Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W. Va.) said on Sunday that he will not support President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending plan.
“We don’t have the need to rush into this and get it done within one week because there’s some deadline we’re meeting or someone’s going to fall through the cracks,” Manchin said on NBC’s Meet the Press. “I want to make sure that children are getting taken care of, that people are basically having an opportunity to go back to work. We have 11 million jobs that we haven’t filled, 8 million people still unemployed. Something’s not matching up there,” he added.
“There’s no way” that Congress will meet House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s deadline to pass it by the end of the month. “[Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer] will not have my vote on $3.5 [trillion] and Chuck knows that and we’ve talked about this,” Manchin said on CNN’s State of the Union.
Bernie Sanders later told CNN that Manchin’s opposition to the bill is “absolutely not acceptable.”
“I don’t think it’s acceptable to the president, to the American people or to the overwhelming majority of the people in the Democratic caucus,” Sanders added. “This is a consequential bill. It is hard to put a bill like this together. At the end of the day, I believe we will.”
