The House is ready to vote on President Joe Biden’s signature care economy and infrastructure proposals Friday. Maybe. While the first vote of the day (a Republican nuisance motion to adjourn) was ongoing, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was still whipping for conservative Democratic votes from the Sabotage Squad. Now that the Congressional Progressive Caucus is enthusiastically supporting both bills—the Build Back Better (BBB) human infrastructure and climate bill and the bipartisan hard infrastructure (BIF) proposal—the saboteurs are coming up with more and more excuses to delay.

If nothing else, it demonstrates just how clever the progressives were to insist on the two bills being linked. The conservative Democrats and their Senate counterparts and cheerleaders Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have proven untrustworthy. They’ve been trying to renege on the deal for the linked votes for months, with the only aim seeming to be preventing the larger care economy and climate change plan from passing. The moderates have been demanding a thing that leadership says won’t happen for a few weeks—a Congressional Budget Office score. They already have a Joint Committee on Taxation score to work with, and the Senate will make changes, and thus the CBO score on this package won’t be final anyway. It’s all just seeming like the saboteurs are back to making up reasons not to pass this bill.

    <a></a>
  
  
    <a href="#update-1636133421000">
            Friday, Nov 5, 2021 ·  5:30:21 PM +00:00

      ·
      Joan McCarter
    </a>

    That vote to adjourn is still open, setting the record for the longest open House vote ever, while leadership tries to get <a href="https://twitter.com/scottwongDC/status/1456673657980428291">five or six</a> of the conservative Dem holdouts to help. That handful is, according to multiple Hill reporters, Murphy (Fla.), Golden (Maine), Case (Hawaii)— Rice (N.Y.), and Bordeaux (Georgia) and probably Schrader (Oregon), too. 

    <a></a>
  
  
    <a href="#update-1636141854000">
            Friday, Nov 5, 2021 ·  7:50:54 PM +00:00

      ·
      Joan McCarter
    </a>

    The House is now voting on the rule for bringing the BBB to the floor. Leadership said it intends to also vote on BIF today, the Progressive Caucus is <a href="https://twitter.com/USProgressives/status/1456705662667345932">absolutely reasonably</a> saying they want to wait for the CBO score the conservatives are using for the excuse to delay, and vote on both when that’s in. Stay tuned.

  
  
    <a></a>
  
  
    <a href="#update-1636150213000">
            Friday, Nov 5, 2021 · 10:10:13 PM +00:00

      ·
      Joan McCarter
    </a>

    That Rules vote to advance BBB is still being held open while the Progressive Caucus meets to determine if they’ll w/hold their votes on BIF. Still no resolution.

That the bad faith in these negotiations is centered in that group of conservative Democrats is made even more evident by the concession of a bloc of lawmakers fighting for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants that would not be included in this bill.

“This is just the battle. This isn’t the end of the war when it comes to immigration,” Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, a California Democrat, said following Thursday’s meetings with leadership. “There are so many things in this bill that will benefit immigrant families that we just can’t lose it all because of this one issue.”

The bad faith from the so-called moderates looks even worse after they negotiated new language on SALT, the deduction for state and local taxes. The deduction was eliminated in the 2017 tax bill, a pointed punishment for people living in blue states like New York and California, which have the highest state and local taxes, particularly property taxes on ridiculously expensive homes. The moderates got higher SALT cap included in the bill, a condition of New Jersey Democrat Josh Gottheimer, which already mainly benefits the rich. They voted to raise the SALT cap from $10,000 to $ $80,000 per year. By the way, the Democrats pushing for that are also the Democrats who want to see a CBO score right now—but their changes mean the CBO will have to take longer to do its work. Funny how that played out, huh?

Another conservative Democrat who has been fighting against Medicare being able to negotiate drug prices also got a win Thursday. Rep. Scott Peters of California further whittled down the narrow drug price negotiating powers given to Medicare in the bill by delaying the provision by another year for some categories of drugs. The bill previously would only allow Medicare to negotiate prices on 10 select drugs by 2025, and 20 per year by 2028, and only for drugs that are outside the “exclusivity” period—the time in which the Food and Drug Administration allows them a monopoly on the drug.

That means some of the most expensive drugs can’t be negotiated. So-called “orphan drugs,” those generally very expensive drugs used to treat rare illnesses, are also exempted from negotiations, as are drugs from “small biotech” firms, though their exemption expires in 2028. It’s not clear which category Peters and crew got further carved out.

And yet they’re still holding out. Maybe this will help: