By Jeff Mason
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden will celebrate his climate change and drug pricing law, The Inflation Reduction Act, on Tuesday with an event at the White House to highlight Democrats’ commitment to progressive priorities ahead of the November election.
Biden signed the $430 billion bill, seen as the biggest climate change package in U.S. history, into law last month in a low-key ceremony.
The Tuesday event on the White House South Lawn will bring together more lawmakers and interest groups who worked at getting it passed, and give Biden an opportunity to talk about key elements of the law that are important to his political base.
He will also use it to take aim at Republicans. Biden plans to argue they should have supported the package but instead “unanimously opposed lowering costs for the American people,” the White House said in a preview of his remarks.
Republicans suggest the legislation will lead to higher energy prices and aggressive audits from the Internal Revenue Service.
In addition to providing incentives for the clean energy industry, the law allows Medicare to negotiate lower drug prices for the elderly, seeks to ensure corporations and wealthy people pay their taxes through beefed-up IRS resources, and aims to combat inflation by reducing the federal deficit.
Biden had hoped to secure a trillion-dollar-plus “Build Back Better” bill with measures to fight global warming and tackle other social issues but could not get it through the 100-member U.S. Senate, which is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans and whose rules require 60 votes to advance most legislation.
Support from Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, a conservative Democrat who opposed the more expensive bill, helped get the smaller one passed. At the Aug. 17 signing ceremony, Biden gave Manchin the pen he used to sign the legislation into law.
As a presidential candidate Biden promised to make fighting global warming a top priority. He returned the United States to the international Paris climate accord, from which Republican President Donald Trump had withdrawn, and has sought to revamp the U.S. economy to prioritize clean energy, electric vehicles, and lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Younger, left-leaning voters are especially eager to fight climate change, and the president has sought to appeal to them ahead of the congressional elections in November in which Democrats risk losing control of the House of Representatives and Senate.
Inflation is a top political headache for Biden, though, and one of the reasons the bill was named for efforts to fight it.
A key measure of inflation, August’s consumer price index, will be released on Tuesday and is expected to show a decline from July, led by falling gasoline prices.
U.S. consumer prices, which have been climbing at the fastest pace in four decades, rose 8.5% over the 12 months through July.
(Reporting by Jeff Mason; Editing by Tim Ahmann and Gerry Doyle)
