The House has sent a $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to President Joe Biden’s desk. But congressional Democrats still have more work to do in the coming weeks and months to deliver the other half of Biden’s first-year legislative agenda, the nearly $2 trillion Build Back Better Act that covers a number of social spending provisions.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now aims to pass that bill next week, when some Congressional Budget Office assessments of the bill could be released. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has said he wants to pass the bill in the Senate by Thanksgiving.
But that timeline could change as negotiations with key centrist Democratic holdouts in the House and Senate continue, just like many other previous timelines for the infrastructure and social spending bills have been delayed as Schumer and Pelosi manage their razor-thin majorities.
Further complicating matters, a CBO assessment, or “score,” may not come out until the week of Thanksgiving. More centrist Democrats wanted that assessment before voting on the legislation.
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Regardless of when the House passes its $1.85 trillion version of the Build Back Better Act, the content of the bill is likely to change.
Conservative West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, for instance, opposes a four-week paid family and medical leave provision that is included in the House version of the bill.
Other Democrats are unhappy with the House bill’s raising of a cap for federal tax deductions for paid state and local taxes, or SALT, arguing that the change benefits the wealthy.
On top of all of that, Congress must deal with two major deadlines on Dec. 3. That is when government funding is set to run out after a temporary extension and the date until which Congress temporarily suspended the debt ceiling.
Some Democrats are worried about the bill making it to Biden’s desk at all.
“I’m really concerned,” New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram live video on Saturday. “Part of me does think that the Build Back Better Act in some form or another will be passed. Will it be recognizable from where it was on Monday? I’m not sure. It was already cut down to four weeks of paid leave — it was already cut down to, you know, a lot.”
Democrats are using a special reconciliation process that allows them to push the Build Back Better bill through the Senate without the need for Republican votes, all of whom are expected to oppose the bill. That means buy-in is needed from all 50 senators who caucus with Democrats, giving centrists Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema much power to craft the scope of the legislation. It has already been downsized from an original $3.5 trillion price tag, with items such as universal community college taken out of Biden’s second-draft negotiated framework.
That dynamic is why dozens of members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus in the House for months had demanded that the Senate first vote on the Build Back Better bill before the caucus would commit to voting for the infrastructure bill. Centrists in the House, meanwhile, wanted to immediately pass the infrastructure bill.
After hours of last-minute negotiations on Friday, an agreement was struck: Progressives would vote for the infrastructure bill and the House would have a procedural vote on advancing the Build Back Better bill, and the centrist Democrats would commit to voting on the bill the week of Nov. 15 as long as the CBO score was found to be in line with White House estimates.
More centrist Democratic Reps. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Ed Case of Hawaii, Stephanie Murphy of Florida, Kathleen Rice of New York, and Kurt Schrader of Oregon signed on to a statement Friday night saying that they would commit to voting for the bill when it gets a CBO score “but in no event later than the week of November 15th.”
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If the projection does not match that of the White House, they said, they “remain committed to working to resolve any discrepancies in order to pass the Build Back Better legislation.”
Despite that wording, Gottheimer hinted Sunday on CNN that he does not expect there to be a situation in which the CBO score is different enough from the White House estimate that it would prompt the five lawmakers to withhold their votes from the legislation.
