- A $1.8 trillion offer from Manchin to the White House on Build Back Better is no longer on the table.
- "We'll just be starting from scratch, whenever they start," Manchin told Insider.
- Manchin appeared more interested in advancing an elections reform bill rather than the economic legislation.
Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia said on Thursday that negotiations on President Joe Biden's signature economic legislation will start again at square one — if and when they ever get off the ground.
"We'll just be starting from scratch, whenever they start," Manchin told Insider.
"I'm hoping to talk to everybody. We'll just start with a clean sheet of paper and start over but we're off that," he told reporters, referring to a $1.8 trillion compromise Manchin offered the White House in December that didn't include an extension of the popular child tax credit monthly checks to parents.
He also appeared more interested in advancing a bipartisan elections reform bill instead of the Build Back Better plan. "We can work on everything," he told Insider, adding that voting rights are "the thing we want to make sure we get done quickly."
The White House did not immediately respond to comment. White House chief of staff Ron Klain said in a Wall Street Journal interview published Wednesday that they aimed to begin talks with Manchin "privately and directly."
Manchin has been one of two Democratic holdouts on the social and climate spending legislation, alongside Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Without their votes, Senate Democrats can't approve the bill over unified Republican opposition.
Biden suggested he was open to trimming the ambitions of the program on Wednesday to get it through Congress. "I'm confident we can get pieces, big chunks, of Build Back Better signed into law" he said.
A week before Christmas, Manchin made a $1.8 trillion offer that included roughly $500 billion in climate spending, Affordable Care Act subsidies, and universal pre-K, The Washington Post reported. But it excluded the expanded child tax credit which provided up to $300 in monthly checks to parents.
The conservative West Virginia Democrat dealt his party a major blow a month ago when he came out against the House-passed Build Back Better bill. Since then, Democrats spent the month attempting to decide what programs should be prioritized that could get the backing of all 50 Democratic senators.
But some are starting to suggest they are fed up with a process that has dragged out since the summer of 2021. "It's not just this vote. These are people who I think have undermined the President of the United States," Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont told reporters on Wednesday evening. "They have forced us to go through five months of discussions which have gotten absolutely nowhere."
Democrats spent much of January making an aggressive push to pass voting rights legislation. But resistance from Manchin and Sinema on blowing a hole in the filibuster's 60-vote threshold caused the bills to fail in a pair of votes Wednesday evening on the Senate floor.