- Mitch McConnell said delaying Biden's agenda is "the best Christmas gift" for working families.
- Senate Democrats seem to be focusing on passing voting rights legislation before Christmas instead.
- This angered House progressives who argued the two bills should be equally prioritized.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer's goal to pass President Joe Biden's Build Back Better agenda before Christmas is in jeopardy following reports Senate Democrats are turning their focus to passing voting rights legislation before the end of the year instead.
This news angered a number of House progressive lawmakers, but it was music to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's ears.
"Yesterday, we got indications that the far left's slapdash sprint may be hitting the pause button," McConnell said during Thursday remarks on the Senate floor. "Well, that would certainly be great news for the American people. The best Christmas gift Washington could give working families would be putting this bad bill on ice."
McConnell and his Republican colleagues have long opposed Democrats' plan to spend $1.75 trillion on Biden's sweeping climate and social-spending bill, saying they're concerned it would add to the already spiking inflation in the country.
That's a concern that centrist Democrat of West Virginia Joe Manchin has shared on numerous occasions, frequently expressing the need to pause passing Biden's agenda until inflation is under control. As Insider's Joseph Zeballos-Roig reported on Wednesday, Manchin all but sank Democrats' hopes of getting the bill passed before Christmas due to reports claiming he opposed a one-year expansion of the child tax credit in the bill, which provides families with up to $300 per kid a month.
Manchin later denounced those reports as "bullshit," but his Democratic colleagues in the Senate said they felt blindsided there was even a discussion surrounding cutting the benefit for families; the credit was included in the House version of the bill that recently passed.
"I'm very, very surprised because I thought that there was an agreement on this," Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, an architect of the program, told Insider.
Regardless of what makes it into the final version of the Senate's bill, a number of House progressives came out in opposition to the idea that passing voting rights legislation should take Build Back Better's place.
"It is unacceptable that discussion of further delays to the passage of the Build Back Better Act is being framed as a choice between this legislation and voting rights," Missouri Rep. Cori Bush said in a statement. Bush was one of the six Democrats who voted against the infrastructure bill's passage because she wanted the social-spending bill to be passed at the same time.
New York Rep. Jamaal Bowman expressed a similar sentiment on Wednesday, saying "there is not good enough reason" to delay the bill's passage.
"It has now been 26 days since the House did its job to deliver on President Biden's full agenda and passed the Build Back Better Act," Bowman said in a statement. "Now, we are faced with a false choice between saving our democracy from the existential threat of fascism and meeting the immediate needs of the people."