Pete Buttigieg Defends Spending Bill Despite Dropping Paid Family Leave: ‘Nobody Gets Everything That They Want’

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg defended Democrats and the Biden administration despite the fact that they are moving to drop paid family leave from their spending package.

Buttigieg, who just came off of paternity leave for the adoption of his newborn twins, was confronted by CNN’s Dana Bash with footage of his saying paid leave is long overdue for most Americans.

“What do you say to the more than 100 million Americans who don’t have access to the kind of paid family leave you just benefited from and don’t understand why the administration didn’t fight harder to keep it in the bill?” Bash asked.

Buttigieg maintained that the Biden administration believes in paid family leave, but he pivoted to say the bill does allow financial support for American families who need assistance with child care. Bash acknowledged his point, but she asked him how Democrats can keep on fighting for paid family leave if they are about to head into an election year.

Buttigieg stood by his view that the bill still represents “the most important pro-family legislation of my lifetime,” and “the most we’ve done” for health care, climate change ever and various infrastructure agendas.

“When you have a successful policy, when you deliver major positive transformational change in the lives of Americans, you are rewarded with more running room to do more great things,” Buttigieg argued. “I firmly believe that, that idea that good policy is good politics, and this framework is good policy.”

Bash then asked Buttigieg what he has to say to Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV), since paid family leave was one of his major objections to the bill. Buttigieg deflected from the question by maintaining once more that the bill remains “a feast of good policies, some of which my party has been talking about, or even politicians on both sides of the aisle have been talking about for literally as long as I have been alive and the chance to deliver it is now within our grasp.”

It is an extraordinary package that is going to make concrete improvements in the lives of every American and I can’t bait to see it done. Obviously, when you put together something this big and this complex, nobody gets everything that they want. The president has been clear about that, I don’t think anybody crafting their perfect package in their mind would see it reflected here, because this reflects the input of so many different people, including bipartisan work on the infrastructure side, and a very ideologically diverse big tent party on the family stuff.

Battigie concluded by saying he won’t leave Republicans “off the hook” for their opposition to this.

Watch above, via CNN.

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