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Biden Shows Confidence That Senate Holdouts Will Back His Agenda

Biden Signals Confidence Congress Will Pass His Economic Agenda

President Joe Biden voiced confidence that U.S. lawmakers will pass his legislative agenda as House Democrats work with shifting timelines toward votes on his infrastructure and social-spending bills.

“I believe we will pass my Build Back Better plan and I believe we will pass the infrastructure bill,” Biden said Sunday at a news conference closing out the Group of 20 summit in Rome. “I believe we’ll see by the end of next week at home that is passed.” 

Biden has been struggling to pass a $1.75 trillion social-spending and tax bill and a separate $555 billion infrastructure bill that are at the core of his domestic economic agenda. He agreed to pare the measures down significantly from his initial proposals -- for the former, to keep a pair of conservative Senate Democrats and, for the latter, to win Republican votes in the Senate.

Biden Shows Confidence That Senate Holdouts Will Back His Agenda

He injected a note of caution on Sunday, leaving open the possibility of failure. “But we’ll see, we’ll see,” he said.

While House Democrats over the weekend set a Tuesday target for bringing both bills to a floor vote, the timeline was at risk of slipping. A planned Rules Committee meeting on Monday was delayed to allow more time to try to add provisions to the Build Back Better Act text, a House Democratic leadership aide said Sunday. 

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders said he favors waiting for all of the chamber’s Democrats to agree on what to include in the economic package before putting it to a vote in the House. That would require explicit, public statements of support by Democratic holdouts Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema.

“I think there has got to be a framework agreed upon in the Senate that all of us know is going to be implemented before the members of the House vote,” Sanders said on CNN. “I think we can put that together within the next short period of time.”

Biden tried to kick off the endgame for the process by releasing a framework for the final bill on Thursday, just hours before departing Washington for Europe. 

With negotiations among Democrats dragging on for months amid a sluggish economic recovery -- bogged down by supply-chain bottlenecks and labor shortages -- Americans’ views of Biden are sagging. His approval rating is at 42% in an NBC News poll released Sunday, down from 49% in August and 53% in April.

One test of Democrats’ political viability will come Tuesday as former Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe tries for a second term, facing Republican Glenn Youngkin. Recent surveys have shown the two locked in a closer race in the onetime battleground state that has been increasingly Democratic in recent elections. 

©2021 Bloomberg L.P.