Pelosi Readies Biden Agenda for Vote With Key Items Unsettled

(Bloomberg) -- Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pushing the House toward a vote on President Joe Biden’s economic agenda with a few key issues still unresolved and without the full support of Senate Democrats.

Pelosi on Wednesday told fellow Democrats during a private meeting to anticipate voting on an updated version of the tax and spending bill even though changes will likely be made in the Senate, according to a person in the room, who asked for anonymity because the discussion wasn’t public.

Democrats did make some progress in negotiating some of their differences -- such as prescription drug pricing -- and the House Rules Committee began a hearing to ready legislation for the House floor. Pelosi told Democrats that the soonest the House could act would be Thursday, but didn’t outline a schedule, the person said. Several Democrats expressed skepticism about whether a vote could be accomplished this week.

To get the legislation through the House, Pelosi has decided to include provisions that probably don’t have the votes to pass the Senate. These include four weeks of paid family leave, which is opposed by Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, and raising the cap on the deduction for state and local income taxes to $72,500, which was dismissed by Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders minutes after it was unveiled.

Sanders is pushing his own compromise -- restricting SALT deductions to only those who earn up to about $400,000 to $550,000.

But Democrats have found new urgency to pass the roughly $1.75 trillion tax and spending plan as well as an infrastructure bill with $550 billion in new spending after being stung by a Republican sweep of statewide races in Virginia on Tuesday and a much stronger than expected GOP challenge for New Jersey’s governorship.

“People want us to get things done,” Biden said in remarks at the White House. “We should produce for the American people.”

That was echoed by many congressional Democrats.

“We were already in a high gear to get this done, and if there is a higher gear we just went into it,” Washington state Representative Pramila Jayapal, head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said.

Still, Representative Stephanie Murphy of Florida, a leader of the fiscally conservative Blue Dog Coalition, said she wants to see an analysis of the bill’s costs from the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation before voting.

No matter how quickly the House moves, it likely would take weeks for the Senate to vote. And if the Senate changes the legislation, the House would have to vote again on passage before it could go to Biden’s desk to be signed into law.

Pelosi indicated that she wants to vote on the more expansive tax and spending bill before the separate public works measure. Progressives have held up the infrastructure bill, which has already passed the Senate, as leverage in negotiations on Biden’s agenda.

In the latest draft text of the legislation posted by the House Rules Committee on Wednesday, several key issues -- including immigration and the state and local tax deduction -- were not finalized.

‘Big’ Issues

“The outstanding issues are big ones,” New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a leading progressive, said after the Democrat meeting.

Ocasio-Cortez said she wanted “clear assurances” that the Senate would act.

Rules Chair Jim McGovern said the legislation would need “to comply with Senate’s arcane rules. and it may still need perfecting.”

There were major fault lines emerging over SALT deduction, which House and Senate Democrats at odds over whether the very rich should be allowed to take the tax break.

Representative Tom Malinowski of New Jersey said the House would vote on his proposal to raise the cap on the deduction to $72,500 from the current $10,000 limit. He also said he didn’t favor restricting it by taxpayer income. But Sanders said that gave too much of a benefit to the wealthy.

“This is a better proposal than eliminating the SALT completely, but it still is quite regressive,” Sanders said.

Pelosi also added a plan for four weeks of paid family and medical leave, despite opposition from Manchin. The West Virginia Democrat, whose vote is critical in the evenly divided Senate, said he would prefer to deal with a policy change like paid leave in a “bipartisan way” rather than the reconciliation process that Democrats are using to avoid a Republican filibuster. 

House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn on Wednesday evening began a formal count of Democratic votes, sending a questionnaire to Democrats asking, “Will you support H.R. 5376, Build Back Better Act?”

The deadline for responding was listed as 11 a.m. Thursday.

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