When Democrats took back the White House in January, they expected to pass a lot of legislation with former President Donald Trump out of the picture and conservatives unable to control the agenda.
The party's narrow congressional majorities require near-unanimous buy-in from lawmakers in the House and the votes of all 50 Senators in the upper chamber, making any defections on substantive legislation a death blow.
When Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia announced his opposition to the Build Back Better Act on Sunday, Republicans cheered the potentially fatal blow to President Joe Biden's signature domestic agenda item.
While 19 Senate Republicans and 13 House Republicans crossed over to support the bipartisan infrastructure bill, they did not support the $2 trillion Democratic social-spending plan.
Lindsey Graham praised the Mountain State lawmaker's position after he maintained that Democrats underestimated the true cost of the social-spending package.
"I very much appreciate Senator Manchin's decision not to support build back better, which stems from his understanding of the Congressional Budget Office's analysis of the bill," Graham said. The CBO's response to my and Congressman Smith's request to score the bill without sunsets is a budget trick.
The CBO analysis confirmed Senator Manchin's worst fears. He will not support a bill that added to the debt or made inflation worse.
The Congressional Budget Office updated their analysis earlier this month and found that the cost of the social-spending bill would be higher if the education, childcare, and climate provisions were made permanent.
The White House and Democrats criticized it because it didn't take into account future tax increases they would seek to fund the programs.
The Republicans are so desperate to justify their opposition to the popular, much-needed provisions in the Build Back Better Act that they've resorting to requesting fake scores based on mistruths, according to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
The bill's potential demise was discussed by other Republicans on Sunday.
The bill was slammed as "nakedly partisan" by Sen. Ben Sasse.
He said that President Biden's mega-spending bill was dead and that Joe Manchin put the nail in the coffin. The American people don't want to upend this country with nakedly partisan legislation because of a divided country, a 50-50 Senate, and inflation.
The right course of action was taken by Manchin, who helped untether the bipartisan infrastructure bill from the larger spending bill.
He wrote that separating partisan infrastructure into 2 bills was the right thing to do.
