Biden’s big bill, Pelosi’s big legacy

Washington: Deep into the gruelling negotiations over President Joe Biden’s big domestic policy package, when it seemed that bickering among Democrats would never stop, Speaker Nancy Pelosi let everyone in on a little secret.

This, she confided quite publicly to reporters some time ago, “is the fun part.

The grind of legislating, treacherous for some, a sport for others, and often unsuccessful in the slow-moving Congress, is where Pelosi resides, exerting a relentless drive to advance Biden’s roughly USD2 trillion package Friday through the House, sending it now to the Senate.

The House vote, with just one Democrat opposed, boosts momentum for Biden’s signature legislation after months of start-stop negotiations and provides a down payment on the party’s campaign promise to deliver competency in government and put it to work for Americans.

And for Pelosi, who breezed into the House chamber early Friday to gavel the vote closed after a nearly all-night session, the outcome serves as a career milestone and further cements her legacy as not only the nation’s first female speaker, but among its most powerful one who is working to secure massive federal investments that Biden and others have compared to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.

Congratulations, Biden told her in a phone call she took in the Gold Room off the House floor as the final tally rolled in.

Friday’s vote was never a sure thing. The final action in some ways snuck up on lawmakers after frenzied weeks of negotiations, several false starts and high-profile setbacks that delayed, and threatened to derail, the entire enterprise.

There was the difficult process of compiling the 2,135-page Build Back Better Act, with its far-reaching proposals to expand government support to help families afford health care and child care and lower the price of prescription drugs, alongside new efforts to tackle climate change.