On Wednesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I. Vermont) announced that he will file amendments to Inflation Reduction Act. This is to correct certain concessions made by top Democrats to please Sen. Joe Manchin (D. West Virginia).
In a speech on the Senate floor, the Vermont progressive announced that he is planning to take aim at the IRA’s giveaways to the fossil fuel industry that would make it harder to fight the climate crisis. He’s also planning to file an amendment to expand Medicare and allow it to access the same prices for prescription drugs as the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), which would cut prices for hundreds of drugs roughly in half.
“In my view, we have to do everything possible to take on the greed of the fossil fuel industry, not give billions of dollars in corporate welfare to an industry that has been actively destroying our planet. I will be introducing an amendment to do just that,” Sanders said, quoting climate advocates who have called the bill a “climate suicide pact.” Instead of giving subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, he said, Congress should be focusing on ending such handouts altogether.
He said that Medicare being able to access lower drug prices has the double effect of saving the agency $900billion over the next decade and funding his initiative to expand Medicare coverage to include vision, hearing, and lowering the eligibility age to sixty or lower.
Sanders was one of the most vocal critics of the bill. He There has been limited praise for this product. for some of the bill’s proposals, like its plans to expand clean energy. But the bill is still far narrower than last year’s Build Back Better Act, he says, and contains no plans to take on corporate oligarchy, address child- and job-related economic crises that the public is facing, or reform the health care system at large.
“As currently written, this is an extremely modest piece of legislation that does virtually nothing to address the enormous crises that working families all across this country are facing today,” he said. “Given that this is the last reconciliation bill that we will be considering this year, it is the only opportunity that we have to do something significant for the American people that requires only 50 votes and that cannot be filibustered.”
What’s worse, as Sanders and Climate advocatesAs I have pointed out, the bill currently contains poison pills such as Big Pharma subsidies and fossil fuel. They would be locked into for many years.
Senate leaders are rushing toBring the bill to a voting session as soon as possible. This will give lawmakers little time to read the 700-page bill which has been secretly negotiated for months with Manchin.
As Sanders acknowledged, this may be Democrats’ one and only chance to pass a climate bill before Republicans may take the House or the Senate this fall, and there are few other avenues forSenate to address the looming climate crisis. The bill expands fossil-fuels, which climate experts argue must be phased down completely. Top Democrats even negotiated a fossil fuel-friendly side dealThis would also be greenlit by Manchin a pipeline projectThat is what climate advocates have declared unacceptable.
