Pelosi Struggles to Stare Down Rebellion in Her Caucus

CLAY: Nancy Pelosi just finished her press conference on Capitol Hill, and she was asked whether or not she is going to be bringing the infrastructure bill to the House floor today or not — and, so far, she has refused to answer. She’s hoping she’ll be able to do it. Here’s Nancy Pelosi talking about the infrastructure decision.

PELOSI: I trust the president of the United States. And again, (sputtering) the text is out there if they have some — anybody, any Senator, any House member has some — suggestions about where their comfort level is or their dismay might be, then (sputters) we welcome that. But I — I trust the president of the United States. Uh, we will — we have… All the things I named, we have agreement on most of those things. Now, when people see the language they may say, “Well, this goes further than I thought.” I don’t know. We’ll see what they say back. But we are within range on — on — on th-those things. There are some things are not in that I, frankly, have not given up on.

CLAY: So that is Pelosi discussing this issue. Now, this has got a rebellion inside of her own caucus, in particular Representative Cori Bush. You may remember that she was the representative who got Joe Biden to put forward an unconstitutional eviction moratorium by effectively camping out on the Capitol steps. She said she’s been bamboozled, and she doesn’t believe that the Democratic leadership has been negotiating in good faith. Here is what Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, said.

BUSH: If a — a vote on the bill is held on the bill today, I’m a “no.” That has not changed. Ummm, we… I have held — held steady, uhhhm, with what we talked about as progressives. Uh, at least some of the Progressive Caucus up until now, saying that we need both, uh, bills to arrive together, and, uh, we don’t have that right now.

Also, I felt a little bamboozled because was not — this was not what I thought was coming today. (sigh) Uhm, and one thing that I said — and the speaker knows how I feel at this point. Um, also, what I — and I — and I keep thinking about we are supposed to trust. Trust. Our trust has to be in two senators that have not, in my opinion, been ver — been good-faith actors up until this point.

CLAY: Okay. So what’s going on here is an internal civil war for the Democratic Party over whether or not they’re going to be able to pass two signature platforms of the Joe Biden administration. One is infrastructure, which has already passed the Senate. The other is the Build Back Better bill, the budget reconciliation bill that initially was gonna cost $3.5 trillion, according to the math that is out there. It’s now down to around one seven or one-eight trillion, cut in half.

The two senators that Cori Bush, the Democratic congresswoman in the House are referencing are West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema. So there is a bit of a stare-down going on right now on Capitol Hill. The progressives in the House — The Squad, the AOC crew, Cori Bush, who you just heard from — are saying this bill doesn’t go far enough in terms of being left wing enough, the Bernie budget bill that now has been sliced down.

And as a result, they are threatening to not support infrastructure. The fear here — and again it really is a stare-down between the moderates and the progressives inside of the Democratic caucus — is once the infrastructure bill passes the House, the fear is that Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are then going to say, “You know what? I don’t support the budget reconciliation bill anymore because infrastructure got through.

“Let’s pause here, because inflation is skyrocketing to such an extent,” this is Joe Manchin’s argument, “that the government doesn’t need to be spending more money right now,” and that to me seem like a pretty solid argument when you’re looking around at the Dollar Store can’t even sell products from dollar anymore — dollar cost, by the way.

McDonald’s today announced that they’ve had to increase prices nationwide by 6%. Six percent. That’s just a symptom of what’s going on with inflation across the country. The more dollars you print, the more guaranteed money you give out, the less value a dollar has. This is basic economics. Remember being a kid and sitting around and hearing everybody talk about the budget deficit? I remember that as a kid 8, 9, 10 years old.

And I just remember sitting around and thinking, “How can there ever be a budget deficit when the government can always just print more money?” And then I remember asking my parents about it, ’cause I didn’t understand the concept of inflation. And I said, “Why can’t the government just print as much money as they need to in order to pay off whatever the debt is?”

My dad said, “Well, there’s something called inflation, and if you print too much money, then you’re going to end up with every dollar being worth a lot less, and eventually, you end up causing more problems to your country through inflation than you would paying for the debt that exists out there.” And guess what? The Democratic economic policies are basically the same right now that I thought when I was 8, 9, or 10 years old and didn’t understand inflation.

You think when you’re a young kid that there’s a magical money tree and you can always shake that money tree and the dollars are gonna come falling down. You think that the government can make it rain forever — dollars, pennies from heaven — and there’s no impact. And that’s why most of the Democratic left is arguing right now. And the unfortunate part of this is that the people who end up bearing the costs there are paying a default tax.

A lot of you out there know exactly what I’m talking about every time you pull up at the gas pump and you’re paying near-decade high prices on gas. When McDonald’s is costing 6% more, when the New York Times has a front-page article saying this is going to be the most expensive Thanksgiving meal ever because everything that you’re gonna buy — from a turkey to cranberries to stuffing, all of it — is gonna cast way more than it ever has before because of Biden-era inflation.

And that’s what Joe Manchin is saying. And that’s what’s only, in my opinion, going to get worse if suddenly we throw over a trillion dollars into infrastructure and then we ladle on top of it over a trillion dollars on government spending on the budget reconciliation bill and we combine it with all of the covid relief spending that we already have. The idea that the government spending more money is going to have a positive impact on inflation is flagrantly anti-basic economics.

You can’t run the printing presses forever and just keep giving people more money without prices increasing everywhere where you start to defeat the entire purpose — which is where we are right now — of your entire domestic economic agenda. I just wish there were more people in the Democratic Party with a basic — just basic — understanding of economics who didn’t think about money spending like I did when I was 8 or 9 or 10 years old, or like a lot of your kids do right now when you try to explain to ’em why McDonald’s is costing way more, why the gas tank costs a lot more to fill up, and why every single thing that you buy in the grocery store for Thanksgiving is going to lead to a record-high cost for a Thanksgiving meal.