Democrats vow passage of social policy bill as Republican leader derails planned vote
House Democrats have vowed to vote on Friday on an expansive domestic policy package that would overhaul large swaths of the American economy, after the Republican minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, derailed a vote planned for Thursday evening with a rambling, hours-long speech.
After months of fits and starts, gridlock and intra-party warring, Democrats had been on the verge of passing the centerpiece of Joe Biden’s economic vision on Thursday. But final passage of the measure was ultimately delayed by McCarthy, who used his leadership privileges to rail furiously against the legislation, the administration and the Democratic party in an overnight speech that lasted an extraordinary 8.5 hours.
Democrats eventually dispersed and Steny Hoyer, the House majority leader, announced they would return early on Friday to vote on the bill, known as Build Back Better. If it passes the House, the measure would next go to the Senate, where additional hurdles await in the evenly divided chamber.
McCarthy’s protest speech enraged Democratic lawmakers who taunted and jeered, underscoring the deep animosity between the two political parties a day after the censure of Congressman Paul Gosar, a Republican from Arizona who shared a video depicting himself killing congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and threatening Biden.
At one point during his discursive and angry monologue, McCarthy quoted the Democratic congresswoman Abigail Spanberger: “Nobody elected Joe Biden to be FDR.”
“I did,” Ocasio-Cortez shouted.
House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office derided McCarthy’s speech as a “temper tantrum”, accusing him of making “unhinged claims” about the bill.
Shortly after midnight, Democrats began to file out of the chamber. “I’m not going to stop,” McCarthy said as they left. “I’m really not talking to them. I’m talking to the American people.”
The planned vote follows the release of a cost estimate from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, as requested by a band of centrist Democrats with concerns about the legislation’s impact on the federal deficit.
The analysis found that the bill would spend $1.7tn over 10 years, increasing the deficit by $367bn over the same span of time. The score did not include estimates of Democrats’ plans to raise revenue by increasing enforcement of federal tax laws.
The budget office separately predicted that boosting funding for the Internal Revenue Service by $80bn would raise $207bn in revenue, shrinking the deficit to $160bn over 10 years. The estimate was far less than the $400bn the White House said would be raised by tougher IRS enforcement.
With the analysis complete, the treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, said in a statement that “Build Back Better is fully paid for” and would ultimately reduce the country’s debt by enacting “reforms that ask the wealthiest Americans and large corporations to pay their fair share”.
The budget score appeared to be enough to placate worried centrists, at least for now. Congresswoman Stephanie Murphy, co-chair of the centrist Blue Dog coalition, said she would vote for the bill, despite “reservations about the overall size of the legislation”.
“I will work with my Senate colleagues to improve this bill, and I hope to vote on – and enact – a more streamlined version of the bill once it returns from the Senate,” she said in a statement.
The package is ambitious: it aims to dramatically reduce childcare costs, provide universal pre-kindergarten for children, lower the cost of prescription drugs for seniors, expand Medicare to cover hearing aids, extend work permits to millions of undocumented immigrants and provide the largest-ever investment in efforts to combat the climate crisis. The House version of the legislation also includes four weeks of paid family and medical leave, though the provision faces opposition from Senator Joe Manchin, a Democrat of West Virginia.
With a paper-thin majority, Democrats can spare only a handful of defections on the package. Only one House Democrat, Jared Golden of Maine, was expected to vote against the bill.
Pelosi had twice attempted to bring the spending bill to the floor for a vote, only to see those plans unravel amid a standoff between progressives and moderates over Biden’s double-barreled legislative agenda. A truce brokered by the president and the Congressional Black Caucus helped secure the passage of a sprawling public works bill earlier this month and paved the way for Friday’s vote.
Two of the Senate’s 50 Democrats, Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, have not yet committed to supporting the package, even as negotiators reshaped the climate and tax portions of the package to meet their demands.
“This was like a Rubik’s cube, trying to get all the different provisions together,” Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas said at a press conference highlighting the immigration reforms contained in the bill. “You move one piece and there’s a constituency or a caucus in the House or Senate that is unhappy.”
Opening the House floor debate on Thursday, Democrats touted the historic nature of the legislation. Congressman John Yarmuth of Kentucky, the chair of the House budget panel, which played a critical role in shaping the package, said any single element of the bill by itself would be significant, but together they represented the “most consequential legislation for American families since the New Deal”. “It’s a hell of a bill,” he said. Democrats and Republicans sparred on the House floor over the economics of the plan. Republicans assailed it as reckless spending that would exacerbate the trend of rising inflation and slow economic growth. Democrats argued the opposite, that the bill would actually combat inflation while relieving many of the financial stressors Americans face, such as the cost of childcare and prescription drugs.
Though many of the bill’s initiatives remain broadly popular among voters, including among Republicans, boiling economic discontent have sent Biden’s approval ratings tumbling.
Facing daunting challenges in next year’s midterm elections, Democrats are hopeful that enacting Biden’s agenda in full will bring something of a reversal of fortunes for the party. But McCarthy, who hopes to be speaker if Republicans take back control of the House next year, predicted otherwise.
“Could she be the speaker in modern history, one of the few to lose the House twice and lose the most seats?” he said, breaking her record for the longest House floor speech in history. “I don’t know.”