Two factions of the Democratic Party in Congress are currently playing tug-of-war over the centerpieces of President Biden’s legislative agenda. Moderate Democrats have balked at the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation budget bill, attempting to delay a vote on it in the House and insisting that the price tag will have to come down in the Senate. At the same time, House progressives have threatened to block a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill unless the reconciliation bill passes first — with the current price tag intact. (The House is scheduled to vote on the infrastructure bill on Thursday.)
But it’s easy to blow these disagreements out of proportion. On one hand, they are certainly relevant in that they threaten to derail two potentially transformative pieces of legislation. But they do not mean that Democrats are a hopelessly — or even significantly — divided party. Instead, it’s really the narrowness of Democrats’ congressional majorities that makes passing big legislation difficult, as even a small number of defectors can make the difference in a bill passing or failing.
Read more at:
Why House Democrats May Be More United Than They Seem | FiveThirtyEight
Showing posts with label Progressives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Progressives. Show all posts
10/2/21
5/15/20
USA - Democrats Presidential elections: The fight is on for progressives to push Biden to the left. They might just win
Joe Biden has had a hard time to capture the minds of progressive Democrats. Like the media, progressive
Democrats tend to see him as a centrist – a status quo candidate who
just wants to return the US and the world to the pre-Trump era.
Even
Biden’s collaborations with Bernie Sanders, including the recently
announced unity taskforces,
are often dismissed as pure window-dressing. But this kind of blithe
dismissal of the presumptive Democratic nominee misreads both the
politician and the times.
It is true that Biden
was never a very progressive Democrat, but neither was he a
particularly conservative one. He has been a classic “centrist
Democrat”. But it’s important to note that this places him not in the
political center of the US electorate, but in the center of the
Democratic party – a party that has shifted left significantly since
2016, as has Biden.
Read more at:
The fight is on for progressives to push Biden to the left. They might just win | Joe Biden | The Guardian
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