Joe Manchin has shoveled another heap of dirt on President Biden’s Build Back Better social spending agenda.
“What Build Back Better bill?” he said on Tuesday when reporters asked about him about the legislation. “I don’t know what you guys are talking about.”
“No, no, no, no,” Manchin added when CNN’s Manu Raju asked if he’d had any talks about the bill since December. “It’s dead.”
Build Back Better has become an amorphous term for a series of proposals, and it’s unclear whether Manchin is talking about a specific bill or the entire agenda. What is clear, however, is that Democrats’ negotiations with the centrist senator on the package have followed a pretty standard path: Manchin asks for and gets concessions, then finds a new reason why he can’t support the bill.
The cycle played out in December when Manchin told Fox News that he
