Former U.S. Senator Al Franken (D-MN) took a swipe at Democrats’ crafting of the Build Back Better bill that the Biden administration has been trying to get passed since 2021.

Speaking with the founder of The Lincoln Project, Steve Schmidt, on the Sunday episode of The Al Franken Podcast, the two began discussing the challenges that have plagued the bill from the start.

Schmidt asked, “Do you think that there was a lot of stuff that was big stuff, transformative policy under Build Back Better?”

“Yeah,” Franken said.

Schmidt then admitted, “I don’t know what Build Back Better means. What I’m saying is if you take something important and you degrade it with jargon and nonsense words in an era where trust is completely collapsed, and there’s really no expectation from a competency perspective, right?”

Schmidt then brought up the idea of universal Pre-K for children being a fundamental aspect of the bill.

“Talk about that directly with conviction, travel around about it, build a coalition, right? You know, talk about a common interest, right? Build, support, and pass,” he said.

“I would argue that Build Back Better was a bad name for the package because no one knew what was in it,” Franken agreed. “I think that Americans don’t say yes or no to legislation because — there’ve been a lot of bills passed with really bad names. I think the, the fall here was that we, the American people never knew what was in the bill. And this is why I argued for putting these, these bills on the floor individually.”

He continued, “My feeling is that this wasn’t about Build Back Better is just the worst name for a bill ever. It was that we didn’t put what was in this bill before the people. And all they kept hearing was from the press. It was at 3 trillion is at 1.5 trillion? It was inside baseball. It was, it was a horse race. Instead, we should have been saying, no, you have subsidized childcare that also allows people to work.”

“We needed to put these things on the floor so people could see them,” he concluded, “And the stuff that people really liked could have gone into a reconciliation package.”

Listen above via The Al Franken Podcast.

The post Al Franken Rips Democrats Over Handling Of BBB: ‘Build Back Better Was a Bad Name — Because No One Knew What Was In It’ first appeared on Mediaite.

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