Free Republic

There’s a grudging realization among Democrats on the Hill that Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill will not pass either the House or Senate without substantial changes. Those changes include dramatically trimming the amount of money to be spent and curtailing the ambitious climate change agenda. Centrist Democrats in the House want to see concrete measures on how to pay for the bill. Even Joe Biden has said he wants ideas on how to find the revenue to pay for the spending. So far, the Democrats’ proposals for increasing revenue include some form of smoke and mirrors and not...

President Biden on Thursday said “the climate crisis” caused deadly New York City flooding from Tropical Storm Ida as he used the disaster to push his $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill. Biden spoke after at least 18 people died in New York and New Jersey, including at least eight people who drowned in flooded basement apartments in Queens and Brooklyn. “The past few days of Hurricane Ida and the wildfires in the West and the unprecedented flash floods in New York and New Jersey is yet another reminder that these extreme storms and the climate crisis are here,” Biden said in...

LET’S BUILD INFRASTRUCTURE is preparing to launch formally in Washington, D.C., next week with a six-figure advertising blitz focused on pressing lawmakers to use privatization, rather than taxation, to pay for the infrastructure proposals debated in Congress. The organization touts public-private partnerships and a process known as “asset recycling,” in which the government finances new construction and repairs by selling or leasing roads, bridges, water utilities, parking lots, and other infrastructure assets to private contractors instead of paying for them with public funding. The private operators in turn recoup costs by adding tolls or increasing user fees, such as water...

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was censured by the Aiken County Republican Party over his vote in favor of the so-called bipartisan infrastructure bill. They said that Lindsey Graham “consciously violated the platform of the South Carolina Republican Party.”

The Aiken County Republican Party in South Carolina announced Friday it voted to censure Senator Lindsey Graham over his support of the $1.2 trillion infrastructure package.The group said in a statement to Newsweek Saturday that the vote was not against "realistic achievable and necessary infrastructure projects" and that it understands the importance of strong infrastructure including roads, bridges and rural broadband internet access.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell praised President Joe Biden on Wednesday for working with Republicans to pass an infrastructure bill. “I think the president deserves a lot of credit for getting the Democrats open to reaching a bipartisan agreement on this bill,” McConnell said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

Former President Donald Trump against lashed out at Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell for giving President Joe Biden a win by allowing the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill to pass. '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. I have quietly said for years that Mitch McConnell is the most overrated man in politics - now I don’t have to be quiet anymore,' Trump wrote in a Tuesday morning statement. 'He is working so hard to...

WASHINGTON — The Senate gave overwhelming bipartisan approval to a $1 trillion infrastructure bill on Tuesday to rebuild the nation’s deteriorating roads and bridges and fund new climate resilience and broadband initiatives, delivering a key component of President Biden’s agenda. The legislation would be the largest infusion of federal investment into infrastructure projects in more than a decade, touching nearly every facet of the American economy and fortifying the nation’s response to the warming of the planet. It would provide historic levels of funding for the modernization of the nation’s power grid and projects to better manage climate risks, as...

President Joe Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill nears certain passage in the Senate with the blessing of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), even though he strongly opposed a trillion-dollar spending program proposed by President Donald Trump in 2016. “What I hope we will clearly avoid, and I’m confident we will, is a trillion-dollar stimulus,” McConnell said in December 2016 after Trump won the presidential election. Trump campaigned on the idea of massive infrastructure spending, a proposal that McConnell was not eager to endorse. “We need to do this carefully and correctly, and the issue of how to pay for...

American drivers could soon trade paying taxes on gas at the pump for owing the government annual 'per-mile user fees,' under a new pilot program recently passed by the Senate in Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal. The bill passed a Senate vote on Tuesday and will go on to the House of Representatives. The massive deal puts $125 million toward exploring the possibility of a federal vehicle miles traveled tax (VMT) by funding the launch of federal, state and local VMT pilot programs. It gives Transport Secretary Pete Buttigieg the ability to award grants to local and regional...

Blunt Burr Cassidy Capito Collins Cramer Crapo Fischer Graham Grassley Hoeven McConnell Murkowski Portman Risch Romney Sullivan Tillis Wicker

Over the course of the pandemic, federal overspending has exploded even by Congress’s lofty standards. While trillion-dollar deficits were a cause for concern before 2020, spending over just the last two years is set to increase the national debt by over $6 trillion. It’s bizarre, then, that the only thing that members of opposing parties in Congress can seem to work together on is fooling the budgetary scorekeepers with phantom offsets for even more spending.Photo: Bill Clark, Roll CallIn total, the bipartisan infrastructure deal includes around $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure to take place over five years....

The so-called bipartisan “infrastructure” bill, backed by Senate Democrats and 18 Senate Republicans, would reward blue states with federal money for driving up immigration levels to the United States. The bill, among other things, includes the Digital Equity Act that would help expand broadband to American communities that currently lack access to the internet. Slipped into the legislation are provisions allocating federal funding based on the number of newly arrived immigrants in a state or region — a design that rewards blue states who tend to have the largest foreign-born populations in the nation. As the legislation states, the Department...

WASHINGTON — Republicans and Democrats rushed on Thursday to line up a Senate vote to pass the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, working to clear away the final obstacles despite a finding by Congress’s official scorekeeper that the bill would add more than $250 billion to the federal deficit over the next decade.The flurry of activity came after three days of plodding work on the package, which would devote $550 billion in new money to rebuild the nation’s crumbling roads, bridges and rail systems and fund new climate resiliency and broadband access initiatives. It followed an estimate from the nonpartisan...

Remember that promise of Joe Biden’s that he wasn’t going to raise taxes on people earning less than $400,000 per year?“If you make less than $400,000, you won’t see one single penny in additional federal tax,” Biden told George Stephanopoulos in March 2020.But then Psaki tried to fudge that by saying that they meant “families” earning that amount or suggesting that it referred to couples. Which, of course, has a completely different meaning and leaves individuals at much greater risk.But that is not the only place where the Democrats are trying to sneak something past us in regard to potential...

Buried in the 2700 page infrastructure bill:

Fox News host Laura Ingraham confronted Louisiana GOP Sen. Bill Cassidy on Monday night over the Democrats infrastructure bill.Cassidy was one of a handful of Republicans who joined bipartisan negotiations with the White House on the infrastructure bill.During an interview on her Fox News program, Ingraham agreed there is a need for physical infrastructure funding, she noted many Republicans are worried about spending more money and inflation.But things went off the rails when Ingraham laughed and told Cassidy “you guys got played,” arguing that Democrats pulled a fast one over them on the bill.Cassidy also got shut down when he...

Buried in the “Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act” in the U.S. Senate is approval for the Department of Transportation (DOT) to test a new federal tax on every mile driven by individual Americans. The bill directs Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg to establish a pilot program to demonstrate a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee designed “to restore and maintain the long-term solvency of the Highway Trust Fund.” The objectives of the pilot program include: To test the design, acceptance, implementation, and financial sustainability of a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee. To address the need for additional revenue for...

A federal judge Tuesday blocked Texas from allowing state troopers to stop vehicles carrying migrants on the grounds that they may spread COVID-19 as worries and new cases are rising along the U.S.-Mexico border. The temporary order by U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone of El Paso is at least a short-term victory for the Biden administration, which had warned that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott's plan would create more problems amid high levels of summer border crossings in Texas —- particularly in the Rio Grande Valley, which one U.S. official called the “epicenter of the current surge.” In a sign of...

On Sunday, the Senate released the final text of the so-called bipartisan (but really liberal) infrastructure bill — all 2,702 pages. According to Breitbart, the huge bill was written in secret for months outside the normal legislative process. Buried in the measure is a pilot program for a national motor vehicle per-mile user fee (MBUF) which is basically a long-term plan to make it too expensive to drive a car. One of the “fun” parts of the supposed bipartisan bill (fun for believers of the climate change hypothesis) can be found on page 511 of the measure, which you can...