Bipartisan infrastructure bill runs into trouble
What happened
Republicans delivered a setback to hopes for a bipartisan infrastructure bill this week, voting down New York Sen. Chuck Schumer’s push to open debate on a bill that would provide $579 billion to upgrade roads, bridges, rail lines, and broadband. A motion to advance the “skinny” bill, which is limited to new funding for physical infrastructure, fell 11 votes short of the 60 needed to pass. Republicans said they needed more time to negotiate and actually write details of the legislation. Forcing a vote this week “does not achieve any goal except to alienate people,” said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a member of the bipartisan group of 10 senators who began negotiations on the physical infrastructure bill last month.
Some Republicans opposed measures in the bill to offset the costs, and Senate negotiators agreed to drop a plan to increase funding for the Internal Revenue Service’s enforcement of tax law, which proponents hoped would raise an additional $100 billion. Conservative politicians and economists also raised concerns that the bill could fuel inflation in an economy that is showing signs of overheating.
The vote does not impact Democrats’ more expansive $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill, which provides funds for child care, senior care, health care, and a transition to renewable energy. Democrats intend to pass this bill via budget reconciliation, which means it would require only a simple majority instead of a filibuster-proof 60 votes. But that would require every Senate Democrat to be on board, and centrists such as West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema have raised concerns about the bill’s price tag and, in Manchin’s case, its proposed curbs on fossil fuels. “I’m not committed to anything right now except for a bipartisan infrastructure,” Manchin said.
What the editorials said
Despite this setback, Democrats remain intent on “going for broke—literally,” said The Wall Street Journal. Their
$3.5 trillion spree would provide funding for universal pre-K, paid family leave, a new federal child-care program, free community college, Obamacare subsidies, and more, all of which will turn into entitlements that “will be politically impossible to reform or repeal.” The bill will also fund “a vast climate agenda” and raise taxes by hundreds of billions. Republicans should walk away from the charade of bipartisanship on the first bill, and force Democrats “to take sole responsibility for the consequences” of the entire mess.
Sens. Manchin and Sinema “may be right” that a bipartisan deal would be preferable, said the Los Angeles
Times, but “that’s not how Congress has operated for the last decade.” The Affordable Care Act and the 2017 tax cuts both became law through singleparty support. Meanwhile, bipartisan cooperation around the physical infrastructure bill is crumbling. Republicans are turning against provisions “that were supposedly settled,” such as the $40 billion to aid the cash-starved IRS’s efforts to enforce tax law, which is routinely evaded by corporations and the wealthy. “The public strongly supports more spending on infrastructure,” so Congress should stop wasting time.
What the columnists said
Yes, infrastructure spending is popular, because “everybody loves Santa Claus,” said Brian Reidl in TheDispatch.com. But congressional Democrats are using taxes and financial chicanery, such as pretending to allow the child tax credits to expire, to create an illusion of offsetting the costs. Honest math shows that Democrats want to add at least $6.1 trillion in new spending and tax credits over the next decade to President Biden’s “mostly unnecessary” $1.9 trillion Covid stimulus. That would balloon the national debt to a crippling $43 trillion, or 130 percent of the economy, within a decade.