(TheRedWire.com) – One minute, the House is going to vote on the Senate’s bipartisan infrastructure bill, and the next moment it’s not. That seems to be an emerging pattern coming from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). In August, Pelosi offered Moderates a concession: if they would vote to move reconciliation forward, Pelosi promised a vote for the bipartisan infrastructure deal would happen on September 27, independent of the $3.5 reconciliation proposal.
"In the meantime, there was this 'Oh my god, we can't go to that number,'" Pelosi said, invoking the Senate holdouts. "Well that completely sets off the timetable." https://t.co/gktLhmzzmp
— The Hill (@thehill) September 29, 2021
On Monday, the House was supposed to vote based on the Speaker’s agreement with the Centrists. However, the Left forced her to move the vote to Thursday. Pelosi is vacillating now that the Left is threatening to vote against the bill because the Senate can’t seem to pass a reconciliation proposal. She stormed out of a meeting, blaming Senate Moderates for disrupting her timeline. She could break her promise with House Moderates, forcing the House to reschedule the bipartisan vote again.
Both House Moderates and the Left are threatening to withhold their votes. If the Left doesn’t get the reconciliation bill passed first, it won’t vote on the bipartisan proposal. The Moderates say they will not vote for the reconciliation bill if the Left uses the bipartisan proposal as leverage. In either case, both bills would die.
Pelosi is in the middle of a brutal civil war between the far-Left and Moderate factions in her party. With Democrats holding only a three-vote margin in the House, there’s no wiggle room. The Speaker needs every Democrat to vote in approval of both bills. It’s proving to be more challenging than Pelosi hoped it would become.
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