If democrats wanted that, they would write a bill to do so. Not everything has to be bundled up in a multi trillion dollar bill that involves a ton of other unrelated things. The reason they haven't done that is because they don't really want to.
Whoa whoa, don't crap on politician's favorite do-nothing-but-promote-everything method of working! If enough people realized what was really going on, our politicians might actually have to start working for us!
There were a couple other things with a few more dollars allocated in Build Back Better, if I recall, perhaps worthy of more criticism than community college for everyone. Anyway, I wonder how much of the student loan debt is from community college, both as total dollar figure and per borrower. Something tells me that in-state tuition for community college isn’t where all the underwater borrowers went to school.
free community college is already a thing, it's called 'Pell Grants'
republicans don't want to talk about it because it's free money that works, and democrats don't want to talk about it because there's no reason to expand it
Side rant (though somewhat similar to colpabar's reply):
The Democrats tried to govern like they had a large majority, when they had 5 (I think) seats in the House, and a 50/50 Senate. Of course it failed! If you need every single vote, you can only go as far as the least-willing member will let you go.
The Democrats never should have tried to govern that way. They should have been coalition building, trying to find some common ground where they could do some things. Instead, they acted like they could dictate their agenda to Congress. Both Biden and Pelosi should have known better; they have decades of experience in Congress.
Why did they do this? You could argue that they did it because they knew that no Republican would ever cooperate on anything. But if that was the reason, they still should have gone for what they could get through the members they had, not going for the moon.
Or you could suspect that they wanted to blame the Republicans (and maybe the more conservative Democrats) for their lack of progress, as a tactic to win the next election. Well, from all the indications so far, that's not working out for them.
> The Democrats never should have tried to govern that way. They should have been coalition building, trying to find some common ground where they could do some things.
> So why did they take the approach they took?
The Republicans set that precedent (trying to govern like they had a large majority). I don't mean that as a "the other side does it too", just that each side has become increasingly vindictive of the other, making it much more difficult to work together when doing so is necessary to get anything done at all. We will continue to see power swaps with the winning side spinning its wheels while shutting the other side out.
> each side has become increasingly vindictive of the other
For a number of reasons, no doubt. But partly I blame the efforts to remove pork from legislation. We thought that was a good idea, without realizing that it was the basis of compromise. When each little piece of legislation comes through on its own, there is no incentive to compromise, but just play tribal politics instead.
