|  Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker; Source photographs by Getty It turns out that Pramila Jayapal, a congresswoman from Seattle and the head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, is a lot like the rest of us: when she receives a phone call from an unknown number, she lets it go to voice mail. In late September, as the Democrats were in the midst of negotiating the passage of their infrastructure and Build Back Better social-spending bills, such a call turned out to be from President Biden, who, as older people do, left a message: “I just watched you on MSNBC and you were terrific. I wanted to say happy birthday, and I really appreciate your support.” This, as Robert P. Baird reports in his account of how congressional progressives delayed the infrastructure bill in an effort to protect the rest of Biden’s agenda, was just one of several overtures made by the President to Jayapal. Others included serenading her in the Oval Office and even placing a call to her mother, in Bangalore. While much of the attention during the legislative wrangling this fall has been on the pivotal Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, Baird notes that not for decades “had a group of left-leaning members of Congress acted with such concentrated force.” The central question of this entertaining and illuminating report: What did Jayapal and her fellow-progressives achieve? —Ian Crouch, newsletter editor Read “Inside the Democrats’ Battle to Build Back Better.” Robert P. Baird has written about the recurring trauma of California’s wildfires and the first impeachment trial of Donald Trump. | 
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