Prez pushes $3.5T retool in sitdowns

President Biden met with key House and Senate Democratic lawmakers behind closed doors on Wednesday as he raced against time to bridge intra-party divisions over his sprawling multitrillion-dollar “build back better” spending plans ahead of looming deadlines.

The back-to-back afternoon sessions at the White House come at a make-or-break time for Biden’s $3.5 trillion package as lawmakers try to find consensus on language and budget numbers. With Republicans solidly opposed, Democratic leaders are counting on the president to bring together progressives and centrists in their party.

Biden first met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), while the White House’s communications team headed to Capitol Hill to huddle with other House Democrats.

“The time is now,” Biden tweeted in a video Tuesday ahead of the sitdowns.

The House faces a deadline Monday to vote on the first part of Biden’s plan — a nearly $1 trillion public works measure that was already approved by the Senate but has become tangled in disputes over the broader package.

When asked about the lineup for the votes on Monday, Pelosi (inset) said, “We are on schedule. That’s all I will say. And we’re calm, and everybody’s good, and our work’s almost done. We’re in good shape.”

The stakes could hardly be higher for Biden and Democratic lawmakers who hold barely-there majorities in both houses of Congress and face difficult midterm elections next year.

Centrist Democrats support the slimmer bill. But moderates like kingmaker Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) are not on board with the $3.5 trillion plan, which raises taxes on the wealthy to make what Biden calls overdue investments in health care, family services and efforts to fight climate change.

Progressive lawmakers, on the other hand, say the infrastructure bill is woefully inadequate and say they will vote to scuttle it unless it is considered alongside the bigger Biden package.

The White House says it’s still confident both bills will pass, and Democratic leaders are pushing ahead to draft the details of a compromise, which could include significantly scaling back the bigger plan.

Meanwhile, another deadline looms. The House and Senate are at a standstill over a separate package to keep the government funded past the Sept. 30 fiscal yearend and suspend the federal debt limit to avert what could be a devastating U.S. default on payments.

The Treasury Department projects that at some point next month it will run out of cash reserves.

That could force it to delay or miss payments, which experts warn could significantly impact an economy still battered by the pandemic.