would go with the build back better agenda and the bill. president biden. vice president harris and staff went up to the residents in the white house and started to call progressives and conjoeling them in to actually passing it. the american people needed to see action. the bill was ready to go and to be sent to the president s desk. you had vice president harris calling progressives, the president calling progressives and the congressional progressive caucus put out a statement saying we are ready to go. you have six hold outs. cortez, omar and other others. you saw 13 republicans voting in favor of it. the hold outs did not matter as much as we thought. the president and everywhere trying to push progressives. there are a couple of things everyone knows. whatever the build back better
bills to pass simultaneously. they re both part of his agenda. so progressives were just standing up for what this white house wanted. if the white house wanted infrastructure to pass separately, they could have done that. they could have started calling progressives, the speaker could have started whipping on that. i didn t get a single call from the white house, the speaker, from the majority leader. the vast majority of the caucus understood this. there were a few under a misguided impression that the white house or the speaker somehow wanted infrastructure to pass. they ve now seen the reality with the president being very explicit on friday. okay. so what about this, your democratic colleague josh gottheimer, one of the leading moderates, has also put a statement. he says, we cannot let this small faction on the far left who employee freedom caucus tactics as described by the new york times today destroy the president s agenda and stop the creation of 2 million jobs a year. i
going to put into this. is he going to start calling progressives, is he going to make sure that folks are coming to the white house, meeting with him, making it clear that this is his agenda, and, yes, they are hoping to get to the bigger bill, but not yet. meanwhile, this is all happening within that backdrop of the government shutdown that is looming. and i think that has been a major thing this week, because as the end of the day if the bipartisan infrastructure bill doesn t pass, nothing happens to the country per se in the immediate aftermath. if the government funding bill doesn t pass you have a government shutdown. last night in the senate, there was that vote that republicans blocked that would have increased the country s borrowing limit and funded the government to mid-december. now, of course, we know that there is going to be a question of how quickly democrats can move in the senate to try to do this as a stand alone bill, will it pass, can they accidentally fall into a