“Barnstorming” is usually a term reserved for the campaign heights of a heated election. But barnstorming is exactly what one-time presidential candidate and now-Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders of Vermont is doing to help seal passage of the $3.5 trillion budget bill Democrats are currently shepherding through Congress. 

On the road to building support for the once-in-a-generation bill, Sanders has been visiting red-ish districts in Iowa and Indiana, and he’d love to be hitting even more states by his own admission.

During Sanders’ visit to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, one onlooker actually wondered aloud what the Vermont Democrat was doing in a state normally reserved for presidential campaigning.   

“I am chairman of the Senate Budget Committee,” Sanders explained, according to The New York Times. “And I am here to explain what the hell is in the budget for the American people.”

Ah, yes, what exactly is in the bill that’s being bandied about in the press as carrying a massive price tag, but the contents of which have mostly been obscured by the smaller, bipartisan infrastructure deal? While the $1 trillion bipartisan bill would certainly add needed jobs and help bring America’s infrastructure into the 21st century, the $3.5 trillion budget measure—which would be passed by Democrats alone—is a legacy bill that would dramatically increase the quality of life for tens of millions of Americans throughout their lifetimes. From providing more affordable child care to more affordable education to more affordable health care to more affordable elder care, the Democrats-only bill would be a cradle-to-grave game changer. 

As chair of the Senate budget panel, Sanders has assumed a unique role in both conceiving and drafting that bill. His main detractors have been two so-called “centrist” Democrats, Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, who have both signaled they don’t like the $3.5 trillion investment in America but haven’t been willing to outline what they would actually cut from it. Last week, Manchin wrote an op-ed calling on Democratic leaders to hit “pause” on negotiating the budget—a call that virtually every Democratic congressional leader has since rejected, including both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. 

Sanders is also clear-eyed that momentum is king in Washington and hitting pause is a strategy for losers.

“You can’t slow it down,” he told the Times. “Within a little while, everything is going to become political. The only way you get things done historically in Congress is in the first year of a session, where you can escape a little bit from the partisan politics.”

The truth of that sentiment cannot be overstated—negotiations dragging into the winter and then perhaps being delayed over the holidays into next year would spell nothing but doom for the crucial bill. 

Sanders also understands the hurdles that both Schumer and Pelosi face in bringing the bill home given the necessary give-and-take between Democratic moderates, progressives, and—perhaps most gallingly—the “centrists,” who have no ideological objections to the bill other than needing to be perceived as far less than progressive. 

“Pelosi and Schumer have enormously difficult jobs — they really do — and it’s easy to disparage them, to criticize them, but they have no margins with which to deal with,” Sanders observed. “It’s not a job that I envy, a job that I could do for three minutes.”

Instead, Sanders is controlling what he can control in what has proven to be one of his most effective formats—talking to voters. 

“This is way outside of what normal budget committees do, but on the other hand, I feel very fortunate to be in this position at this moment,” Sanders said. “In fact, if I weren’t so preoccupied with the reconciliation package and having to deal with members of Congress, etc., etc., I would probably take the Budget Committee on the road all over this country.”

“That’s what we should be doing,” he added. “We’ve got to explain to the American people what we’re doing here for them, and it can’t simply be an inside-the-Beltway process.”

It can’t simply be an inside-the-Beltway process—amen.