Since the Democratic Senator’s from West Virginia and the Senator from Arizona have final veto power over Biden legislation?
The President and House Democrats had better listen and give these two wat ‘they’ want if they want something to get passed…
With Republican Senator’s united against most things from the Democratic House?….
Manchin and to some extent Sinema set the agenda…..
Not Senate Majority leader Schumer or President Biden….
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who torpedoed President Biden’s Build Back Better agenda at the end of last year, on Wednesday laid out a dramatically scaled down version that he says he could vote for under the special budget reconciliation process.
Manchin said he could support a reconciliation package that reforms the tax code and lowers the cost of prescription drugs if the money raised is split between spending on new climate change proposals and deficit reduction and fighting inflation.
The West Virginia senator clarified he hasn’t made any formal counterproposal to the White House but is sketching the outlines of a proposal that he could support along with the rest of the Senate Democratic Caucus.
Whatever Manchin ultimately agrees to would have a different name than the Build Back Better Act, which he said in December he couldn’t support.
“There’s not a proposal, there’s just a conversation,” he said of informal talks with White House officials.
“It just makes all the sense in the world. The one thing that we as Democrats all agreed on was the 2017 tax cuts were weighted unfairly. So if you want to fix the tax cuts and make everyone pay their fair share, whether it’s the very wealthiest or the corporations that pay nothing — I think the president identified that last night — then you have to fix the tax code,” he said.
“Then you find out what revenues you have from that if you fix it,” he added.
Manchin also said there is broad agreement among Democrats on passing legislation to reduce the cost of prescription drugs and suggested that modeling a program on what the Department of Veterans Affairs does to negotiate lower prices for military veterans would be a good idea….