Pelosi: House won’t take up the bipartisan bill until Senate votes on reconciliation

By Daniella Diaz and Clare Foran, CNN

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi made clear on Thursday that the House won’t take up the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a larger, more sweeping infrastructure package through budget reconciliation.

“Let me be really clear on this: We will not take up a bill in the House until the Senate passes the bipartisan bill and a reconciliation bill. If there is no bipartisan bill, then we’ll just go when the Senate passes a reconciliation bill,” the California Democrat said Thursday during her weekly news conference.

“There ain’t gonna be no bipartisan bill, unless we have a reconciliation bill,” she said. “As I said, there won’t be an infrastructure bill, unless we have a reconciliation bill. Plain and simple. In fact, I use the word ain’t. There ain’t going to be an infrastructure bill, unless we have the reconciliation bill passed by the United States Senate,” she reiterated.

Pelosi’s statement comes after Republican and Democratic senators said Wednesday evening there was an agreement reached with White House officials and 10 senators on a bipartisan infrastructure deal. And on Thursday afternoon, Biden said he had signed off on the agreement.

Pelosi’s statement was meant to put pressure on progressives, who have expressed reservations about a smaller price tag for infrastructure, to get behind the bipartisan proposal with the promise that their priorities for infrastructure will be in a separate larger, more sweeping bill that could be passed by Democrats via budget reconciliation. Using budget reconciliation means it would need only a simple majority to pass through the Senate.

The speaker’s statement also puts pressure on moderate Democrats — such as Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia — to support the larger infrastructure package so that the bipartisan package can pass through Congress. So far, moderates including Manchin have refused to say if they’ll vote for the reconciliation plan.

The bipartisan proposal is significantly less than what Biden had initially proposed. The President initially put forward a $2.25 trillion plan to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure and shift to greener energy over the next eight years. The cost of the bipartisan plan announced Thursday is $1.2 trillion over eight years, including $559 billion in new spending, multiple sources familiar with the matter tell CNN.

But after their late-night meeting on Wednesday with White House officials, Democratic leaders said they planned to move forward with a much larger Democratic-only approach to dramatically expand the social safety plan in addition to the bipartisan infrastructure plan.

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CNN’s Manu Raju and Ted Barrett contributed to this report.