their terms. we have heard president biden say they re not giving me a number. what is the number, what exactly defines those terms that you say? well, again, you need to get joe manchin and sinema on the show to ask them that question, like i said, i m ready to support a reconciliation bill. i m ready to vote tomorrow for the infrastructure. these two bills make up, they make up joe biden s agenda. i want to support the joe biden agenda, and we are going to do that. we are in a legislative process. people need to understand this is what happens in the legislative process. it s what we do every year and every day. okay. so you say you are ready to vote on that reconciliation bill. you will vote for $3.5 trillion in spending? no, i did not say that. okay. what number are you comfortable with. look, i m not going to good enough you a number. all i m going to tell you is we support a bipartisan, somebody
that is we are at the end of the fiscal year. right. the infrastructure/spending stuff, the only reason it has to be happen is because of an agreement they thought they could patch together between, you know, the moderates and the progressives, as long as everyone agrees to extend it, they could keep talking. the question is more time going to get them closer to where they are now. phil, we talk about this as threatening president biden s agenda. isn t it also threatening his reelection. i mean, what we just heard there, from congressman cuellar, i was around in 2010 with obamacare, he thought they were punished and democrats lost seats, and it was too big. he wasn t going to make that mistake again. it threatens the democrats majority, president biden s reelection, am i overstating it? no, i think the reality is this is the agenda the president campaigned on. this is the agenda most democrats who won in 2020 campaigned on as well, and if this domestic agenda falls apart
i support health care, i support education, i want to make sure we fight, you know, the problem with climate change. i want to do all of that, but were you and i in that room, somebody came up with $3.5 trillion, i don t know who came up with that number. if you can tell me, please tell me who came up with that number. so it sounds like you have a long way to go, so should the vote tomorrow no, no, no. should the vote tomorrow be postponed? no, of course not. you know, the people think that making this part of joe biden s agenda a historic $1.2 trillion, knocking that down, is that going to be helpful to the president, no, do people think that if we knock down that bill tomorrow that s going to get people closer to each other? no, it doesn t. we got to understand that we got to work together. i want to vote for the reconciliation. we ve got to have a number that passes 50 democrats on the senate side, and of course the
these are really important items that we re talking about here. i mean, the politics are hard to be sure. but the payoff is going to be immense, if they can, in fact, get infrastructure bill, that s roads and bridges and traditional infrastructure. but some of the expanded ideas that the president campaigned on. and, amara, the real politics here that are going to matter is that the president made several promises on the campaign trail. and they weren t just about bipartisanship. that s the thing that we all like to focus on and talk about, but he also made some promises to move the country forward. he made promises to make key investments in slices of the country that voted for him in a big, big way. so, he s got to come through, there s a progressive wing and a progressive base to the democratic party, they are expecting him to make good on his promises to actually tax the wealthy. to tax some of the profits that major corporations have made overseas and bring some of that money back
straight face. so this idea, though, that they ve sort of tied a hand behind their own back. they said this morning, and i m sure they feel good about it because the president feels good about staging a tv production this morning. but he s laid down some structural dee f structural defin sis for the sbierp republican party by saying i m not doing anything until i m not under investigation. he s going to be under investigation until his dieing breath. this was something that the president campaigned on. he was talking about a $1 trillion infrastructure package when steve bannon was running his campaign. by saying i m not going to move forward with this, he is saying i m not going to move forward with something that is, in fact, one of my major campaign promises, something he talked about repeatedly, devoted weeks we laugh about infrastructure weeks being held over and over again.