trillion covid bill in january and february and signed into law in march, and the white house was able to use the urgency of the moment and the freshness of a new administration to get democrats all onboard with the reconciliation package and have something to tout as far as an early win for the administration. now it s a much different situation, both the economy is showing signs of rebounding, and the coronavirus is in something of a little retreat at least in the u.s., and the white house sees two tracks here for movg an infrastructure bill, and the president wants to do something bipartisan if possible, and then they have the backup of the democrats only path. you are already hearing some republicans that want to be part of the bipartisan group say if you are only going to follow that up by pushing through an even bigger $6 trillion reconciliation measure, maybe
they re meeting with the problem solvers caucus in the house today. senators portman and sinema meeting with a group in the house and they re going to brief them on that, which you need to do if you re going to go anywhere. the question, like you said in your setup, can they get to 60? if you can get a substantial number of republicans, say for argument s sake, 20 or 25, if there s a deal, can you bring 35 democrats? i think there s a possibility of that. but the democrats would have to know that there s still going to be a separate vote on a reconciliation measure on these social problems, on president biden s social programs they really want. i don t think you can have one without the other. this is going to be a complicated maneuver here. but there s a possibility. there s a chance it s going to happen. it seems much more likely this morning than yesterday morning when we were talking about this topic.
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all right, we re going to be willing to work with a united republican front trying to get some leverage to shape deals the way we want. if the republicans aren t together the democrats can hang back and point to the republicans saying they can t govern. they re too conservative. unless they get their unity we won t go along. jon: despite the numbers that they hold, the democrats have had very little leverage especially in the senate where you will be looking at a 51-49 split. the republicans were still able to manage to get this tax reform bill through on as a reconciliation measure which allowed them to do it on a straight party line vote. that s exactly true. infrastructure will not be able to be debated under those rules. without getting too far down in the weeds reconciliation is only for the idea is for pure budget bills to oversimplify a little bit.
is for those block grants to be either completely removed or to at least be cut back some. in terms of what might happen going forward with the senate if they can get it done this time around, they may seek another reconciliation measure and get it down after september 30th, but senator mitch mcconnell warning on the floor just a little while ago that if they don t get a republican repeal bill, the democratic idea may start to catch hold. in a debate last night, bernie sanders was against pushing the idea of a single-payer system. listen here. speak out no matter what you call it at its core, here s what it is. a massive expansion of a failed idea quadrupling down on the failures of obamacare. a totally government run system that would rip health insurance plans away from even more americans and take away even more of their personal health care decisions. where the smart money is now is that graham-cassidy will likely fail.