And They Cave to the Conservatives

In response to a completely meaningless "promise" from house conservative Democrats, the House has passed the infrastructure bill without the stimulus bill.

The promise involves CBO score, and possibly the alignment of the stars, so I have no confidence in their promise:

The U.S. House on Friday night passed a bipartisan physical infrastructure bill but didn’t bring the Build Back Better Act to the floor — sending just one half of President Joe Biden’s two-pronged economic agenda to the White House, with only a pledge that conservative House Democrats will vote for the party’s broader social infrastructure and climate package at a later date.

………

Due to the intransigence of a few right-wing House Democrats who made last-minute demands for additional fiscal information that could take weeks to obtain, and the acquiescence of Pelosi and Biden, a planned floor vote on BBB was shelved and reduced to a “rule for consideration,” which was approved in a party-line vote of 221-213. Prior to that, BIF passed by a tally of 228-206, with 13 House Republicans joining most Democrats in supporting the measure.

Because it wasn’t accompanied by a real vote on BBB, six progressives — Reps. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.), Cori Bush (D-Mo.), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) — voted against BIF.

“Passing the infrastructure bill without passing the Build Back Better Act first,” Omar said in a statement, “risks leaving behind child care, paid leave, healthcare, climate action, housing, education, and a roadmap to citizenship.”

………

Even though analyses of spending and revenue conducted by the U.S. Treasury Department, the White House, and the Joint Committee on Taxation have found that BBB is paid for and may actually reduce deficits, a small group of conservative House Democrats on Friday insisted on seeing an official score from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) before they would vote for BBB.

Given the razor-thin margins in Congress, Democrats can afford only three defections in the House and none in the Senate to pass BBB through the filibuster-proof budget reconciliation process. Meanwhile, it could take the CBO weeks to produce a score, and there is no guarantee that the holdouts will be satisfied with the results, which are notoriously arbitrary and unreliable, according to experts.

That's the point.

They want to kill the bill, because they get campaign donations, and eventually comfortable post-retirement sinecures, from Wall Street types.

This is why Democrats will get hammered in 2022:  Because they never deliver on their promises.