Joe Biden’s agenda in Congress is now on the rocks.
After losing out on efforts to pack the courts and abolish the filibuster, Biden just suffered yet another political defeat.
And this time, it’s his top agenda item that’s going down in flames.
Joe Biden is wrapping up 2021 with yet another major political defeat.
After failing to pass nearly a single major piece of legislation this entire year, the Democrat-controlled Congress is now set to kill Biden’s own Build Back Better bill, which would have gone down in history as the most expensive piece of legislation in American history.
But far short of getting to Biden’s desk, it appears that BBB is now permanently stuck in Congress with no hope of passage.
The Washington Times reports, “Senate Democrats, frustrated with a lack of progress on President Biden’s mammoth social welfare and climate bill, are talking about blowing up the filibuster rules again to force through a partisan overhaul of the country’s election laws.
Democrats want to close out their first year in the Senate majority with at least another major domestic policy win for the White House. Their best bet for reaching that goal is by mobilizing momentum for an overhaul of the nation’s voting laws, especially as Mr. Biden’s $1.75 trillion Build Back Better Act has in recent days.”
Democrats are now panicking that they’ve spent the past 11 months failing to pass anything short of the infrastructure package that was passed shortly after Biden took over in January.
Which means the recent pivot to passing something related to elections and voting is now being driven by a fear that Democrats will soon be wasting their entire congressional majorities on nothing, unless they act soon.
“I think there’s a universal view in our caucus that we need to get something done,” said Senate Democrat Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Yet that’s exactly what seems to be happening.
Not only is BBB effectively defeated for the remainder of this Congress, but it ended up being Democrats who killed the bill, namely West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.
Yet even a renewed push to pass a Left-wing Voting Rights Act seems unlikely to pass, as Democrats would almost certainly need to abolish the filibuster in order to pass it, and Arizona Democrat Senator Kyrsten Sinema has already torpedoed such efforts.
Politico reports, “The Arizona moderate is making clear that she intends to keep protecting the Senate’s 60-vote requirement on most legislation and she isn’t ready to entertain changing rules to pass sweeping elections or voting legislation with a simple majority. Her Democratic colleagues have been discussing those revisions as they weigh dropping their focus on President Joe Biden’s $1.7 trillion climate and social spending bill and pivoting to voting rights, though it’s not clear that avenue will be any more successful.”
Without Sinema’s vote to abolish the filibuster, it’s unlikely that Schumer will be able to get much of anything passed through the Senate, which means very little could end up going to Biden’s desk before next year’s midterm elections.