Senators’ building bill vote expected
Bipartisan OK is looking likely
WASHINGTON — After weeks of fits, starts and delays, the Senate is on track to give final approval to the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure plan, with a growing coalition of Democrats and Republicans prepared to lift the first phase of President Joe Biden’s rebuilding agenda to passage.
Final Senate votes are expected today, and the bill would then go to the House.
Already preparing to take the next step toward advancing central elements of Biden’s economic agenda, Senate Democrats on Monday released a sweeping $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that proposes to expand Medicare, boost federal child care and education programs, and invest new sums to combat climate change.
But first up is the $1 trillion infrastructure package.
Some 70 senators appear poised to carry the bipartisan package to passage, a potentially robust tally of lawmakers eager to tap the billions in new spending for their states and to show
voters back home they can deliver.
Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said it’s “the first time the Senate has come together around such a package in decades.”
The often-elusive political center is holding steady, a rare partnership with Biden’s White House.
On the left, the Democrats have withstood the complaints of liberals who say the proposal falls short of what’s needed to provide a down payment on one of the president’s top priorities.
From the right, the Republicans are largely ignoring the criticism from their most conservative and farflung voices, including a barrage of name-calling from former President Donald Trump as he tries to derail the package.
Together, a sizable number of business, farm and labor groups back the package, which proposes nearly $550 billion in new spending on what are typically mainstays of federal spending — roads, bridges, broadband internet, water pipes and other public works systems that cities and states often cannot afford on their own.
“This has been a different sort of process,” said Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, the lead Republican negotiator of the group of 10 senators who drafted the package.
Portman, a former White House budget director for George W. Bush, said the investments being made have been talked about for years, yet never seem to get done.
He said, “We’ll be getting it right for the American people.”
The top Democratic negotiator, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, said she was trying to follow the example of fellow Arizonan John McCain to “reach bipartisan agreements that try to bring the country together.”
VOICES OF DISSENT
Still, not all senators are on board, Despite the momentum, action ground to a halt over the weekend when Sen. Bill Hagerty, a Tennessee Republican allied with Trump, refused to speed up the process.
Other Republican senators objected to the size, scope and financing of the package, particularly concerned after the Congressional Budget Office said it would add $256 billion to deficits over the next decade.
Two Republicans, Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Todd Young of Indiana, had been part of initial negotiations shaping the package but ultimately announced they could not support it.
Rather than pressure lawmakers, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has stayed behind the scenes for much of the bipartisan work. He has cast his own votes repeatedly to allow the bill to progress, calling it a compromise.
Trump called Hagerty, who had been his ambassador to Japan, on Sunday and the senator argued for taking more time for debate and amendments.
The bipartisan package is to be funded by repurposing other money, and with other spending cuts and revenue streams. The bill’s backers argue that the budget office’s analysis was unable to take into account certain revenue streams — including from future economic growth.
Senators have spent the past week processing nearly two dozen amendments to the 2,700-page package, but so far none has substantially changed its framework.
One remaining issue, over tax compliance for cryptocurrency brokers, appeared close to being resolved after senators announced they had worked with the Treasury Department to clarify the intent.
But an effort to quickly adopt the cryptocurrency compromise was derailed by senators who wanted their own amendments, including one to add $50 billion for shipbuilding and other defense infrastructure. It’s unclear if any further amendments will be adopted.
The House is expected to consider the package when it returns from recess in September.
DEMOCRATS’ PACKAGE
Looking ahead to the $3.5 trillion package, Democrats view the wide array of proposed spending as historic, and they hope to rely on their narrow but potent majorities in Congress to grow government to a level not seen in decades.
In addition to Medicare, child care, education and climate-change investments, the measure proposes universal pre-kindergarten, an overhaul of federal immigration laws and fresh efforts to lower prescription drug prices, marking fresh attempts on Capitol Hill to adopt long-stalled priorities and campaign promises from the 2020 presidential election.
In releasing the document, Democratic leaders pledged their package would be financed in full, chiefly through tax increases targeting corporations and wealthy families — all the while leaving untouched Americans earning less than $400,000 a year in keeping with Biden’s pledge.
Like much of the budget, however, it ultimately leaves the work to draft those provisions to other lawmakers and committees. They are set to start translating the numbers into policy come September, making the announcement Monday the start of a long, fraught process in the House and the Senate still to come.
Once the package is complete, Democrats plan to shepherd the new spending through Congress using a process known as reconciliation. The maneuver allows them to sidestep what is likely to be unanimous Republican opposition and adopt the legislation in the Senate with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes typically needed. The first step comes this week, when the Senate is expected to approve the overall funding level before departing for its August recess.
“At its core, this legislation is about restoring the middle class in the 21st Century and giving more Americans the opportunity to get there,” Schumer said Monday in a letter to his caucus.
“By making education, health care, child care, and housing more affordable, we can give tens of millions of families a leg up. By making further investments in infrastructure, we can create tens of thousands of good-paying jobs. And by finally tackling climate change, we can spare our country and our planet the most devastating effects of global warming,” he said.
The new budget outline complements the $1 trillion infrastructure proposal that the chamber is on track to pass today. That public-works package is bipartisan, but it omits many of Democrats’ top priorities, prompting lawmakers to seek the trillions of dollars in additional spending through reconciliation. Some House Democrats say they simply will not vote to approve the public-works package unless they can also vote on a much-larger budget deal.
The Senate’s outline — drafted chiefly by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., chairman of the Budget Committee — essentially opens the door for Democrats to seek many of the proposals Biden put forward this spring as part of his families and jobs plans. Republicans had derided many of the initiatives as social spending, which they argued did not belong in an emerging deal over new investments in the country’s roads, bridges and pipes.
“For too many decades, Congress has ignored the needs of the working class, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor,” Sanders said Monday in a statement. “Now is the time for bold action. Now is the time to restore faith in ordinary Americans that their government can work for them, and not just wealthy campaign contributors.”
CHILD CARE, EDUCATION
The blueprint paves the way for significant new spending on child care and education, as Democrats look to fulfill a promise to make community college free for two years. The budget resolution also opens the door for lawmakers to extend a recent set of expanded federal tax credits that help low-income families with children.
Another bucket of spending aims to target climate change, addressing Democrats’ concerns that the bipartisan infrastructure deal does not go far enough to address their concerns about the warming planet. On the same day that the United Nations released a new report warning about the grim consequences of sustained carbon emissions, Democrats proposed new investments to crack down on pollution and authorize new clean-energy tax policies.
The budget further allows Democrats to pursue significant changes to Medicare, including an expansion to cover dental, vision and health benefits. And Democrats have opted to try to seek lawful permanent residency for perhaps millions of immigrants as part of the reconciliation process, embarking on a political journey that could find them tangling with the Senate parliamentarian over whether the idea is allowable under procedural rules that narrowly restrict them to proposals that affect spending.
And the budget deal puts the onus on the Senate’s top tax-writing panel, the Finance Committee led by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., to cover the costs of the massive package while also reducing the deficit by at least $1 billion. The task sets the stage for thorny fights even within the Democratic Party over the size of the potential tax increases on families, investors and businesses.
“More broadly, the American people are with us on these issues,” Wyden said in a statement. “They pay their taxes with every paycheck while the world’s wealthiest individuals and most profitable corporations pay little to nothing or cheat by not paying taxes they do owe.”
But Democrats opted against including one significant element: an increase in the debt ceiling, the statutory limit the government can borrow to pay its bills. Congress missed a key deadline to raise or suspend the ceiling at the end of July, meaning lawmakers have only a few weeks to avert a potential fiscal crisis that puts the country at risk of default.
Democrats instead seek to address the issue outside the context of the budget, an approach backed by the Treasury Department, but the move threatens to put them on a collision course with Republicans threatening to withhold their votes over spending concerns.