(Some) Republicans deliver

Gov. Asa Hutchinson issued a statement Saturday praising the U.S. House of Representatives’ passage Friday night of the bipartisan infrastructure bill.

That’s the bill that all four of the state’s House members — all of Hutchinson’s Republican Party — voted against.

So, what else isn’t new? Other, I mean, than Hutchinson’s frequently standing as an island of moderation and pragmatism amid a Trumpian madness raging around his party and state. The madness demands and gets subservience from the state’s four cowering House members — Rick Crawford, French Hill, Steve Womack and Bruce Westerman.

Hutchinson actually issued his statement in his role as chairman of the National Governors Association. Governors tend to like federal money for infrastructure because they can use it to build nice things while, in Hutchinson’s case, running up state budget surpluses that can be used to justify cutting taxes.

Days before, Hutchinson had touted the then-unpassed infrastructure bill in remarks to the Arkansas Good Roads Transportation Council. “What it gives for us,” he said, “is $3.6 billion in highway funding over five years through the normal formula process [and] $278 million in bridge replacement funds over five years. These are big dollars for big projects to help us avoid dangerous situations that we can have in the future.”

The state’s four Republican congressmen dared not risk endorsing their governor’s wish for that money. They didn’t want to be labeled “RINOs,” or Republicans in Name Only, or worse, for voting to help pass an enemy bill that increases spending, and, according to the Congressional Budget Committee, doesn’t quite pay for itself up front.

But it wasn’t an enemy bill. It was an American bill. It was the handiwork of negotiations between about a dozen senators split between the two parties.

Thirteen Republican moderates essentially passed it Friday night, casting bipartisan votes for it, more than covering the six extremist House Democrats who wanted to continue holding the bill hostage as leverage to pass a bigger social-spending bill.

Those 13 Republican votes came mostly from Congress members from blue or swing states — from New York, Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Nebraska, Alaska, New Jersey and West Virginia. West Virginia and Alaska are the exceptions, but they are eccentric places, producing moderates like Lisa Murkowski on the Republican side and Joe Manchin on the Democratic.

Arkansas used to be eccentric, but is now a cookie from the Trumpian cutter.

The Nebraska vote came from the Republican representing the swing district around Omaha that Biden carried last year.

“Socialists,” Rep. Matt Gaetz called the 13 Republicans. “Communists,” chimed in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Perhaps you had not known that the Arkansas Department of Transportation headquarters rising on Interstate 30 south of Little Rock was a socialist or communist installation.

Persons finding socialistic or communistic the infrastructure of America — highways, airports, train service, broadband expansion, water and sewer systems and, in this bill, electric carcharging stations — should get out of their cars and swim across the Mississippi River next time they need to get to the other side. That’s provided they’d reached the river by eschewing public highways and driving through the briars and the brambles and the bushes where the rabbits couldn’t go.

In the end, Biden and House Democrats passed a popular bill creating jobs and enhancing public safety in the same way they could have passed it in August — with across-the-aisle support producing a clear accomplishment that could have been cited effectively in the off-year gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey.

But, no, they let the new impractical “progressive” movement run things for about three months. That caucus held the infrastructure bill to tie it to a massive and unsold social-spending bill that came to be branded by big dollar signs and political dysfunction rather than for any of the worthy proposals within it.

Those include expanding Medicare at least for hearing services and to provide more coverage for in-home care, providing universal access to pre-kindergarten and granting childcare credits for working parents.

Reeling from Virginia’s rebuke, Biden at last directly leaned on members not to generally help him, but specifically to send him the infrastructure bill alone, after which they’d all turn their full and undivided attention to getting that social-spending bill passed.

Presumably that means trying to rebrand it for what’s in it, rather than for how big it is and the Democratic schism it’s caused. Presumably it means finding an elusive sweet spot the “progressives” won’t say is too little and Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema won’t say is too much — if such a spot exists.

Democrats might also keep in mind, though I suspect they won’t, that the most politically smart policies within a year of the midterms are those that are popular enough to warrant votes from those 13 mostly swing-state Republicans that would cover any likely defections from their own huffy and impractical left-wing.

No Republican is as yet remotely tempted by big money for something or other.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.