After Tuesday's drubbing at the polls, it was clear that the Democratic leadership felt the need for a win. The infrastructure bill had already passed in the Senate back in August, by a vote of 69 to 30, with nineteen Republicans joining all 50 Democrats in order to pass the measure.
But the proposal stalled in the House when the progressives declared that they would vote against the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill unless the President's Build Back Better plan, the so-called "human infrastructure" bill, passed first. Speaker Pelosi was perfectly willing to defer to the progressives, and not bring the infrastructure bill to a floor vote - until Tuesday. Biden's Build Back Better bill was originally put forward as a $3.5 trillion measure. With objections from within their own party, the Democrats scaled that back to $1.75 trillion. However, the analysis from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School suggested that the true cost could exceed $4 trillion.
With the Congressional Budget Office not having scored the Build Back Better plan, and with progressives still holding out for Build Back Better to be voted on first, Pelosi divorced herself from the left-wing of her party and held a vote on the infrastructure bill.
Six "Squad" members (Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, Ayanna Pressley and Jamaal Bowman) still refused to vote for the infrastructure bill. So Pelosi had to depend on 13 Republicans to get the bill passed. My guess is that she did not want to have to rely on Republicans. The bipartisan votes in the House and Senate likely undermine one of the Democrats' election talking points for next year, that only their party cares about repairing our infrastructure.
And the political necessity of getting a win weakened the influence of the Squad.
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