House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Thursday condemned President Joe Biden’s runaway spending plan as the ”most expensive Thanksgiving for America.”
He also invoked a scene from the comic strip ”Peanuts” to mock negotiations on President Joe Biden’s ”Build Back Better” agenda.
”I wonder if the president feels a little like Charlie Brown in the famous scene with the football,” McCarthy, R-Calif., said in a press conference on Capitol Hill.
”His advisers tell him to come back up to the Hill. They promise this time Speaker Pelosi won’t take it out from under him. We will find out today if she does the exact same thing,” he added.
Biden traveled to the Capitol on Thursday to ask congressional Democrats for support on a framework for a $1.85 trillion climate and safety net plan.
”We have a framework that will get 50 votes in the United States Senate,” Biden told a group of House Democrats, according to a person familiar with his private remarks. ”I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the House and Senate majorities and my presidency will be determined by what happens in the next week.”
Later, in public remarks at the White House, Biden hailed the plan as ”historic.”
”No one got everything they wanted, including me,” he said before departing on a trip to Europe. ”But that’s what compromise is. That’s consensus. And that’s what I ran on.”
Democrats are hoping both progressives and moderate Sens. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Joe Manchin of West Virginia will back the bill.
Manchin and Sinema, according to Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., said they could work with the new framework.
”I’ve heard from both senators, Manchin and Sinema, that they believe this is a framework that they can work with, that this is a basis for us moving forward,” Coons told CNN.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., on Thursday said she would hold a vote on the bipartisan infrastructure package and warned members not to embarrass the president by blocking the measure.
Asked if any members of his caucus would support the infrastructure bill, McCarthy replied, ”I don’t expect few, if any, to vote for it,” arguing that the president and Pelosi have tied the bills together.
”It’s one bill, together,” he said. ”That’s why I think it would be difficult for people to vote for it.”
