One or more panelists on ABC’s “This Week” could be heard audibly sighing when host Jonathan Karl announced that Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV) had promised to vote “no” on President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill, effectively killing the legislation.
After ABC’s Jon Karl breaks the news that Joe Manchin is a “firm no” on Build Back Better, there were audible sighs from the mostly liberal “powerhouse roundtable” panel. pic.twitter.com/qyMh803XtM
— Nicholas Fondacaro (@NickFondacaro) December 19, 2021
“By the way, some breaking news,” Karl began. “Senator Manchin has just said that he is a firm ‘no’ on this legislation.”
At least one of the panelists could be heard sighing in the background as Karl made the announcement, and he turned the question to Politico Playbook’s Rachel Bade — who had previously said that Build Back Better would pass, it was just a matter of when that would happen.
“I think it’s time to reassess that prognosis,” Bade replied, adding, “Clearly, they’ve got a big problem here on a number of issues. Number one, they sort of lost their greatest forcing mechanism to get this done, that was the Christmas deadline.”
Manchin announced his decision to vote “no” on the behemoth spending package during an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” saying that he could not justify voting for anything that would exacerbate inflation or that he felt he could not adequately explain to his constituents when he went home to West Virginia.
The White House responded almost immediately with a scathing rebuke from Press Secretary Jen Psaki, who accused Manchin of reversing his position and breaching commitments he had made — both to President Joe Biden and other members of the Democratic Party — with regard to continued negotiations.
Members of the House Progressive Caucus also responded quickly, saying that Manchin’s refusal to vote for the spending package was the reason they had been so insistent on tying it to the bipartisan infrastructure package.
“When a handful of us in the House warned this would happen if Dem leaders gave Manchin everything he wanted 1st by moving BIF before BBB instead of passing together, many ridiculed our position. Maybe they’ll believe us next time. Or maybe people will just keep calling us naïve,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said in a tweet-thread.
“Either way, we cannot accept no for an answer. Dem leadership – incl but not limited to the President himself and House Dem leadership – wrote a massive check on their credibility the night of the BIF vote in order to secure the votes they needed, *promising* passage of BBB…” she continued, adding, “To every member who brought up Manchin, they personally promised they had a solution & BBB would pass. It is simply not an option for Dem leaders to walk from BBB, voting rights, etc. They must find a way, just as they promised they would when we raised this inevitability.”
“We, as always, are here to fight for this agenda. What matters most to us is that it gets done. But we cannot just shrug our shoulders and accept this as some Charlie Brown moment. Our entire democracy is on the line. So we need to get back in there & get this sh*t done. Period,” she concluded.