In March, President Joe Biden introduced an infrastructure bill that was slated to cost about $4 trillion total in new spending. In the intervening months, Republicans and centrist Democrats slowly whittled at that number, and the proposals in the bill. Now, it’s a paltry $579 billion in new spending — and Republicans, they say, still aren’t happy.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) set a procedural vote to advance the bipartisan infrastructure bill for Wednesday, saying that “it’s time to move forward” with the bill. The topline spending number hasn’t changed, and they’ve just been negotiating the details for a month, as Schumer pointed out.
But Republicans, who have stalled the bill with negotiations for months, say that they’ll vote against advancing the bill to debate because (despite months of negotiations) they still need more time.
Evidently, all 50 Senate Republicans are set to reject advancing the bill, which means that even the Republicans who had helped to negotiate the bill in its current form aren’t planning to vote for it. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia), who is also part of the bipartisan group negotiating the bill, say that the vote should wait until next week, when more details of the bill can be hammered out.
But Schumer disagrees with their reasoning. The vote on Wednesday isn’t whether or not to approve the bill; it’s a vote on whether or not to advance with debate on it. “There’s no reason it should fail,” Schumer told CNN on Tuesday. “What is the reason? They say they need the whole bill text, they haven’t asked for that on bill after bill after bill.”
Meanwhile, one of the major points of contention in the bipartisan negotiations is how to pay for the bill. Republicans have rejected proposal after proposal to pay for the bill, refusing to agree to tax hikes on corporations and the rich and even rejecting modest funding for the Internal Revenue Service to better enforce tax law. Instead, they’ve proposed taxes on the middle and lower classes, which Democrats won’t agree to.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) said Wednesday that if Democrats want to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans won’t agree to that either. “I can’t imagine there will be a single Republican voting to raise the debt ceiling after what we’ve been experiencing,” he said.
He added that if Democrats want to raise the debt ceiling — one of their only options left after so many pay-for options have been rejected — they’ll have to pursue it themselves in the reconciliation process.
Even so, if Democrats choose a path to raise the debt ceiling that circumvents Republicans, conservative Democrats like Manchin could stand in their way. Plus, Democrats raising the debt ceiling opens an avenue for the GOP to criticize them for spending, even though they weren’t too concerned about the national debt during the Donald Trump years.
“The leader’s statements on debt ceiling are shameless, cynical and totally political,” Schumer said in reaction to McConnell’s statements. “This debt is Trump debt. It’s COVID debt.”
The takeaway, argue progressives, is that Republicans are dangling their support for the bill in front of Democrats while delaying the bill to further politicize and weaken the proposal. This is similar to what happened to the Affordable Care Act during the Obama administration: Democrats kept making concession after concession to Republicans for the proposal until it was significantly weaker than the original idea. And then, no Republicans voted for it anyway.
There are clear parallels between then and now. Without Republican support for pay-fors or a raising of the debt ceiling for the bill, it’s unclear how it will get passed at all. A stalemate over the debt ceiling could end up leading to yet another government shutdown.
“They’ve been killing time for months and and at this point, I believe it’s starting to get to a point where this bipartisan effort is seeming to serve less on investing in our infrastructure and serving more the end of just delaying action,” Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) told reporters on Tuesday. “It’s been enough.”
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
Last week, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy