Pelosi Hunts for Infrastructure Votes as Democrats Case

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WASHINGTON — President Biden’s trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure plan suffered a significant setback late Thursday night when Democratic House leaders failed to find support amid a liberal uprising, delaying a planned vote on a crucial plan on their domestic agenda.

Democratic leaders and supporters of the bill insisted the delay was only a temporary setback. The infrastructure vote was postponed to Friday, giving liberals more time to agree on a comprehensive climate change and social safety net bill that would bring them along.

Such a deal seemed far away, however, and the delay was a humiliating blow for Mr. Biden and the Democrats, who struggled for days to garner the votes needed to reach an agreement among their party’s conflict factions and pass the infrastructure bill. Mr. Biden has risked his reputation as a deal maker on the success of both the public works package and a much more ambitious social policy bill whose fate is uncertain in a Congress riddled with partisan divisions and internal Democratic strife.

Given the distance between the Democrats’ left wing and the few centrists in this larger bill, it was unclear when either of them would get the vote or even whether Mr. Biden’s economic agenda could be revived.

The House and Senate passed legislation that would fund the government by December 3, with more than $28 billion in disaster relief and $6.3 billion to help resettle refugees from Afghanistan, and Mr. Biden signed. At the very least, this eliminated an item on the Democrats’ to-do list for at least two months, avoiding the immediate financial threat of a government shutdown.

This minor success, however, was stifled by the moodiness displayed within the president’s party.

The infrastructure measure, which would provide $550 billion in new funding, was supposed to polish Mr. Biden’s bilateral goodwill. Allocate $65 billion to expand high-speed internet access; $110 billion for roads, bridges and other projects; $25 billion for airports; and the most funding for Amtrak since the passenger rail service was established in 1971. It will also initiate the transition to electric vehicles with new charging stations and the strengthening of the electricity grid that will be needed to power these cars.

But progressive leaders have said for weeks that they will oppose it until they act on the law they really want—a far-reaching law that includes paid family leave, universal kindergarten, Medicare expansion, and powerful measures to tackle climate change.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and senior members of Mr. Biden’s team worked feverishly through the night in the Capitol to come to an agreement that could allow the large-scale public works measure the Senate approved in August with great fanfare. But amid deception, pleading, and arm-twisting, the most liberal members of the House didn’t budge, while Republicans were largely left behind in their leaders’ efforts to kill the bill.

“No one should be surprised that we’re at this point because we’ve been telling you this for three and a half months,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal, a Washington Democrat and Chair of the Congressional Progress Group.

The problem for Mr. Biden is that the price of liberals’ infrastructure votes – the social policy measure getting passed the Senate – is starting to become out of reach.

Conservative-leaning Democrats made it clear Thursday that they would never support a package as large as Mr. Biden had proposed. West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin III told reporters he wanted a bill that didn’t spend more than $1.5 trillion, which is less than half the package Democrats envision in their budget plans.

“I’m trying to get them to understand that I’m at 1.5 trillion,” Mr. Manchin told reporters late Thursday night, as he left the office of New York Democrat and majority leader Senator Chuck Schumer. He met with White House officials. “I don’t see a deal tonight – I really don’t.”

Soon after, House leaders announced that plans for the infrastructure vote, which Ms. Pelosi had been insisting on all day, were still pending.

Mr. Manchin spoke about his position after a note detailing the situation. Posted in Politico Thursday.

The document was instructive far beyond the total expenditure. Among its most basic demands are to test new social programs to target the poor; a major initiative to treat the opioid addictions that are devastating his state; control of shaping a clean energy supply targeting, by definition, West Virginia’s mainstay, coal; and assurances that nothing in the bill will eliminate the production and combustion of fossil fuels – a demand that will surely anger climate change advocates.

He was more in line with other Democrats on payables for the package and supported several rollbacks of the Trump-era tax cut in 2017; increasing the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 25 percent; set a top individual income tax rate of 37 percent to 39.6 percent; and raising the capital gains tax rate to 28 percent is another significant increase.

But that tax deal ran counter to the position of fellow Democratic senator, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Cinema, who told her colleagues she was against such significant tax rate increases.

Ms. Pelosi, 81, nurtured her reputation as a master legislator and skilled deal maker, but above all she was reluctant to call a vote on any bill she wasn’t sure would pass. In this case, he was faced with a dilemma. He had promised nine moderate and conservative Democrats that he would put the infrastructure bill to a vote before the end of September, and some of those nine said that pulling the bill out of consideration would badly shake their confidence.

But he also didn’t want to see it rejected. In the end, he decided that it would be better for the president’s agenda to postpone action for himself.

The decision came after he jeopardized his reputation as a legislator by telling top Democrats that he told social policy and climate action was the “high point of my career in Congress.”

Susan E. Rice, director of the White House Council on Domestic Policy, and Brian Deese, director of the National Economic Council, huddled into the night, along with Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Schumer’s aides, whizzing around the Capitol as they tried to hammer. to draw up a social policy framework that can satisfy the warring groups.

Now, to save both parts of his economic agenda, Mr. Biden will likely have to secure the bigger and more difficult one, climate change and the social policy bill.

Some Democrats saw Mr Manchin’s memo as at least a starting point for negotiations that fell through as there was no clear signal from him or Miss Cinema as to what they could agree to.

Mr Manchin said he and Mr Schumer had informed Mr Biden about the top rank number in the past few days, nearly two months after he signed the memo acknowledging Mr Manchin’s position.

Thursday’s comments were most revealing about what Democrats want to see in the social policy plan that they hope to move forward using a quick process known as budget compromise that protects fiscal legislation from a scam. Democrats are trying to push the pack through the united Republican opposition, meaning they won’t be able to split even a single vote in the equally divided Senate.

Mr. Schumer, who signed the deal while trying to persuade Mr. Manchin to support the party’s budget plan, appeared to have written “I will try to dissuade Joe from many of these” under his signature.

On Thursday, a spokesperson stressed that Mr. Schumer did not see it as binding.

“As stated in the document, Leader Schumer never agreed to any of the conditions laid out by Senator Manchin; Spokesman Justin Goodman only acknowledged where Senator Manchin was on the matter at the time.”

Also Thursday, Ms Cinema’s office said it would not “negotiate through the press” but had communicated its priorities and concerns to Mr Biden and Mr Schumer.

In the middle is the infrastructure bill, negotiated by Republican and Democratic senators, pushed hard by the nation’s biggest business groups, and widely supported in polls by voters of both parties.

The question now is whether the postponed vote will anger moderate supporters enough to lower the priority of liberals. Some centrist Democrats, who pressed for the move to pass quickly, resented the delay.

“When Iowa people tell me they’re sick of the Washington games, that’s what they mean,” Iowa Democratic Representative Cindy Axne said in a statement. “Instead of moving forward with just one piece of the comprehensive agenda we’ve built over the past six months, some in my party insist that we put the shovel down and wait until we pass the largest rural broadband investment in US history. until every piece of our agenda is ready.

“There is no way to manage all or nothing,” he added.

But progressives, who are pushing to slow down the infrastructure bill to leave room for an agreement on the larger social policy measure, said securing the best possible package was well worth it.

“The world will not collapse if there is no vote today or if it is defeated,” said Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent and chairman of the Budget Committee. “This is an extremely important bill. We have time. Let’s get it right.”

Madeleine Ngo, Luke Broadwater and Sheryl Gay Stolberg contributing reporting.

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