President Joe Biden and Democratic congressional leaders raced Monday to strike a compromise on a sprawling domestic policy plan, pushing for a vote within days even as a number of key sticking points remained on health care benefits, paid leave and how to pay for the package.
The White House and top Democrats hoped to reach an accord with key centrist holdouts before Biden departs later this week for a U.N. climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, that begins Sunday, where he plans to push for a stronger international response to counter global warming and climate change.
Both of the president's economic proposals contain new programs to combat emissions and promote cleaner energy, which the White House hopes to brandish on a global stage as it tries to encourage other countries to fight global warming more aggressively.
Biden told reporters that he was aiming for a deal on the package before his trip, which is scheduled to begin Thursday in Rome ahead of the Group of 20 economic summit.
"That's my hope," the president said Monday as he departed for New Jersey, where he planned to promote the social safety net, climate and tax increase package, expected to cost up to $2 trillion.
Democrats were also facing time pressure to approve a $1 trillion, Senate-passed bipartisan infrastructure bill whose fate is tied to the broader domestic policy bill. Its enactment could hand the party a popular legislative achievement days before elections for governor in Virginia and New Jersey on Nov. 2. Passage of that bill would also stave off the expiration of a series of transportation programs that are set to lapse Sunday and furloughs for nearly 4,000 federal workers.
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On Monday morning, the president visited classrooms at East End Elementary School in North Plainfield, N.J., as part of his push for universal prekindergarten. The White House said Biden's spending initiative, known as Build Back Better, would enable the North Plainfield School District and others to expand free tuition to all 3-year-old children. It currently serves 4-year-olds.
Biden then visited the NJ Transit Meadowlands Maintenance Complex in Kearny, where he sounded his now-familiar, urgent call to make significant investments in the nation's infrastructure as well as American jobs and families.
"These bills are about competitiveness versus complacency," Biden said. "They're about expanding opportunity, not opportunity denied."
Liberals have so far refused to vote for the infrastructure measure until a deal is reached on the far more expansive package, despite mounting pressure from their centrist colleagues.
But a number of issues remain over the details of the plan, which is facing unified Republican opposition and must draw the support of every Democratic senator and nearly every member of the party in the House.
Biden huddled over the weekend with Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., a crucial holdout on the measure who has pressed to keep the package to no more than $1.5 trillion, even as Biden and other Democrats have worked to nudge the price tag higher. They are also discussing how to beef up climate provisions in the legislation after Manchin, a longtime defender of his state's coal industry, rejected a $150 billion clean electricity program that had been the core of the plan's bid to reduce emissions.
Among other issues unresolved after the weekend meeting is paid leave, as Manchin continues to fight its inclusion in the package, according to two people familiar with the matter who requested anonymity to describe the private talks. Party lawmakers already have had to scale back their ambitions from 12 weeks of leave to 4 weeks, as they try to lower the overall cost of the bill, angering liberals who have vowed to expand the program.
Manchin on Monday declined to offer his specific concerns on paid leave.
Manchin is also among the lawmakers who have expressed concerns with a liberal push, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., the chairman of the Budget Committee, to expand Medicare to include dental, vision and hearing benefits. Biden, speaking at a CNN town hall last week, floated an $800 voucher to help accommodate that push. Democrats are also still haggling over the duration and details of a push to include a Medicaid expansion, a new paid leave program and an extension of expanded payments for families with children.
Speaking to reporters on Capitol Hill on Monday, Manchin expressed reservations about expanding Medicare without addressing the program's financial stability, telling reporters, "If we're not being fiscally responsible, that's really concerning."
He also expressed concerns about a push to cover the full expansion of health care for the dozen states whose leaders have refused to expand Medicaid under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
While the states that already expanded Medicaid pay 10% of the cost of the expansion, Manchin said he felt it would be unfair for the federal government to cover the entire cost of the expansion and in essence reward states for holding out. Because of a 2012 Supreme Court ruling, there is no way for Congress to force the holdout states to pay 10% of the bill against their will.
Negotiators are also still hammering out the details of how to pay for the package. Because Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another key Democratic holdout on the plan, has rejected increases to corporate and individual tax rates, negotiators are discussing an array of alternatives, including beefing up the IRS' ability to collect unpaid taxes, a wealth tax on America's billionaires, a global corporate minimum tax and a tax on what corporations report to shareholders.
Information for this article was contributed by Emily Cochrane of The New York Times; and by Tony Romm of the Washington Post.