Which group promised to pass

Biden's administration will now oversee the biggest upgrade of America's roads, railways and other transportation infrastructure in a generation, which he has promised will create jobs and boost U. Democrats still have much work to do on the second pillar of Biden's domestic program: a sweeping expansion of the social safety net and programs to fight climate change.

Democratic leaders had hoped to pass both bills out of the House on Friday, but postponed action after centrists demanded a nonpartisan accounting of its costs - a process that could take weeks. After hours of closed-door meetings, a group of centrists promised to vote for the bill by Nov.

The standoff came just days after Democrats suffered losses in closely watched state elections, raising concerns that they may lose control of Congress next year. The infrastructure bill passed with the support of 13 Republicans, fulfilling Biden's promise of passing some bipartisan legislation.

The phrase "infrastructure week" had become a Washington punch line during his predecessor Donald Trump's four years in the White House, when plans to focus on those investments were repeatedly derailed by scandals. As part of his flurry of executive actions during his first day in office, Biden did just that, calling on the Department of Education to extend the freeze on the payments until September 30, a request the department immediately carried out.

Biden pledged on the campaign trail to make passing the Equality Act into law a top legislative priority in his first days. The act would amend the Civil Rights act to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity or sexual orientation. Since taking office, Biden has urged its swift passage. The House of Representatives passed the bill on Feb. But Biden has made passage of COVID relief and a major infrastructure plan his top legislative priorities thus far, not spending much political capital to urge the evenly divided Senate to take up the Equality Act.

Biden did sign an executive order during his first week in office aimed at enforcing the protections LGBTQ Americans already have under law, but part of it is already tied up in a legal challenge from a private Christian college. Trump abruptly tweeted in July that he had decided to ban transgender Americans from serving in the military. On the campaign trail, Biden vowed to overturn the ban, saying it was "not just the right thing to do, but it's in our national interest.

On his sixth day in office, Biden made good on his promise, signing an executive order restoring the ability of transgender Americans to serve. LGBTQ advocacy groups praised his swift action. The promise: Address systemic racism in housing, criminal justice, voting rights. On Jan. Biden had promised to update the Voting Rights Act to prevent Americans from being denied the right to vote based on race, and as president he's made repeated calls for Congress to move it forward.

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is the first openly gay person to be confirmed by the Senate to a Cabinet position, Janet Yellen is the nation's first female treasury secretary, Deb Haaland became the first Native American interior secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas is the first immigrant to head the Department of Homeland Security and Lloyd Austin is the first Black defense secretary.

There are more women serving in Biden's Cabinet than any other recent administration and more than half are people of color. On the campaign trail, Biden promised to raise the White House's ethical standards following four years of Trump officials pushing the limits. One of Biden's first executive orders in office was to require all federal government employees to sign an ethics pledge "designed to ensure that executive branch employees act in the interest of the American people and not for personal gain," including preventing federal employees from interfering with independent Department of Justice probes.

The Biden White House has also started to release personal financial disclosure forms and has committed to releasing quarterly visitor logs, which the Obama administration began and Trump stopped. As a candidate, Biden said he would introduce a constitutional amendment to entirely eliminate private dollars from federal elections and other campaign finance reforms, and establish a Commission on Federal Ethics.

His administration has yet to move forward on these pledges. While not an explicit day promise, during his presidential campaign, Biden touted his past bipartisan work and pledged that he would do the same as president. But Biden's first two major legislative undertakings are proving just how difficult achieving that bipartisan consensus may be. However, the White House plowed ahead on the measure, narrowly passing it without a single Republican vote -- drawing the ire of some who questioned how open Biden actually was to compromise.

The White House defended its decision to move ahead, citing the need to get relief to Americans ahead of looming expiration dates to critical benefits like expanded unemployment insurance.

But the White House has set deadlines, saying it wants to see "significant progress" by Memorial Day, and the measure passed over the summer. We'll notify you here with news about. Turn on desktop notifications for breaking stories about interest? Comments 0. Top Stories. Vermont has the highest vaccination rate in the country. So why are cases surging? Contributing to this optimism was the fact that this time around the Democratic coalition was less divided.

In the six years since failure of the legislation, the labor movement had changed and included many more Hispanics in its membership. Workers care for the elderly, mow our lawns or drive our taxis, work hard and deserve a reliable road map to citizenship. The Congressional Black Caucus was a bit less enthusiastic but still expressed support for the effort while complaining that the Diversity Visa Program had been eliminated. Chamber of Commerce and the agricultural lobby were on board as well.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration had continued efforts begun during the Bush administration to prove that the United States could police the borders. In federal prosecutions for immigration crimes reached an all-time high. If the factions of the Democratic Party had softened in the years between and , the factions in the Republican Party had hardened.

In , Speaker John Boehner was facing significant intra-party infighting, largely due to the growing voice of the Tea Party activists in his conference—a group that would contribute to his historic resignation just two years later. To please the hard-liners in his party he rejected the Senate bill in favor of a series of smaller bills and then, when suspicion was that these smaller bills would go to conference with the hated Senate bill, he had to promise not to compromise.

And then, as is so often the case in politics, something happened that on the face of it had nothing to do with immigration reform but that killed it nonetheless. Majority Leader Eric Cantor, widely expected to succeed Boehner as speaker, lost his Republican primary to a right-wing tea party supporter who among other things campaigned on opposition to immigration reform.

If a member of the leadership could lose to an unknown Tea Party challenger, they could too. Boehner never brought the legislation to the floor, in spite of the fact that it probably could have passed with a united Democratic caucus and some more moderate business-oriented Republicans. Immigration reform has always had a way of eluding the best-laid plans of powerful people.

The Republican Party is still in limbo, with many members clearly anti-immigrant and others fearful of an anti-immigrant primary electorate. Immigration reform may be as difficult in the third decade of the 21 st century as it was in the first and second.

This is in part because of a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, the United States is a country of immigrants; on the other hand, it is a country that has always been worried about being overrun by immigrants.

And this makes reform especially difficult. Graham Jr. But that coalition never happened. FixGov 5 lessons from election night Elaine Kamarck.