Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced on Wednesday that he and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) had reached an agreement on a reconciliation bill that represents a pared-down version of President Biden's Build Back Better agenda.
Punchbowl News founder Jake Sherman reported that the reconciliation bill — which requires only 51 votes to pass — "deals with climate, energy, tax[es], and healthcare." According to The Washington Post, the legislation, known as the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, includes "roughly $433 billion in new investments, much of which is focused on climate change and energy production."
Manchin pulled out of a similar deal earlier this month, citing concerns that new climate spending could exacerbate the ongoing inflation crisis. That agreement represented a renewed attempt to pass key parts of BBB after Manchin said in December that he wouldn't vote for the whole package. According to The New York Times, this second failure infuriated Democrats, who had spent more than a year working to "scale back, water down, trim and tailor" the $1.75 trillion BBB agenda to "Manchin's exact specifications."
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On Monday, six Democratic staffers were arrested for protesting outside Schumer's office, urging him to bring Manchin back to the table.
In a statement released Wednesday, Manchin declared BBB "dead" once and for all. He also insisted that the Inflation Reduction Act would not "make the United States more dependent on foreign energy" or move "the country closer to the unstable and vulnerable European model of energy."
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