Speaker Nancy Pelosi hoped Oct. 28 would be the day she could finally push her party past the internal divisions that were holding up Democrats’ sweeping agenda.
But after a morning meeting with House Democrats where President Biden surprised her by not forcefully backing her call for a vote that day on an infrastructure bill while negotiations continued over a social spending package, Pelosi was searching for ways to keep her plan on track.
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This brought her unannounced to a meeting of the Congressional Progressive Caucus just before noon to check in on skeptical liberals who shared her desire to enact a bold agenda, if not always her strategy for getting there.
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After Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) finished speaking about where she stood, the group’s leader, Pramila Jayapal (Wash.), welcomed Pelosi and politely made it clear that this was a meeting where members hoped to speak candidly about the plan the speaker outlined in the morning. Pelosi said she was there to listen and sat down in the front row.
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Rep. Mark Takano (Calif.) then approached the microphones and became visibly emotional as he told Pelosi that after voting alongside her countless times over almost a decade in Congress, he could not support her push to hold a vote on the infrastructure bill without firmer commitments about the future of the social welfare legislation that is more important to liberals.
Soon after, Rep. Cori Bush (Mo.) spoke about her opposition to the speaker’s plan, and Pelosi quietly left the meeting less than 15 minutes after she arrived.
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The message was clear: Even Pelosi’s vaunted ability to keep her caucus in line would not be able to overcome intraparty divisions at this point.
Within hours, House Democratic leaders scuttled their plans for a vote, marking the end of a day in which Pelosi was undermined by a president who at times has seemed unsure about how to cajole lawmakers into action and in which her members — both moderates and liberals — openly defied her wishes.
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What’s in the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package
It marked a low point in her efforts to push the party’s sweeping agenda into law, but one she rebounded from when the House cleared the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package for Biden’s signature eight days later. House Democrats also reached a tenuous deal on legislation funding climate change, education and health-care programs — the so-called Build Back Better plan.
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That day also illustrated the challenges Pelosi will face in the weeks ahead as Democrats attempt to pass Biden’s $1.75 trillion social spending bill, the party’s signature policy initiative.
The unusually chaotic and messy process that has defined the recent negotiations has made clear the growing divisions in the Democratic caucus and leadership’s eroding power as members across feel empowered by the party’s razor-thin House majority to make demands or resist pressure to fall in line.
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Still, Democrats said they have faith in Pelosi’s ability to deliver. If she does, it would likely serve as a capstone to a career that is already one of the most significant in modern congressional history.
This account of how Pelosi has handled the negotiations over the party’s agenda and the challenges she faces when the House returns to Washington this week is based on interviews with people involved in the recent events and the continuing discussions about how to handle the debate ahead. Most spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private events and conversations.
Pelosi’s top priority going forward will be the same as it has been the previous few months — finding the sweet spot where moderates and liberals can agree on the social spending plan. And getting there will involve trekking down a treacherous path to the Senate and back.
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This week the House is set to vote on its version of the spending plan, which takes Biden’s framework and adds other top priorities for many Democrats, including paid family leave and provisions that would make it easier for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country.
Most Democrats in the House have agreed to pass the bill, but five moderates have also insisted on waiting until they get more information about the budgetary impact from Congress’s scorekeeper, the Congressional Budget Office.
That has led several liberals to publicly state their worry that these centrists will not abide by their promise to vote for the bill if the numbers don’t come back to their liking.
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“It’s hard to actually believe them,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). “They’ve really messed up this process.”
For Democrats and the Biden agenda, it’s becoming a matter of trust
Overcoming the lack of trust between the feuding moderates and liberals will be a chief challenge for Pelosi and her leadership team.
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“This is new for this process where there were clearly some different thought processes for the different groups and they were locked in and identifying themselves by those,” Rep. Brenda Lawrence (D-Mich.) said. “So this is going to be a defining moment for us as a party to build the trust among us. So God help us, I hope we never have to go through this practice or this process again.”
If the House passes the bill, it is all but certain to be scaled back in the Senate, where centrist Democrats Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) have made clear certain provisions favored by the House do not pass muster with them. This includes a month of paid leave for the birth of a child or a family illness.
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Some of the policies in the bill may also have to be stripped for technical reasons. Because Democrats are using a special budgetary process known as reconciliation that prohibits filibusters in the Senate, the legislation can contain only policies whose primary effect is on spending and tax levels.
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The Senate parliamentarian has already said changes to immigration law don’t meet this criteria.
Also on Pelosi’s list of problems to address: Several House Democrats in tight races are upset that they will be asked to do what Pelosi said they would not — voting on a bill that will be changed by the Senate. In their view, it’s a pointless exercise because they will vote for provisions — such as changes to the immigration system — that won’t ultimately make it into law and that Republicans will use to attack them during the campaign.
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Adding to the anxieties for House liberals, meanwhile, is recent data showing inflation is on the rise and whether that will spook moderates already concerned that too much government spending is jacking up prices on a range of goods. Manchin has already chimed in with a word of caution.
“From the grocery store to the gas pump, Americans know the inflation tax is real and DC can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day,” he tweeted Nov. 10.
As she navigates this bewildering bicameral briar patch, members are privately calling into question one of the tools that Pelosi has long used but that has proved ineffective at times in recent weeks: setting deadlines.
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On numerous occasions, the speaker said votes had to occur by a certain time, only to watch her members shrug off her schedule and stick to their conflicting positions.
“The best way to motivate action is through deadlines. Now, of course, the downside to that is your credibility. At some point it is undermined because you continually are missing these deadlines,” said one House Democrat close to the process.
Those closest to Pelosi say deadlines are necessary to move the process forward, some of them were not arbitrary given that funding for routine transportation programs was set to expire at the end of September and October.
“Part of the job of a speaker — and it’s the hallmark of what Pelosi always does — is pressure. Pressure necessitates deadline,” one senior Democratic aide said. “If you’ve never set a deadline, you never get anything done. Right or left, hostage-taking is not something we can allow to happen in our caucus and sustain our majority. ”
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Also at issue is Pelosi’s working relationship with Biden and whether they can act in tandem to enact the party’s agenda.
After months of setbacks, Biden finally gets long-sought win on infrastructure
What frustrated Pelosi and her leadership team the most in recent weeks, according to numerous aides, was Biden’s failure to call for a vote when he visited Capitol Hill on Oct. 28. It led to an awkward moment that was emblematic of the chaotic nature of recent negotiations: The speaker stood up toward the end of the meeting to tell her members that the president had asked for their votes to pass the infrastructure bill that day, and some members blurted out, “No, he didn’t!”
Democratic House leaders thought that if he had, it would have influenced the holdouts who sank the plan.
Both sides worked to repair the rift in the days following that debacle.
Biden and Pelosi spoke daily ahead of the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill on Nov. 6. And as the wheeling and dealing created a seesaw effect, as pleasing one group lost the votes of another, Pelosi decided to ask Biden to intervene.
While she worked the phones for hours on Nov. 6 in the “Gold Room” just off the floor, sitting in a black chair with a list of wavering members in her lap, it became clear they were close to success but still lacking the votes.
She asked Biden to do what he had not before: call for a vote on his agenda that day. He soon released a statement that did.
Later, Biden called into a meeting of liberals who still remained skeptical of a plan that called for enacting an infrastructure bill while only incrementally advancing an agreement on a framework for the economic and social spending bill that was their top priority.
Jayapal said the president’s message was direct.
“Let’s move forward, because if we don’t, the BIF could have gone down tonight. The Build Back Better Act would have also probably gone down,” she said, using the acronym for the infrastructure package.
That call helped kick off a negotiating session that resulted in liberals and moderates putting out statements affirming they supported both bills. Moderates got liberals to vote for the infrastructure package, and liberals got a promise that moderates would vote for the social spending plan no later than the week of Nov. 15.
In this case, Pelosi allowed her members to do much of the face-to-face negotiating. Liberal Reps. Joe Neguse (Colo.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.) met with moderate holdouts and shuttled between that meeting and Pelosi to give her updates on where members stood. Liberal Reps. David N. Cicilline (R.I.), Sheila Jackson Lee (Tex.) and Mondaire Jones (N.Y.) all huddled in the office of Stephanie Murphy (Fla.), alongside moderates Kathleen Rice (N.Y.), Kurt Schrader (Ore.) and Ed Case (Hawaii) to advise Josh Gottheimer (N.J.) on how to write the moderates’ statement on his laptop.
The expectations game hounds Democrats as they try to deliver their vast agenda
Moments after the infrastructure bill passed right before midnight that Friday, Biden called Pelosi for the fourth time that day and congratulated her for sending the bill to his desk. She thanked him for his efforts as well.
“I want to say that our success on the infrastructure bill is a tribute to President Biden. He really made the difference,” Pelosi said as she left the floor after the bill passed. “It was a lot of work to move people, to make them aware of what it was and the rest. But in the end, all along, but especially at the end, his strong message is what carried the day.”
But those good feelings may not last as Democrats try to finish what they started earlier this month, in what many members hope will be a far less chaotic and politically damaging process.
“I think we kind of got victory from the jaws of defeat, but I hope we never have to do that again,” said Pocan, a leading liberal. “Instead, everyone, maybe, talks a little more ahead of time and realizes we’re closer than we think and not have to do it on the spur of the moment like that.”
Mike DeBonis and Sean Sullivan contributed to this report.