A needed prescription
What this country needs is the signing of an imperfect infrastructure bill at a White House ceremony attended by smiling members of Congress representing— imagine this—both parties.
Rebuilding vital structures to make our lives more safe and efficient—that’s a strong undercurrent of American virtue, perhaps enough to make a dent in our hardened political division.
We seem to be emerging safely enough at the moment from the virus. The economy seems to be restarting, if unevenly. We have a president with a 63 percent approval rating, mainly because of the two preceding factors and focused virus management.
The key word is “focused.” An overly ambitious $2.2 trillion infrastructure bill hanging out there while a $1.8 trillion family aid plan gets proposed … that’s not focus. It’s partisan waterfront-covering.
The next focused step should be for the Biden administration to persuade and compromise with at least 10 Republican senators on traditional infrastructure, probably somewhere between $600 billion and $1 trillion, with tax hikes on corporations reduced to about half what Biden is proposing.
That would produce a presumably paid-for infrastructure bill that could be passed over a filibuster. Then we could get busy fortifying our top priorities, our most acute needs, in bridge replacements, road improvements, upgraded piping systems and spruced-up airports and other transportation stations.
The people of the nation could behold a practical success of our government, accomplished in this case by all Democrats and a smattering of Republicans acting in the public interest outside the dominance of obstructive leaders like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy.
Biden could sign such a bill with a significant number of Republicans in the photograph, but none named McConnell or McCarthy. Those two could stay at their offices. McConnell could growl that his party needs to obstruct, not compromise. McCarthy could talk on the phone with Donald Trump to find out what to do next.
The right wing would be calling the 10 GOP senators traitors and RINOs.
Biden’s left flank would be howling that he’d been “rolled” by Republicans, just like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. His more-liberal critics would say he wilted to Republicans and thus left billions on the table that would have wired the country for the highest-speed Internet and vastly improved long-term health-care options for baby boomers.
But all of that is racket, and racket builds nothing.
Political advisers for both parties would be scratching their heads on how to spin this one for the midterms. How could you possibly convert political functioning into a midterm talking point?
The only people happy would be three-fifths to two-thirds of the American voters.
For the time being we have Biden presumably holding out for the $2.2 trillion of both traditional and newly defined infrastructure to be paid for by raising the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent and reforming international tax rates and collection.
We have U.S. Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, the 50th Democrat, saying that all of what Biden proposes is too much. He says Democrats ought to pass an infrastructure bill with Republicans since the Democrats rammed through coronavirus relief, with his support, on a simple party-line majority using budget reconciliation.
We have West Virginia’s other senator, Republican Shelley Moore Capito, meeting with Biden and leading a small Republican group countering with a $585 billion bill solely based on so-called traditional infrastructure.
We have a half-dozen to 10 Republican senators who’d be willing to cross their leadership and vote for a bipartisan bill if it was restricted totally to traditional infrastructure and if the tax increases were somewhere between non-existent and half of what Biden proposes.
In a sane world, those are ingredients of a vigorous negotiation. They are elements of a deal that would please neither side greatly, please both sides partly and delight an American majority with results they could see.
It’s not that liberal Democrats are wrong that infrastructure must be redefined for the changing world and that we face real and pressing needs in closing the digital divide and finding better ways to help families care for the declining elderly. It’s that the United States political system is precariously ill, beset by resentment and hate and misinformation and money. It’s that the broken system needs above all else to experience what a sick person happily reports, which is feeling a little better today than yesterday.
The prescription is not to try to take the whole bottle of medications at once. It is for a strategically and strictly paced dosage.
American politics needs to take its recommended allowance, which is an infrastructure bill smaller than many want and paid for by tax increases larger than many want.
We’d put people to work making us safer. And that’s not such a bitter a pill.