'It is pushing it. All we can do is try,” said House Budget Chair John Yarmuth.
Democrats are hustling to finalize their gigantic social spending plan during the dog days of summer recess, wary they will blow their target date to finish as Congress faces a crush of deadlines later this month.
House committees kick off markups on Thursday to begin churning out the pieces of the final spending package, even as intraparty arguments continue privately over what exactly to include in the legislation. Democratic leaders, senior lawmakers and aides are scrambling behind the scenes to settle the types of major policy disputes that would normally take months or years to be resolved.
Senior Democrats are also tussling over a much bigger issue — Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders’ push to expand Medicare to include vision, dental and hearing benefits. The dental plan in particular could cost hundreds of billions of dollars and may not be implemented for up to five years, coming at the cost of what some Democrats see as their best chance to permanently strengthen Obamacare and score a political win in the 2022 midterms.
All year, Democrats have laid the groundwork for enacting the $3.5 trillion proposal, releasing detailed outlines and marking up bill text for many of the provisions they plan to tie together. That includes the proposal Wyden’s panel approved in May to revamp clean energy incentives and the framework he and other Senate leaders released last week to hike taxes on corporations’ foreign profits.
Republicans are amused by the power struggles the mega-legislation has exacerbated between House Democrats and their peers in the Senate.
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