AOC Excuses Joe Biden’s Flip-Flop on Tying Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill to Far-Left Reconciliation Package
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told Punchbowl News on Tuesday she excuses President Joe Biden’s flip-flop over the weekend regarding not tying the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the far-left reconciliation package as Biden said he would.
“I think Biden can say what he needs to say and what he’d like to say. And he has his strategy,” she said about Biden’s two-track position Thursday that changed Saturday. “There’s three steps to this, right? So the White House can have a position, the Senate can have a position and the House can have a position.”
“I don’t know what’s a good adjective. I know ‘good’ isn’t a great adjective. But I still feel good about the prospect of a two-track [process]. And I think it’s gonna be really important that we continue to pursue two tracks,” Ocasio-Cortez continued.
When Ocasio-Cortez was asked in the interview, “What size budget are you looking for?” she responded by saying a number too low would not include global warming initiatives:
I get asked this question a lot and for me, it’s not a quantitative line as much as it is a qualitative line. And I know that … it’s easier to be like: ‘Oh, if it’s three [trillion] or if it’s four [trillion], if it’s less than this, if it’s more than that, I won’t vote for it.’ … You can have something that’s workable, you can have a huge number that has investments that are completely intolerable, that has tons of pipeline funding and infrastructure funding… fossil fuel funding, that would not be tolerable for us. You can have a number that’s just too low, that doesn’t do enough. You can have maybe something ‘Goldilocks’ in the middle, where you have ambitious investments that aren’t… being destructive.
Ocasio-Cortez continued to keep pressure on Biden during the interview by stating in order to earn her vote for a bipartisan infrastructure bill, Biden would need to promise to pass a radical reconciliation package that would not have to surpass a filibuster.
“It’s like, ‘Show me the beef.’ And to me, the beef is passing reconciliation in the Senate. And if we can get these folks secured in the Senate, then I’ll entertain a bipartisan bill … I believe that keeping the consensus in the House, as we’ve seen, has been more reliable,” she explained.
“In my case, climate is something that I’m really looking at. And then, you know, have that brought forward… [T]he standards that we have are not as mercurial as ‘Oh, can we get Mitch McConnell to feel like he’s supporting this today?’” Ocasio-Cortez said of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY). “And so the Senate is the least stable piece in all of this. So if they can get it together enough to send us two bills, then we have two bills.”
Ocasio-Cortez’s comments about McConnell comes as he is undecided on supporting the bipartisan infrastructure package.
“I haven’t decided yet,” he said Monday. “We need to get a score, so we need to see whether the proposal is credibly paid for.”
McConnell also wrote a letter Monday to Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to “walk-back their threats that they will refuse to send the president a bipartisan infrastructure bill unless they also separately pass trillions of dollars for unrelated tax hikes, wasteful spending, and Green New Deal socialism,” McConnell continued, “then President Biden’s walk-back of his veto threat would be a hollow gesture.”
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