Former U.S. Senator Al Franken criticized his Democratic colleagues for their failure to so far pass the Build Back Better bill, saying in an episode of The Al Franken Podcast that the messaging on it was so bad that the American people had little idea what was in the legislation.
The former Minnesota senator on the Sunday show said, “I would argue that Build Back Better was a bad name for the package because no one knew what was in it,” even though in the bill there was transformative legislation such as universal pre-kindergarten for children.
Although Franken acknowledged that “Americans don’t say yes or no to legislation because there’ve been a lot of bills passed with really bad names,” he did say that “I think the fall here was that we, the American people never knew what was in the bill.”
After calling Build Back Better “the worst name for a bill ever,” Franken said Democrats “didn’t put what was in this bill before the people” so that they would understand the benefits of passing it.
He pointed out that all the public heard from the press was that the dollar amount of the proposal was “at 3 trillion [or] is at 1.5 trillion?”
Franken said that this “was inside baseball” and instead the Biden administration “should have been pointing out clearly to the public the benefits of the legislation and, for example, "saying you have subsidized childcare that also allows people to work."
He emphasized that “we needed to put these things on the floor so people could see them. And the stuff that people really liked could have gone into a reconciliation package.”
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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