Democrats seek to pass Biden’s $2.3 trillion jobs plan, combined with a $1.8 trillion families plan, in July, giving them a matter of weeks to get united behind both a strategy and a bill that can make it through the House and the Senate, where they hold razor-thin majorities.
Senate Democrats, publicly and in closed-door caucus meetings, have debated the best path forward, amid mounting frustration that the party is repeating the Obama-era playbook: Holding out, and eating up precious time, waiting for a deal that can win over enough Republicans.
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Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) during a CNN interview on Sunday didn’t rule out finding a deal with Republicans, but pledged that Democrats wouldn’t scuttle Biden’s larger plan.
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“I have heard him [Biden] say with Republicans in the room, let's figure out what we can agree on, on infrastructure. Let's see if we can come to a reasonable amount of money to get that work done, but I have no intention of abandoning the rest of my vision about the better — building back better,” Pelosi vowed.
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A group of 10 consensus-minded senators, evenly split between the two parties, unveiled their own plan late last week that they are now trying to shop to their colleagues and win the support of the White House.
The framework, spearheaded by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio), includes roughly $579 billion in new spending, for a total of roughly $973 billion over five years or $1.2 trillion over eight years.
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The group is floating repurposing coronavirus relief funds as a way to help pay for the proposal, something that’s previously sparked Democratic opposition. They had been expected to propose indexing the gas tax to inflation, but Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a member of the group, indicated that they had dropped that.
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But the proposal has faced a lukewarm reception from both the White House and Senate Democrats.
"Over the last 18 hours, I've had the chance to discuss the new bipartisan infrastructure proposal with a number of the Senators who developed it and with other colleagues and I look forward to more in-depth conversations in the coming days,” Sen. Tom Carper (D-Del.) said in a statement.
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Andrew Bates, the White House deputy press secretary, also said late last week that White House staff had been briefed.
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The bipartisan group is facing pressure from members of the Senate Democratic caucus, who are getting antsy about letting infrastructure drag out as they get deeper into the legislative year without a clear path forward.
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Though Senate Democrats have largely sidestepped criticizing their colleagues publicly, the jabs from House Democrats are growing sharper.
"I do think that we need to talk about the elephant in the room, which is Senate Democrats which are blocking crucial items in a Democratic agenda for reasons that I don't think hold a lot of water,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) told CNN.
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