Democrats face procedural obstacles in any attempt to break up their clean energy and social safety net expansion bill and pass it in “chunks” — a path suggested by President Joe Biden on Wednesday.
It’s not such an easy task if party leaders want to maintain the special status afforded the measure under budget reconciliation rules, which enable the majority to get around the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to cut off a legislative filibuster.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi nodded to the problems inherent in what Biden suggested at her weekly press conference Thursday. “Remember this, this is a reconciliation bill,” she said, “so when people say, ‘let’s divide it up,’ they don’t understand the process.”
