The reversal of the centrist senator Joe Manchin should allow the party of Joe Biden to vote on a text which taxes the richest, reduces the costs of health care and invests massively in the defense of the climate.
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A word has returned to the language of American Democrats: optimism. For the first time in months, Joe Biden’s camp has a smile. A divine surprise on their own on July 27, when Charles Schumer and Joe Manchin, the two tenors of the Senate who negotiated for months to save from clinical death the Build Back Better of the President, the central building of his mandate, announced that they had reached an agreement – 103 days from the general elections of November 8.
If it is adopted by Congress, this plan, opportunely renamed inflation ACT, law on the reduction of inflation, will allow Democrats to assert voters that they have filled their electoral promises to reduce the cost Health care, tax the rich and invest massively in the fight against climate change.
The announcement of the agreement by Charles Schumer, the leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, took the political class of Court. Until then, Joe Manchin, the centrist senator of Western Virginia, the “president bis”, as the left nicknamed, exasperated by his obstructionism, opposed the plan, too progressive on the climate or the energy. With Arizona senator, Kyrsten Sinema, also opposed to the increase in taxes, he had in fact “killed” Build Back Better.
Compromise
two weeks ago Joe Manchin, elected from a state that Donald Trump won 40 points ahead in 2020, had once again retreated before the obstacle, saying that he was “unequivocal” Opposed to the increase in the taxes provided by the text.
No one knows what prompted him to change his mind. The senator assured that his requests had been in satisfied games and that the plan had been transformed into an anti-inflation tool. He obtained measures to reduce the deficit and defense of “all energy sources”, including coal, oil and gas. Progressive activists, who had published the amount of his fortune and claimed that it be removed from the presidency of the Energy Commission, have attributed the merit of this reversal. The interested party said he was indeed “ostracized”. For the Politico site, he offered another explanation: the Democrats being threatened to lose the majority at the Congress in November – and therefore all hope of reform – he felt obliged to find a compromise.
The press raised tortuous scenarios. A secret agreement between the two senators – one just out of the COVVI -19, the other diagnosed positive during the negotiations – would have allowed them to succeed in bypassing the vigilance of the leader of the Republicans, Mitch McConnell, yet master in the procedural alchemy of the Senate.
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