“(Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer) won’t have my vote on $ 3.5 trillion and Chuck knows it, and we’ve talked about it,” West Virginia Senator told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union”.
“We have already earned $ 5.4 trillion and we have tried to help Americans in every way we can and much of the help we have given is still there and will be clear until next year 2022, What is it? “The urgency? What urgency do we have? It’s not the same urgency we had with the American Rescue Plan. We got that quickly. That was about $ 2 trillion.”
The spending bill proposed by President Joe Biden and his allies in Congress splits spending over ten years as opposed to the Covid stimulus plans Manchin was referring to, which were more immediate injections of money.
“So we’ve done a lot, and there are still a lot of people who need help, but there are still 11 million jobs that aren’t covered. Eight million people are still unemployed. Something doesn’t match. Don’t believe it. that we should pause and find out? The vulnerability we have right now, we don’t know what happened to this Covid, it’s horrible to come back as it is with a vengeance, ”he said. “We don’t know about inflation, we know it’s spreading right now, I can tell you that in West Virginia inflation is spreading, and besides, the challenges we’re going to have, the geopolitical challenges, shouldn’t be are we ready
He added that he does not believe the economic bill can be passed before the Sept. 27 deadline set by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
“There’s no way to do it before the 27th if we do our job,” he said. “There are so many differences we have here and so many, there are so many things apart from us wherever we are up to ours. I’m giving you different things, I’ve been talking, I’ve been working with people, I’m going to talk to people, that makes no sense, ”he said.
Pelosi accepted moderate Democrats last month and agreed to hold a vote on Sept. 27 on the infrastructure bill. But if the reconciliation proposal has not been approved by the Senate by then, it is unclear whether they would have the votes to push through the infrastructure bill and send it to the Biden counter.
How to pay the bill
Asked by Bash about how he would pay the economic bill, Manchin replied that he was in favor of raising taxes on companies, saying, “I want to raise taxes on companies, I have talked to companies, I want the rich to pay their share. justa. “
The senator also suggested that he wanted to pass the bipartisan infrastructure bill as soon as possible, and said it was urgent for lawmakers to address the issue, which has been “ignored for more than 30 years.”
“This is what the president did and he campaigned on it, this is his bill: we worked on it bipartisanly, we got 19 Republicans to vote for it, this is the bill that should come out. immediately, ”he said.
This story has been updated with additional details Sunday.