Biden Says Manchin ‘Will Be There’ on Build Back Better Vote

President Biden on Tuesday told reporters that he believes Manchin will ultimately back Democrats’ social spending and climate change bill.

"I believe that Joe will be there," Biden said of the West Virginia senator during a news conference to close the United Nations climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Manchin made clear Monday that he still has significant misgivings about details of the package and the speed with which his fellow Democrats are trying to enact it. He decried the use of budgetary gimmicks to lower the official cost of the legislation and expressed concern that the spending involved could spur additional inflation. And he said he needed more time to understand the likely economic and fiscal effects of the package.

On Tuesday, Manchin told reporters that he had never signed off on the $1.85 trillion Build Back Better framework released by the White House last week and that there’s no rush to finalize the legislation at this point, again taking aim at progressives for blocking a vote last week on the bipartisan infrastructure bill that would have delivered Biden a win before he headed to Europe.

“I just think it’s going to take quite a while,” Manchin said. “We’re not in a rush right now.”

Other Democrats evidently feel differently. They are racing to nail down a deal and potentially put it to a vote in the House as soon as this week — before an official score of the legislation from the Congressional Budget Office is ready. That score reportedly could take about two weeks. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said Tuesday he hopes his chamber can take up the bill on November 15.

But a number of centrist House Democrats — Reps. Ed Case of Hawaii, Jared Golden of Maine, Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, Stephanie Murphy of Florida and Kurt Schrader of Oregon — said in a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that they want 72 hours to review the package and a cost estimate by the Joint Committee on Taxation and Congressional Budget Office before any House vote. That could push any House action on the package into next week at the earliest.

Whenever a Senate vote happens, Biden indicated Tuesday he expects Manchin to back the legislation. The president said Manchin is just looking to ensure that the details of the final legislative text match up with what he has indicated he would support. "He will vote for this if we have in this proposal what he has anticipated, and that is looking at the fine print and the detail of what comes out of the House in terms of the actual legislative initiatives," Biden said.