Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday announced the House will vote Thursday on President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, as Democratic leaders race to unify their fractious caucus ahead of a critical week.
Pelosi told her members Sunday night that the vote will now take place Thursday, the same day that a slate of surface transportation programs expire, rather than Monday as originally planned. Debate on the infrastructure legislation will still begin Monday, Pelosi said — the date she and a group of moderates had originally agreed upon in August.
Pelosi and her leadership team had signaled for days that the vote could slip past Monday, with dozens of progressives threatening to block it without action on Biden’s separate multitrillion-dollar policy bill. But moderates have fiercely resisted a delay much longer than 24 hours, vowing to ditch the party-line talks altogether if leadership broke the commitment.
“Let me just say we’re going

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday said that Democrats will pass an infrastructure bill with $550 billion in new spending sometime this week but wouldn’t specify exactly when or nail down the timing for the $3.5 trillion social spending package.
The House last month voted for a Sept. 27 deadline to bring the bipartisan infrastructure plan to the floor. On Sunday, Pelosi didn’t specify when this week it would be voted on.
“Let me just say we’re going to pass the bill this week,” Pelosi said on ABC’s “This Week.” She later added, “I’m never bringing a bill to the floor that doesn’t have the votes.”
Along with the infrastructure bill, Democratic leadership is also hoping to push through the $3.5 trillion social spending package this week, in part to retain the support of progressives who might otherwise not vote for the infrastructure bill.
The twinned legislative measures are essential

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A motley gang of deal-making House Republicans took partial credit for pushing through President Joe Biden’s infrastructure plan this summer. That doesn’t mean they’ll all vote for it.
The roughly 50-member centrist group, dubbed the Problem Solvers Caucus, wedged its way into this summer’s multitrillion-dollar talks between Biden and some like-minded Senate Republicans. While the group’s exact role in prying loose a Senate compromise is up for debate, many of those House members, including Republicans, claimed a critical role.
Democrats — and even some Republicans — in the group are now pleading with their GOP counterparts to ignore a robust whipping operation by their own party and back the infrastructure bill on the floor Monday.
And it’s not just the infrastructure bill that could be in jeopardy if those GOP votes don’t appear on the floor next week, with a group of progressives still warning they’ll block the bill without

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House Budget Democrats approved their $3.5 trillion spending plan in a rare Saturday session, sending more than 2,400 pages of text to the floor as the party looks to signal progress on the massive bill heading into a critical week.
The measure passed along party lines at the start of a markup that would last nearly eight hours, filled with debate and voting on nonbinding GOP motions spanning issues like inflation concerns, abortion and electric vehicle tax credits, all of which were defeated. As the markup dragged into the night, Democrats and Republicans sniped at each other while members struggled to vote from the driver’s seat of moving cars, outdoor venues, the golf course and their bedrooms.
Usually committee passage would be a sign that the package is finalized, since the Budget panel is tying together a dozen pieces of the broader bill Democrats want to enact to carry out

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