Posted on 08/10/2021 8:59:53 AM PDT by RandFan
The Senate on Tuesday passed a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal, a significant win for President Biden and the first step on his top legislative priority.
Senators voted 69-30 on the bill, which was spearheaded by a bipartisan group of senators led by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio). Nineteen GOP senators voted with all Democrats to pass the legislation.
The bill is now heading to the House, where it faces an uncertain future and skepticism from progressives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has vowed she won’t take it up until the Senate passes the second part of its infrastructure two step, a sweeping $3.5 trillion spending package that includes Democrats’ top priorities.
But the Senate’s passage of the bipartisan measure on Tuesday gives a victory for Biden and the centrist-minded group that led the legislation, and placed big bets and months of time on the ability to get a bipartisan deal on infrastructure, one of Washington’s long-running legislative white whales.
The bipartisan deal includes roughly $550 bill in new funding, making it substantially smaller than the $2.6 trillion proposed by Biden earlier this year.
It includes money for new investments for infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, broadband, water and rail. According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, the bill would add $256 billion to the deficit, though negotiators argue that “hard” infrastructure projects pay for themselves over time and that CBO didn’t give them full credit for their work.
“The new spending under the bill is offset through a combination of new revenue and savings, some of which is reflected in the formal CBO score and some of which is reflected in other savings and additional revenue identified in estimates, as CBO is limited in what it can include in its formal score,” Sinema and Portman said in a joint statement on the analysis.
Even though the bipartisan bill appeared in recent days to be on a glide path to passage, it was full of stops and starts.
Biden initially tried to negotiate a deal with Republicans led by Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), but those talks unraveled. Biden, instead, blessed the negotiations between Portman and Sinema, who had been quietly talking for weeks, and he joined a group of the 10 core negotiators at the White House in late June to announce they had reached a deal on a framework.
The group and the White House then spent more than the next month trying to iron out their details, including the perennial sticking point of how to pay for the agreement after Republicans took ramped-up IRS enforcement off the table. That included hours of Capitol meetings filled with pizza and several bottles of wine.
Even after the group and the White House announced late last month that they had a deal on the “major issues” and the Senate formally moved to take up the bill, they still spent days finalizing key provisions including broadband and transit.
And the Senate’s final debate on the bill over the weekend was dragged out after Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) rejected lobbying by his colleagues to sign off on an agreement that would trade votes on anywhere from 16 to 25 amendments in exchange for speeding up the final vote. Senators also made 11th-hour attempts to add a deal to change the bill’s crypto-currency language, which has sparked bipartisan alarm, but those were blocked.
The bill passed in the Senate on Tuesday put Republican splits on full display with former President Trump repeatedly lashing out at Republicans, including GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for helping advance the bipartisan deal.
“Nobody will ever understand why Mitch McConnell allowed this non-infrastructure bill to be passed. He has given up all of his leverage for the big whopper of a bill that will follow. ...He is working so hard to give Biden a victory, now they’ll go for the big one, including the biggest tax increases in the history of our Country,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.
To pass the bill through the Senate, Democrats needed at least 10 GOP votes. Though they got several more than that, they also lost GOP senators who had helped advance the bill over earlier procedural hurdles.
Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who is up for reelection next year, announced over the weekend that he could not support the deal.
“Having reviewed the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) estimated fiscal impact of this legislation as currently constructed, and frankly still not being comfortable with a number of the Democratic priorities contained in this version, I will vote ‘no,’” Young said in a statement.
And Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who missed the vote because his wife is undergoing treatment for cancer, announced hours before Tuesday’s vote that he could not support the deal. He voted to advance it on Saturday.
“As we combed through the legislative text of this 2,702 page bill and the subsequent amendments, there were many sections that I believe contradict the values of the people of South Dakota who sent me to Washington. With that in mind, I could not in good conscience support this legislation in its final form,” Rounds said.
The Senate’s passage of the bill tees up Senate Democrats to turn to their $3.5 trillion plan, which they will try to pass through the Senate without GOP support.
Passing the plan requires two steps: First, they need to clear a budget resolution that includes broad instructions and top-line figures on the subsequent bill.
The Senate is poised to vote on Tuesday to take up the budget resolution, which Democrats will be able to do on their own as long as all 50 of their members stay unified. Before they can approve the budget, they’ll need to endure a marathon session known as vote-a-rama, where any senator can force a vote on anything they want.
After they clear the budget resolution, they will then spend at least a month drafting the spending package itself, which will include top priorities including expanding Medicare, immigration reform, combating climate change and universal pre-K.
The House is expected to wait until after the Senate passes the spending package this fall to take up the bipartisan bill, though moderates are ramping up efforts to pressure Pelosi into moving faster.
“So whatever you can achieve in a bipartisan way, bravo. We salute it. We applaud it. We hope that it will pass soon. But, at the same time, we're not going forward with leaving people behind,” Pelosi told reporters last week. “All of these things are urgent, and we're going to get them done together.”
Shameful. Bipartisan means putting the shaft to taxpayers.
I wish I could share your optimism, but even insane Nancy knows this is their shot at permanent rule and she will make sure it get done now that the Assistant Democrats have done their part.
Note. The left currently commands a 70-30 majority in the Senate, this despite the actual make of the the voters being much closer to 50-50. This is what happens in a corrupt republic where candidates consider lying about your beliefs to be a virtue and where the left has no qualms about cheating to get elected.
you are dishonest with yourself.
The ultimate remedy for unconstitutionally big federal government run by very corrupt political parties that are oppressing patriots under their boots...
Patriots need to primary federal and state elected officials who don't send voters email ASAP that clearly promises to do the following.
Federal and state lawmakers need to promise in their emails to introduce resolutions no later than 100 days after start of new legislative sessions that proposes an amendment to the Constitution to the states to repeal the 16th and ill-conceived 17th Amendments.
Combating Climate Change? The IPCC couldn’t come up with a solution so how do the Democrats propose to fix it?
If this isn’t a reason for term limits, nothing is.
Couldn’t congress be sued and take it to SCOTUS?
You aren’t telling us why this is so great.
Make a list of the republicans involved. An attempt to unseat everyone of them needs to occur. If voting fraud is not fixed then it probably won’t do any good.
It’s nice those GOPers are helping Biden out.
Dr. Steve Turley (youtube guy) calls them DIABLOs. Democrats in all but label only.
“Yer gerta vert fer der republricin er else der dermacrirts win. Derp!” ~ so says every retard that insisted we shouldn’t form a MAGA party and render the GOP to 3rd party status.
I have learned over decades these bastards are entrenched they are impossible to get rid of they circle the wagons they have put up SO MANY contenders against Cheney that the bitch will retain her seat BANK ON IT, it’s how they play the game!! I have after 45+ years of honestly fighting tooth and nail donating and really working my heart out come to the realization that this republic is DONE!! My last hope was Trump however my eyes were truly OPENED WIDE because of Trump, I now realize just how corrupted this government is FBI, CIA, IRS, DOJ, STATE, CDC, FDA, and now even the pentagon this is way to massive to fix it!! I thank Trump for bringing the utter rot to the surface for all to see in daylight!! I have no more hope or fight left it is to late,THANK GOD I lived most of my life during the days of freedom we lost the country when we lost the education system, and opened the borders!!!
I am starting to go back to the idea that the GOP needs to be destroyed and a new party formed. They are not listening.
do you have a clue why the DC democrats and RINOs want your guns? Truth; it’s not for your own safety or safety of the common public as they continually spew, it is for their own safety because at some point the American people will have had enough the DC traitors
Complete utter BS!!! Trump’s stimulus was less expensive and not a socialist’s dream. He wanted to upgrade the country’s infrastructure and McConnell was dead set against it. However, as the Judas he is, Bitch side with biden on this one.
Your have got that soooooo right......sadly. For many of us we have seen it coming for a very long time. It’s here.
It was a one sided well planned war. We didn’t know how to really fight it. We trusted lying politicians time and time again. I voted a number of times for McConnell when I lived in KY and Portman when I moved to Ohio. I was so fooled by them. I hurts to think about it.
It isn’t a major victory for Biden! His budget got cut down to 1Trillion from 3 Trillion. The Democrats control all branches of government so we have to recognize that is probably the best we could have done. Hopefully the House Democrats will poison pill it on reconcilation.
“You aren’t telling us why this is so great.”
Because it isn’t. You aren’t telling us why this was OK for Trump but bad now.
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