Closing summary
After more than a year of negotiations, was today the beginning of the end for Democrats’ long-running effort to pass a spending bill improving America’s social services? It very well may have been, after Senator Joe Manchin nixed provisions to raise taxes and fight climate change, and President Joe Biden called on Democrats to pass a narrow agreement that would lower drug costs and extend health insurance subsidies.
Here’s what else happened today:
- Democrats in the House passed two bills to preserve access to abortion nationwide, but they are unlikely to pass the Senate due to Republican opposition.
-
Biden fist bumped Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman after arriving in the country, drawing a rebuke from The Washington Post’s publisher. Jamal Khashoggi, who was murdered in an operation US intelligence concluded the crown prince approved, wrote for the newspaper. The president later said he brought up Khashoggi’s murder with MBS.
- Peter Navarro, a former top advisor to Donald Trump, declined a plea deal from federal prosecutors over his refusal to cooperate with the January 6 committee.
- A House committee announced it would take up a Democratic proposal to ban assault weapons.
- A deposition of Donald Trump and his children was postponed due to the death of his first wife Ivana Trump.
- A Georgia district attorney has warned some Republicans lawmakers in the state that they could be indicted for their role in helping Donald Trump overturn the results of the 2020 election.
In Riyadh, Joe Biden was also asked about Joe Manchin’s apparent torpedoing of Democrats’ attempt to pass spending legislation targeting the climate crisis, healthcare and other party priorities before the midterm elections.
Asked for “your message to those Americans right now who were looking for that relief that would have a wide impact as it affects the climate and energy specifically”, the president said: “I’m not going away. I’m using every power I have as president to continue to fulfill my pledge to move toward dealing with global warming.”
On his way out of the short and slightly testy briefing, Biden was asked if he thought Manchin, a West Virginia Democrat who has nonetheless stymied his party’s agenda over and over again, had been “negotiating in good faith” over the spending deal and its climate-related provisions.
“I didn’t negotiate with Joe Manchin,” Biden said.
It’s true that Manchin has been talking to Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic Senate majority leader, this time.
It’s also true that Manchin has an outsized influence on Democratic policy priorities in the 50-50 Senate and has been at the centre of almost every legislative drama since Biden took back the White House.
In their book Peril, about the end of Trump and the beginning of Biden, Bob Woodward and Robert Costa of the Washington Post devote considerable space to Manchin’s machinations around the $1.9tn Covid relief package Biden got through in March 2021.
At one point, they write, Biden told the senator: “Joe, please don’t kill my bill.”
He didn’t. That time.
More:
