Ex-Squad Reps. Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman claimed that Democrats had originally wanted to pass $10 trillion in spending as part of former President Joe Biden’s doomed Build Back Better (BBB) Act.
“We were at ten [trillion] and then it went down to six and down to three and down to 1.7, I believe,” Bush said on the “Bowman and Bush” podcast on Mar. 14.
The two were reflecting on the collapse of Biden’s ambitious Build Back Better Act, which called for hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in “social infrastructure” programs such as universal childcare, an expansion of the child tax credit, climate change initiatives, and low-cost housing.
“We wanted to make sure that the climate investment was there because many of the groups were saying this isn’t enough on climate… so I was getting attacked for not asking for more,” Bush said.
The former members of Congress each lost Democratic primaries to more moderate opponents prior to the 2024 general election. They said they held out on voting for Biden’s infrastructure bill for “months” in order to couple it with Build Back Better so that one couldn’t pass without the other. But according to the two ex-reps, the federal investments in the BBB Act kept going “down, down, down.”
Continue reading
Discussion about this post