Ideas clash with congressional reality
WASHINGTON — Rep. Thomas Suozzi, D-N.Y., says he will oppose President Joe Biden’s infrastructure package if a cap on state and local tax deductions is not erased. “No SALT, no deal,” he said in an interview.
Rep. Cindy Axne, D-Iowa, said she has pressed Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and other officials to add money for biofuel infrastructure, which would help her state. “I am hoping this was an oversight and that they will support it,” she said.
Business lobbyists, meanwhile, are privately urging the White House to drop the $400 billion home- and elder-care provisions to cut the bill’s cost and the corporate tax hikes needed to fund it. “The home-care provisions have been heavily attacked and are just vulnerable right now,” admitted one White House adviser, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
As Biden and Democratic lawmakers begin assembling a massive jobs bill they hope will echo the New Deal and literally rebuild parts of America, they are quickly finding that their ambitions are colliding with the complicated reality of precisely how to do it.
Only now is Congress starting the arduous task of turning Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure blueprint into legislation, and it’s proving inordinately complex. Even before pen has been put to legislative paper, some Democrats in the narrowly divided House are noisily raising demands, sensing a fleeting moment of leverage.
Republicans are talking through a bipartisan alternative, though they are deeply skeptical that Biden will engage. And the American Jobs Plan could merge with other ongoing efforts to craft a wide-ranging transportation bill, a process with its own set of competing agendas.
The many dynamics at play are setting the stage for a lengthy and laborious path for getting the American Jobs Plan to the president’s desk. Unlike Biden’s coronavirus relief package, which he signed in his seventh full week in office, there is no urgent deadline for an ambitious jobs plan on the scale the White House wants, all but guaranteeing the legislative fight will take months.