Setback
With any bill that’s trying to be passed, there are going to be multiple setbacks. The infrastructure bill saw multiple cuts before it was officially passed by the Senate. When Republicans were trying to cut Obamacare a couple of years ago, a surprise vote by Senator John McCain ended that. Setbacks are a part of politics, whether you like it or not, but it’s often disappointing to the politicians who are fighting for it. The Democrats received that first-hand, and it’s not Joe Manchin.
Like we said last week, the Democratic Party is trying to pass a climate and antipoverty bill that amounts to 3.5 trillion dollars. More specifically, they are trying to do this through budget reconciliation, which allows them to pass a certain amount of budget bills with 50 votes only. One part of the plan is to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, with the logic being that it expands the social safety net, which is one of the main goals of the bill to begin with. However, the Senate Parliamentarian decided that this could not be implemented in the bill, and you might be wondering why? Like we mentioned earlier, this is going through the process of budget reconciliation, and one of the rules is that the change needs to have a bigger impact on the budget than policy in general. In this case, she decided that the policy change was greater, and that makes sense in this situation. It’s likely that they will include this clause in another bill, but it complicates things for the Democrats because they could’ve gotten it done here. Did you know about this budget rule?
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