Finally, a vote? Under pressure after a stinging defeat in a local election, Democrats in Congress were still working Thursday to tune their violins to adopt the major investment plans of Joe Biden, and thus revive his presidency.
After months of intense negotiations, elected officials in the House of Representatives timidly opened the door to a vote on the Democratic leader’s two investment projects, which are supposed to “rebuild” America. “We are going to adopt these two plans,” the Democratic President of the House, Nancy Pelosi, promised Thursday, without advancing on a precise timetable. A vote could be hastily called by the House in the evening, but experts instead agreed that the negotiations could drag on until this weekend.
Time is running out, however. The turf wars between the left wing of Joe Biden’s party and more moderate elected officials are robbing the president of a political victory he desperately needs to breathe new life into his presidency. “There is an emergency,” repeated a spokesperson for the White House, Karine Jean-Pierre. The president’s spending programs are backed by Americans, polls show. And a study by Moody’s published Thursday estimated the number of jobs that these plans could create in ten years at 1.5 million.
One year before the elections
But Joe Biden, who praised his negotiating skills during the presidential campaign because of his long career as a senator, comes up against the divisions of his party and watches, helplessly, his popularity plummet.
Before his tour to the G20 and COP26 summits, the president had already visited Capitol Hill twice to accelerate the adoption of his two flagship projects.
First, a plan to renovate the country’s dilapidated roads, bridges and transport. The $ 1.2 trillion envelope is backed by Democrats and some Republicans. A second, gigantic social and climate component that plans to reduce childcare costs and invest $ 550 billion to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
But his efforts were unsuccessful. Back from Europe, the president, visibly impatient, urged his troops to get in order.
“Democrats have never been so close to completing and adopting” these plans, said Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on Thursday. But their fate is actually in the hands of an elected official who refuses for the moment to support them, Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia.
In view of the very thin Democratic majority in the Senate, this elected official has virtually a right of veto on these projects. This morning he again shattered hopes of a rapid adoption of the measures, reiterating his concerns about their impact on US public debt and inflation.
In his state, one of the poorest in the country, “people are terrified by the rise in the price of gasoline, food, public services,” he told CNN. A way of denouncing the spending deemed excessive by his party, accused of not having known how to take the pulse of the country, to the point of having lost power in Virginia on Tuesday, a state which had however mostly voted for Joe Biden in the presidential election from 2020.
A finding all the more gloomy as this election served as a dress rehearsal before the mid-term legislative elections in November 2022. Joe Biden’s party could then lose control of the two chambers, which would complicate the adoption even more. of any major reform.