SO WHAT NOW? The episode is an embarrassment for Hill Democrats, who insisted on the pandemic money during spending negotiations with GOP lawmakers, but then couldn’t deliver their own members to vote for it. Pelosi’s frustration with the situation was palpable.
“Let’s grow up about this, OK?” she steamed in her press conference Wednesday. “We’re in a legislative process. We have a deadline for keeping the government open. We have a lively negotiation. It has to be bipartisan. … You need 60 votes in the Senate.”
And as our Sarah Ferris, Nicholas Wu and Katherine Tully-McManus write this morning, the issue has set the Democrats’ retreat off to a rocky start at a time when they should be unifying before a difficult midterm. “This retreat is cursed,” Pocan said.
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