After a last minute change to the voting calendar late Friday evening, 13 Republicans helped Democrats pass President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill.
Six Democrats voted against the bill, but it passed thanks to the 13 Republicans who voted for it, for a final vote total of 228-206.
Don Bacon of Nebraska, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, Andrew Garbarino of New York, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, John Katko of New York, Nicole Malliotakis of New York, David McKinley of West Virginia, Tom Reed of New York, Chris Smith of New Jersey, Fred Upton of Michigan, Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, and Don Young of Alaska were the 13 Republicans who voted in favor of the bill, which is estimated to add $256 billion to the deficit over the next 10 years.
Six members of “The Squad” voted against the bill: Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
As The Daily Wire reported, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) struggled to get the votes for an infrastructure package coupled with Biden’s spending bills, prompting her to drop the spending bills for a vote on an infrastructure package she could have voted on three months ago.
From The Daily Wire:
Issues arose from disagreements between progressives and moderates in the Democratic Party. Moderate Democratic members wanted to see the Congressional Budget Office’s report on the social spending package, and the progressive wing of the party pushed back against passing the bipartisan bill without attaching it to the massive plan that has been deemed the “human infrastructure” bill.
“As we’ve consistently said, there are dozens of our members who want to vote both bills … out of the House together,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), the progressive caucus chair. “However, if our six colleagues still want to wait for a CBO score, we would agree to give them that time — after which point we can vote on both bills together.”
Jayapal ended up voting for the infrastructure bill.
The Daily Wire also reported that progressives had been “holding up the bipartisan infrastructure bill in an attempt to pressure moderate Democrats in the Senate, such as Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), to agree to the social spending bill.”
As The Daily Signal pointed out, the bill passing the house paves the way for Biden’s “social spending package.”
“Pelosi made the promise after winning approval of a procedural rule to make the social spending bill easier to pass, to get the party’s progressive wing on board for the more popular infrastructure measure. Even so, Ocasio-Cortez and five other progressives voted against the infrastructure bill, which they long had demanded be considered at the same time as the less popular social spending bill,” the outlet reported. “The price tag of the social spending measure is down from the $3.5 trillion originally proposed by Biden and congressional Democrats and dubbed the Build Back Better Act, a name that echoes Biden’s 2020 campaign slogan. On the House floor later in the night, Pelosi said the social spending bill not only would pass before Thanksgiving but would be more ‘transformative’ than the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare.”
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Source: Dailywire
