Buried in the graveyard of Democrats’ early hopes for the sweeping social and environmental spending bill that passed in the House of Representatives Friday morning is more than $1.5 trillion in spending that would have changed millions of Americans’ lives.
Over months of negotiations, numerous provisions were excised to make the legislation more palatable for the party’s two most centrist Senators: Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, whose votes the bill depends on to become law.
Among the Democrats’ wishlist items that didn’t survive negotiations and the rule-making process were proposals to provide Americans with two years of free community college, expansions of Medicare to include dental and vision benefits, and a pathway towards citizenship for undocumented individuals. Plans for lowering prescription drug prices and providing U.S. workers with 12 weeks of paid medical and family leave were also considerably scaled back.
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“I’m looking at the glass half full, actually three quarters full,” Congressman Sanford Bishop, a Georgia Democrat, told TIME in the Speaker’s Lobby Thursday night. “I’m not looking at what’s not in it. I’m looking at what is in it for the American people.”
But with the Build Back Better bill now on its way for another round of negotiations in the Senate, it’s still likely that the bill will be altered or whittled down further before it reaches President Joe Biden’s desk.
Read More: The House Just Passed Biden’s Build Back Better Bill. Here’s What’s In It
The Senate’s deliberations will once again revolve around Manchin and Sinema, who have already signaled they don’t support every item in the House’s bill. The Senate Parliamentarian will also issue her final determinations on which parts of the bill are eligible to be permitted to pass through reconciliation, which only requires a simple majority vote in the Senate rather than the two-thirds majority that non-budgetary bills…
Source : time
