ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - U.S. Rep. Cori Bush of Missouri says she told President Joe Biden that she would be voting against his bipartisan infrastructure bill, saying directly to him, "St. Louis has to come first for me."
Bush was one of six Democrats that opposed the $1.2 trillion measure last week, which the House of Representatives passed by a vote of 228-206. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts also voted “no” on the infrastructure bill.
Bush told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that she also spoke to Vice President Kamala Harris, and that she and Biden both knew "in everything that I do, St. Louis is going to come first."
“I didn’t come to Congress to — to allow our priorities to be put on a shelf,” Bush said. “Child care, climate action, community violence prevention — I made it very clear that those are the things that we need. We won’t get that if we — we won’t get those things if we don’t stand up. And so he understood that.”
Bush said she vowed not to support the infrastructure plan without a vote on the separate $2 trillion Build Back Better proposal. That proposal, she says, would include universal preschool, four weeks of paid family leave, expanded home care for the elderly and disabled, and initiatives to tackle climate change.
“We have to have both,” Bush said. “I never said I didn’t want the infrastructure package, I just want both.”
Bush, the former activist and nurse from St. Louis, became Missouri’s first Black congresswoman when she defeated longtime U.S. Rep. William Lacy Clay last year.
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