Nancy Pelosi’s supposed deal-making skills are looking rather frail, even as she is hinting that she will retire after this term. She had promised to bring the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill — which does contain a bit of real infrastructure — to the floor for a vote this week, decoupling it from the $3.5 trillion hyperinflation bill which is full of more handouts and climate change nonsense. But the “quad” and other “progressives'’ said they would vote against the infrastructure bill unless it were re-linked to the $3.5 trillion bill, despite the fact that President Joe Biden had promised the two would be considered separately. Pelosi punted on Oct. 2, and did not bring up the promised bipartisan infrastructure bill, saying both bills will be put off, but adding that they must go through by Halloween!
The Pelosi plan is to pass the $3.5 trillion bill through reconciliation, bypassing the filibuster and allowing a simple majority vote. But Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona insisted they will not vote for the absurd inflationary bill, and the Democrat majority is so slim that that is enough to kill it.
Manchin said he would only allow at most a $1.5 trillion bill to go through. Sinema issued a tweet: “Respectfully, as I have said for months, I can’t support $3.5 trillion more in spending when we have already spent $5.4 trillion since last March. At some point, all of us, regardless of party, must ask the simple question – how much is enough? What I have made clear to the President and Democratic leaders is that spending trillions more on new and expanded government programs, when we can’t even pay for the essential social programs, like Social Security and Medicare, is the definition of fiscal insanity. Suggesting that spending trillions more will not have an impact on inflation ignores the everyday reality that America’s families continue to pay an unavoidable inflation tax.”
