumbs-up from the parliamentarian, they’d still have to get Manchin’s vote. So what lies ahead for immigration in Build Back Better is unclear.

Then again, that’s true for the entire bill. With no votes to spare in the Senate, everything hinges on what Manchin and Sinema will accept. Nothing is final until everything is final. And a great deal more intense negotiation lies ahead.

Newsom’s statement comes on the heels of a Friday Supreme Court ruling, which further entrenched Texas’s ability to ban virtually all abortions in the state, despite allowing a suit against Texas state health officials to advance. As Vox’s Ian Millhiser explained:

The upshot of this decision is that, while the abortion provider plaintiffs in Jackson may be able to get a federal court order declaring that SB 8 is unconstitutional, the only real relief they are likely to win is an order preventing a few state health officials from carrying out the minor role they play in enforcing the law. The most important provisions of the law — the ones that effectively prevent anyone from performing an abortion after the sixth week of pregnancy by threatening them with financial ruin if they do so — will most likely remain in effect.

Currently, few details are known about the proposed California legislation other than its enforcement mechanism; according to Newsom’s announcement, plaintiffs suing firearms manufacturers could be awarded at least $10,000, plus attorney’s fees if they win their case. As the LA Times reports, however, the California State Assembly and Attorney General Rob Bonta won’t be able to move on putting together a bill until January 3, when the legislature reconvenes after the holiday break.

Newsom wants to use Texas’s abortion tactics for gun control

SB 8, the law that Newsom references in Saturday’s announcement, hinges on a novel, convoluted enforcement scheme. Though it functionally bans all abortions after a mere six weeks of pregnancy, Texas officials are prohibited from directly enforcing the law, according to its text. Instead, SB 8 is constructed so that an individual — who doesn’t even have to be a Texas resident or have anything to do with the abortion in question — can sue an abortion provider or someone suspected of aiding an abortion performed after the six- week window.

As Vox’s Millhiser explained in August, SB 8 is an intentionally perplexing piece of legislation, designed to thwart legal challenges:

The anti-abortion law, which is before the Supreme Court in a case called Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson, presents a maze of procedural complexities that are rarely seen in even the most complicated litigation. The law appears to have been drafted to intentionally frustrate lawsuits challenging its constitutionality. And Texas, with an assist from a right-wing appellate court, has thus far manipulated the litigation process to prevent any judge from considering whether SB 8 is lawful.

Already, SB 8 has resulted in a number of copycat bills. According to Forbes, state legislatures in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, and Ohio have all introduced similar abortion bans, and even more could be on the way.

The proposed California legislation, however, would be the first measure to use a SB 8-style enforcement mechanism for a different goal. Newsom’s proposal would empower private citizens to sue the manufacturers of assault rifles and so-called ghost guns — firearms made from kits, which are difficult to track because they don’t have serial numbers like those that come from licensed companies and are sold by licensed dealers. Ghost gun kits are sold online, are easy to assemble, require no background check to buy, and are impossible for authorities to trace, as the New York Times’s Annie Karni explained in April.

California’s longstanding ban on assault weapons was overturned by a federal district court judge, Robert Benitez, in June; the same judge ruled in 2017 against a ban on magazines with a capacity of more than 10 bullets, and last year blocked a 2019 law requiring background checks for people purchasing ammunition.

Benitez overturned the previous ban on the grounds that it violated the Second Amendment, and explicitly pointed to the AR-15’s military utility in his decision. “Like the Swiss Army knife, the popular AR-15 rifle is a perfect combination of home defense weapon and homeland defense equipment,” Benitez wrote. “Good for both home and battle.”

As Vox’s Dylan Matthews explained in 2019, the AR-15 “is not a specific model — it gets its name from ArmaLite, the company that originally manufactured the rifle,” but the design is no longer patented. Though the AR-15 was initially designed as a military weapon, it has since become one of the most popular rifles in the US.

At the time, Newsom called Benitez’s ruling “a direct threat to public safety and innocent Californians.”

Newsom’s new tactic — adapting the SB 8 model to gun control — would ostensibly circumvent Benitez’s June ruling, taking enforcement of the law out of the hands of the state and shielding the ban itself from judicial challenge in the same way SB 8’s enforcement mechanism does.

California legislation could be a political win-win for Newsom

In some ways, the proposed legislation could be a no-lose strategy for Newsom, who is running for reelection next year after surviving a recall effort in September. It’s a way for him to take aim at the June ruling overturning the assault rifle ban, and to rebuke the Texas law that both infringes on the right to an abortion and presents an alarming subversion of legal and judicial processes.

While Newsom’s proposed bill probably stands a good chance in the California legislature, where Democrats have a supermajority in both chambers, it’s also proof positive of the warning that SB 8 presents a slippery legal precedent, as gun rights group the Firearms Policy Coalition described in an amicus brief in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson.

“To the extent this tactic is effective at evading or outright blocking pre-enforcement review, while still deterring protected behavior, it will easily become the model for suppression of other constitutional rights, with Second Amendment rights being the most likely targets,” the group’s attorney, Erik Jaffe, wrote in the brief.

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor echoed that assessment in her dissent to Friday’s ruling, which allows SB 8 to stand while another legal challenge is argued before the Court, saying the Texas law would create a path for other states to “reprise and perfect Texas’ scheme in the future to target the exercise of any right recognized by this court with which they disagree.”

With Newsom’s Saturday announcement, that now appears more likely to come to pass.

“Gov. Newsom is following through on the threat,” UC Berkeley School of Law professor Khiara Bridges told the LA Times. “It’s just been academic up until now.”

As Bridges points out, the proposed bill won’t necessarily succeed. Should it become law and end up before the Supreme Court, it’s still possible judges could strike it down while leaving SB 8’s citizen enforcement mechanism intact.

“I have no doubt whatsoever that the Supreme Court will find some bizarre, disingenuous argument to distinguish gun rights from abortion rights,” Bridges told the Times.

Newsom’s proposal does, however, have the potential to underscore the absurdity of the mechanism behind SB 8, whatever the actual outcome for the gun bill. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote Friday in a minority opinion, “If the legislatures of the several states may, at will, annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy the rights acquired under those judgments, the constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery.”

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