Although few are pointing it out today, Senator Bernie Sanders is truly the man of the hour in the Democratic Party right now. Much faster than anyone expected (myself included), Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced last night that a deal had been struck within the Democratic caucus over the reconciliation bill that Bernie Sanders is in charge of writing (as chair of the Senate's budget committee). This deal was principally negotiated between Sanders and Senator Mark Warner, who represented the penny-pinching faction within the Democratic Party. But even with this necessary trimming, what was just announced is simply breathtaking in its scope and reach.

Of course, the details will matter, and we won't know all of them for quite some time now. The bill under negotiation is merely the first step in the budget reconciliation process, since it will contain only topline numbers. From these totals, the details will be filled in later, in a second bill (this is the normal process for such things). The biggest news from last night's announcement was they had agreed on a total price for the bill: $3.5 trillion.

This is down from Bernie's initial bid of $6 trillion, but up significantly from the opening-bid figure the fiscally conservative Democrats had offered a few weeks ago ($1.5 to $2 trillion). In fact, it is precisely the figure I had hoped they would compromise on when I wrote about it back then. This represents a clear victory for President Joe Biden, because if it holds it will mean he got exactly what he asked for in his entire "three-legged stool" of economic legislation. Biden's American Rescue Plan, his American Jobs Plan, and his American Families Plan requested, in toto, $6 trillion in spending. He got $1.9 trillion in the American Rescue Plan, the bipartisan infrastructure bill will contain $0.6 trillion in new spending, and the reconciliation bill will add the final $3.5 trillion to the mix, to come up with exactly the figure Biden had asked for. That is a clear victory for the White House.

Republicans really can't complain, although they no doubt will. They made a honkin' big deal over microscopically defining "what was true infrastructure and what was not" in their talks over the bipartisan bill, and they jettisoned most of what Biden had proposed (because they complained that you couldn't actually "drive a car on it"). While doing so, they carefully avoided badmouthing all the ideas they were cutting, because even Republicans know how popular the whole agenda already is. Their reasoning, at the time, was: "Well, that'd be nice to do in some separate legislation later on, but it is not traditional infrastructure" (as if that mattered in any way to any voter out there). So this is exactly what the Democrats did -- they took all the discarded pieces and added them all together and came up with their companion bill. But that won't stop the GOP's complaints, because they are only truly happy when they have some Democratic bugaboo to gnash their teeth over.

Everyone else in the country, of course, will judge the proposal on its merits. And this is where Bernie Sanders can truly feel proud, because some transformational changes made it into the reconciliation bill. The biggest of these -- which Bernie had been pushing very hard for -- is the addition of vision, dental, and hearing coverage for those on Medicaid. This will be an enormous change in seniors' lives, since they'll now be covered to get glasses, dental visits, and hearing aids, and they won't have to take out supplemental insurance for it or pay for it straight out of their own pockets. If you don't think this is going to be a big deal, please go ask a senior -- they'll tell you.

Bernie also was successful in including a measure to close the gap in the red states that have stubbornly refused to expand Medicaid. The people who have so far fallen into this gap will now be covered (in one way or another, there are a number of ways they could achieve this under discussion), just like the people in the states (both blue and red) which already have expanded Medicaid. This will bring health insurance to millions who have so far been missing out on the benefits of Obamacare.

Other major policies that made it in to the compromise include: universal preschool for 3- and 4-year-old children, childcare subsidies for parents, paid family and medical leave, nutrition assistance, tackling climate change in a big way, reducing the cost of prescription drugs, and an increase in who will qualify for Pell Grants to be able to afford college. That last one seems like a bit of a disappointment, because it seems to have taken the place of the idea of providing two years of tuition-free community college to all, but we'll have to wait to see what the final bill has in that regard.

The novel approach to the Child Tax Credit has been extended, which is welcome news indeed since it has so far only been funded for this calendar year. These checks are about to start arriving in parents' mailboxes everywhere (or arriving directly into their bank accounts), so Democrats will be able to remind everyone who receives one that Republicans voted against this idea -- and more than once.

The bill will even attempt to at least partially tackle immigration reform, but this one is probably the most dubious of the lot, since it remains to be seen whether it will survive the scrutiny of the Senate parliamentarian (who rules whether each part of the bill fulfills the budget reconciliation rules or not). For now, this is a big progressive victory, but it might not make it into the final package, so we'll have to see.

To satisfy the fiscal conservative Democrats, the entire reconciliation bill will be fully paid for. This will be done by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthiest of individuals (those making over $400,000 per year). The I.R.S. will be beefed up so it can catch more high-income tax cheats as well -- which is critical because the Republicans have been gutting the auditors' budgets for years now. All of these provisions are extremely popular with the voters -- even with Republican voters. The chickens will be coming home to roost on all the faux populism introduced into the Republican Party by Donald Trump, because now Republicans in Congress will have a very clear choice: vote to continue to allow gigantic corporations like Amazon to pay zero dollars in taxes, and also vote in favor of tax cheats -- or vote with the Democrats to fix these problems.

If both the bipartisan bill and the reconciliation bill pass, it will constitute a major part of the Democratic political platform for the midterm election season. If the bipartisan bill stalls, then its provisions will just be rolled into the reconciliation bill anyway, so Republicans will really have no chance to fully stop the Biden agenda dead in its tracks. But it all hinges on getting complete and unanimous buy-in from the Democrats in Congress, though.

President Biden did his part towards this goal today, by visiting the Democrats up on Capitol Hill to praise the newly-announced compromise. He's got to champion both bills and get all the Democrats (especially the two cantankerous senators, Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema) on board for the final votes. But if he can manage to do this, his economic agenda will be talked about for decades to come -- in the same breath as L.B.J.'s Great Society and F.D.R.'s New Deal. If these two bills make it to Biden's desk, he will already have achieved being a transformational president, to put it another way.

Ironically enough, Joe Biden will have his main competitor in the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination race to thank for this. Because this never would have happened if Bernie Sanders hadn't been able to quickly strike a grand bargain with the fiscal conservatives in the Democratic Party. Bernie is routinely portrayed as being some sort of bomb-throwing extremist who refuses to compromise and always demands his way or the highway, but either this caricature was never true in the first place or else Bernie's ascension to chairing the budget committee has given him not only new powers, but also a new outlook. Either way, Bernie Sanders must be acknowledged as the best dealmaker the Democratic Party has right now. He's certainly earned that accolade, this week.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant