Biden says Democrats’ $740 billion bill will boost chances in the medium term as Republicans look to retaliate in November

President Joe Biden suggested Monday that he is confident that Senate Democrats’ Inflation Reduction Act will help his party’s struggles to retain a majority in Congress next year.

Forecasts for the November midterm elections had looked bleak for Democrats for months, but the commander-in-chief told reporters on their way to Kentucky that Americans would immediately feel the benefits of the law if signed into law.

‘Do I expect it to help? Yes I do. It’s going to help right away,” Biden said, according to CNN, when asked about the approaching election.

He reportedly highlighted the bill’s Medicare cap on out-of-pocket drug costs.

But it may take longer for other measures to take effect – Democrat Senator Chris Coons of Connecticut suggested during an interview on ABC News’ This Week that it could take “a year or more” for the legislation to curb inflation.

Meanwhile, Republicans are warning Democrats they will pay a political price after the Senate passed the multibillion-dollar plan for climate change, health care and tax late Sunday afternoon by a vote of 51 to 50.

GOP Representative Kevin Hern told DailyMail.com that the two moderate Senate Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, were “played” by more progressive members of their party to vote for the bill.

What we saw in the Senate this weekend was a masterclass in deception and misinformation. Manchin and Sinema were played. They just voted to raise taxes – in the middle of a recession – less than 100 days before a critical election,” Hern said.

No GOP senators signed the bill, which passed through a budgetary process known as conciliation — meaning the party in power can bypass the required 60-vote threshold to pass a bill by simple majority. Vice President Kamala Harris cast the casting vote in the evenly split chamber.

Republican critics argue that new spending of $430 billion and about $740 billion in new revenues will drive up costs for American households just days after the US economy posted negative growth for the second quarter in a row.

Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, warned that the fallout could hit President Joe Biden’s party in the approaching midterm elections.

“Democrats will pay the price in November for raising taxes on families during a recession,” McDaniel said in a statement.

The bill now goes to the House of Representatives for a vote, where GOP lawmakers are similarly skeptical about the alleged economic benefits.

“Congress should focus on the rising price of gasoline, groceries and just about everything else. But the Democrats have no plan to fix the problems they’ve created,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said Sunday night.

“Instead, they voted for a 700-page issue that would raise taxes, hire 87,000 IRS agents, and raise inflation.”

The bill, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, is the largest ever investment in green energy. It also expands Affordable Care Act grants and is expected to add an additional 87,000 IRS employees over a 10-year period.

That’s more than double the current workforce of about 78,000, though that’s before accounting for the loss of workers over the past decade.

Last week, GOP members of the Senate Treasury Committee commissioned a study by the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation, which ignored certain key data points, which predicted that the bill would raise taxes on millions of Americans in every income bracket.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell also called on Democrats to pass the bill under the current economic conditions.

“With straight faces, the Democrats argued that the damage of their first reckless tax and spending wave was a good excuse to ram another one,” McConnell said in a statement after voting against the bill.

“The Democrats’ response to the recession they created is massive job-killing tax hikes and a doubling of the IRS.”

Former President Donald Trump, however, blamed McConnell for not stopping its passage.

The longtime Republican leader and ex-president’s fragile relationship has been broken forever in the wake of last year’s U.S. Capitol uprising. Since then, McConnell has become a favorite punching bag of Trump. The former president reportedly even made unsuccessful attempts to remove McConnell from his Senate leadership role.

“Mitch McConnell was played like a fiddle by Senate Democrats in the vote today,” Trump wrote in his Truth Social app on Sunday.

“First he gave them the fake infrastructure bill, then Guns, never used the debt ceiling for bargaining purposes (gave it away for NOTHING!), and now this. Mitch has no idea – he is soooo[sic] bad for the Republican Party!’

The legislation passed on Sunday afternoon after about 16 hours of non-stop voting-a-rama.

Under appeasement rules, the bill can only reach a final vote after unlimited rounds of amendments — which Republicans used to force Democrats to vote on tough issues like crime, the border and China’s economic threat.

The GOP’s only victories were forcing Democrats to remove a $35 cap on insulin prices for all Americans and adding a loophole of 15 percent minimum corporate tax rate.

Utah Republican Senator Mike Lee wrote on Twitter, “Democrats decided to ignore inflation and spend billions beyond our means, while rejecting nearly every Republican effort to protect taxpayers.”

His fellow GOP Senator Joni Ernst also chimed in on the platform: “We are in a recession. Inflation is at its highest point in 40 years. Do the Democrats really think now is the time to raise taxes and spend billions more? Yes they do. And their reckless #TaxAndSpendSpree is proof.”

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy released a video directly targeting moderate Democrat Manchin for his leadership of the legislation.

“As a result of Senator Manchin’s bill, and I hope I’m wrong, I predict that Joe-flation, as some people call it, will now refer to Joe Manchin and not President Biden,” Kennedy said. .