Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont on Tuesday threw a wrench into congressional infrastructure negotiations — after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi derailed progressives' voting strategy.
Since June, when President Joe Biden reached a bipartisan deal in the Senate on a $1 trillion roads-and-bridges bill, he and Pelosi have vowed to bring it to a vote in the House at the same time as a $3.5 trillion party-line reconciliation bill. Pelosi's move on Tuesday blew up that strategy, and progressives are furious.
"I strongly urge my House colleagues to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Congress passes a strong reconciliation bill," the independent senator from Vermont wrote on Twitter.
—Bernie Sanders (@SenSanders) September 28, 2021
By calling on House progressives to vote against the basic package until the "human-infrastructure" plan passes the Senate through budget reconciliation, Sanders took the lead among progressive senators in urging Democrats' left wing in the House to hold firm and play hardball with the speaker. The stakes are huge, because if Democrats succeed in passing only one, they will leave much of Biden's agenda unpassed with midterm elections looming in a little over a year.
Progressive fury
For months, progressives have said they will torpedo any movement on the bipartisan package that comes without the reconciliation bill. Now that Democratic leaders seem to be doing just that, progressives are digging in.
Sanders is one of several to throw cold water on a stand-alone bipartisan infrastructure bill. Other progressives are also upset at Pelosi's move. Sen. Elizabeth Warren told reporters that "we had a deal," implying that Pelosi was backtracking on an agreement to hold joint votes.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said earlier on Tuesday that she would vote no unless she got "new information."
And Rep. Pramila Jayapal, the chair of the House Progressive Caucus, said in a statement: "We articulated this position more than three months ago, and today it is still unchanged: progressives will vote for both bills, but a majority of our members will only vote for the infrastructure bill after the President's visionary Build Back Better Act passes."
Not every Senate Democrat was upset with Pelosi.
"I trust Speaker Pelosi, she's the best speaker in my lifetime, and I don't give her advice," Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee, told Insider.
Others were still in favor of linking the bills.
"We need to make sure and have confidence that both measures" are traveling in tandem, Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland told Insider.
The Democratic disarray over a decoupled vote
Pelosi is reversing from a position she laid out in June linking the passage of the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Senate approving a larger social-spending bill in the fall. Now Pelosi plans to hold a vote on the former, with the latter far from materializing into a piece of legislation.
Biden also said the two would move in tandem, but he later walked back his comments that implied he'd veto a solo bipartisan bill.
The debate over the decoupling is the latest entry in the increasingly messy debate within the Democratic Party about how to move forward on infrastructure. Prominent moderates like Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema want the proposed $3.5 trillion in reconciliation spending to be pared down. Manchin has said he wants a "pause" on that larger package.
Meanwhile, in the background looms a government shutdown and a debt default, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell rejecting Democrats' request to raise the debt ceiling on their own.
Sanders reiterated that a deal had been struck between House and Senate Democrats on how the basic package would pass the lower chamber as long as senators pushed the more comprehensive version through by using filibuster-proof budget reconciliation.
"Let's be crystal clear," Sanders tweeted, using one of his signature phrases. "If the bipartisan infrastructure bill is passed on its own on Thursday, this will be in violation of an agreement that was reached within the Democratic Caucus in Congress."
He added: "More importantly, it will end all leverage that we have to pass a major reconciliation bill.
"That means there will be no serious effort to address the long-neglected crises facing the working families of our country, the children, the elderly, the sick and the poor."
Pelosi responded to Sanders' comments on Tuesday.
"Everybody has to do what they have to do and I respect that," she told reporters.
