United States: Joe Manchin bends, Biden's bills advance

U.S. Senate Speaker Senator Joe Manchin attends a Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington July 19, 2022. REUTERS - ELIZABETH FRANTZ

Text by: RFI Follow

1 min

Joe Biden welcomed a major step towards the approval of several of his bills in Congress: the elected Democrats managed to agree.

Joe Manchin, a senator from the party's right wing, finally fell into line. 

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Joe Manchin has agreed to sign the text presented as one of President Biden's priorities, which plans to move the American economy towards cleaner energy sources, thanks to the increase in corporate taxes, and also includes an important health component aimed in particular at reducing the cost of prescription drugs. 

It is a project that amounts to several hundred billion dollars whose ambitions had already been revised downwards since last year to avoid getting bogged down.

Blocking for fear of inflation

Senator Joe Manchin, a centrist Democrat but rather free spirit in recent months, elected from West Virginia, a conservative state, refused to validate it for fear that this project would aggravate inflation. 

This amounted, given the narrow Democratic majority in the Senate, to nip the text in the bud.

Several weeks of quiet negotiations later, Joe Manchin finally folded;

an about-face for which we do not know the exact reason.

It is therefore 1 major and unexpected US event: the conservative Democratic senator #Manchin agreed, at the end of the race and to general amazement, to vote 1 renamed social and climate spending bill (and the name is important) l 'Inflation Reduction Act...1/ https://t.co/LAkXZRQrnH

— Corentin Sellin (@CorentinSellin) July 28, 2022

In any case, the American president thanked him for "

".

This will allow the Democrats to formally submit the text to a vote next week in the Senate, before it is sent back to the House of Representatives in August.

A timely release for Joe Biden: it was the last opportunity to pass this major project of his program before the midterm elections, where the Democrats risk being snatched the majority by the Republicans in the two chambers of the Congress.

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• United States

• Joe Biden