Nancy Pelosi made a profound blunder on Tuesday when confusing Joe Biden with America’s former commander-in-chief Barack Obama as she was pushing for the president’s Build Back Better agenda.
The 81-year-old speaker pressed Congress to urgently "address the full Obama agenda of building back better” and “keep government open” by voting for Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill.
Her gaffe actually got a lot of likes on social media – some have joked that the House Speaker finally “told the truth”.
Pelosi is currently under a lot of pressure to bridge the divide among Democrats over the spending/reconciliation and infrastructure packages and push the agenda through Congress.
She made a decision on Monday to uncouple the two key bills but the move left some progressive Democrats furious, including ‘the Squad’ members, who say they won’t support the infrastructure bill if the reconciliation package is not passed first.
Ex-presidential hopeful Senator Bernie Sanders also urged "to vote against the bipartisan infrastructure bill until Congress passes a strong reconciliation bill”.
What is Build Back Better Agenda About?
The spending bill focuses on providing funding for education, health care and the environment. It is estimated to cost a whooping $3.5 trillion that would be accumulated though corporate and personal tax increases. Unsurprisingly, the bill has no support among Republicans, so in the evenly-split Senate it should get the full backing of 50 Democrats in order to get passed through reconciliation.
If the bill is not endorsed by the time when government funding runs out on Thursday at midnight, the US government is facing a partial shutdown by the end of the working week. Moreover, if lawmakers also fail to raise the debt ceiling outlined in the package by mid-October, this could lead to a full-fledged default, with the Treasury unable to pay all of its bills.
On Monday, Republicans voted to block the spending bill, that needed some 60 votes in the Senate to proceed.
In a Tuesday letter to the Congress, Pelosi said that lawmakers had a “moral imperative” to pass “the Biden Build Back Better Act”:
“We must and will move forward to keep government open and to lift the debt ceiling."
Former President Barack Obama, who has an estimated personal fortune of some $70 million, actually very much supports the plan to tax wealthy Americans. He earlier said that the Biden administration was “finishing” the job he had started while in the office.