Biden and Senators Reach Broad Infrastructure
Deal
The bipartisan agreement is a significant victory, but
Democratic leaders say it can pass only once a far larger social policy bill is
complete.
President Biden met with a bipartisan group of
senators on the infrastructure package at the White House on Thursday. “This
agreement signals to the world that we can function, deliver and do significant
things,” he said.
Jonathan
WeismanEmily CochraneJim Tankersley
By Jonathan
Weisman, Emily Cochrane and Jim Tankersley
June 24,
2021
WASHINGTON
— President Biden and a bipartisan group of centrist senators reached a deal on
Thursday for $1.2 trillion in investments to rebuild the nation’s
infrastructure, a victory for the White House but only the first lurch in what
promises to be an arduous attempt to reshape the nation’s economic and social
programs.
The
agreement on traditional infrastructure projects — roads, bridges, tunnels,
rail and broadband — would be significant on its own, the first major increase
of federal public works spending since President Barack Obama’s 2009 economic
rescue plan. It would include some existing infrastructure programs, but also
provide $579 billion in new money over eight years to patch cracking highways,
rebuild crumbling bridges, speed rail traffic and more equitably spread
high-speed internet access.
The plan
would also pour billions of dollars into waterways and coastlines washing away
as a warming planet raises sea levels, and $7.5 billion into financing a
half-million electric vehicle charging stations, all part of Mr. Biden’s
climate pledges. It would be paid for in part with a $40 billion increase in
the I.R.S. enforcement budget to bring in $140 billion in unpaid taxes, as well
as repurposing unspent coronavirus relief funds, according to an outline
provided by the White House.
“This
agreement signals to the world that we can function, deliver and do significant
things,” Mr. Biden said from the White House’s East Room, after meeting with
the lawmakers.
But almost
immediately after reaching the breakthrough, Mr. Biden and Democrats offered a
giant caveat that could complicate its chances of passage.
Both the
president and top Democrats said the compromise, which constitutes only a small
fraction of the expansive, $4 trillion economic agenda Mr. Biden has proposed,
could advance only together with a far larger bill that would pour trillions
more into health care, child care, higher education access and climate change
programs. That measure, vehemently opposed by Republicans, would be paid for by
remaking the tax code to capture the wealth of the superrich and multinational
corporations that shift profits and jobs overseas.
“If this is
the only thing that comes to me, I’m not signing it,” Mr. Biden said of the
infrastructure piece. “It’s in tandem.”
Speaker
Nancy Pelosi called the changes in their totality “transformative, if not
revolutionary.” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader,
predicted that the pair of bills would be “the boldest, strongest legislation
that this country has seen in decades.”
They said
they hoped all of it could come together by this fall, an enormous challenge
that will involve persuading at least 60 senators to back the traditional
infrastructure plan, and keeping Democrats united on the larger bill. The
latter measure would have to pass through a budget process called
reconciliation, which would allow it to bypass a Republican filibuster, but
would require all 50 Democratic and independent votes in the Senate.
“There
ain’t going to be no bipartisan bill unless we’re going to have
reconciliation,” Ms. Pelosi said, a message she repeated privately to
Democrats, after liberals warned against acting just on a bipartisan deal that
jettisons the provisions progressives want most.
Still, the
deal struck Thursday fulfills the promise of bipartisanship that Mr. Biden has
long sought, and its authors were in a celebratory mood.
They had
spent the last two weeks shuttling across the Capitol, meeting with Brian
Deese, the director of the National Economic Council; Steve Ricchetti, a top
adviser to the president; and Louisa Terrell, the director of the White House
Office of Legislative Affairs. The talks unfolded after negotiations had
collapsed with a separate group of Republicans led by Senator Shelley Moore Capito
of West Virginia, with Mr. Biden saying the G.O.P. was not offering enough
infrastructure funding to meet the country’s needs.
“I think
that this coalition, and now being endorsed by the president, sends a message
not just to Congress, not just to the country, but to the world that we can do
the big things — we can function,” Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona,
one of the group’s primary drivers, said in a brief interview. “We continue to
be the leader of the world, and this is evidence that we are doing the work.”
The
framework doles out money in large pots: $312 billion for transportation
projects, $65 billion for broadband and $55 billion for water infrastructure. A
large sum, $47 billion, is set aside for “resilience” — a down payment on Mr.
Biden’s promise to deal with the effects of climate change.
But the
path forward is complicated and politically freighted, given Democrats’ spare
majorities in the House and Senate, which leave them little margin for error.
Both the infrastructure legislation and the far more ambitious reconciliation
bill must still be written and passed by both chambers. Democrats have signaled
that the contents of one could dictate the contents of the other, and the votes
required for each will be dependent on fragile coalitions of moderates and
liberals who have disparate priorities.
Senator
Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is chairman of the Senate Budget
Committee, has proposed spending up to $6 trillion on a sweeping reconciliation
plan that could include a Medicare expansion and other long-sought liberal
priorities, but moderate Democrats have raised concerns about the scope.
Centrists
like Ms. Sinema and Senator Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, have
not explicitly committed to voting for a reconciliation bill.
Leaders aim
to finish the first step on the reconciliation measure before leaving
Washington for the August recess, but would probably push any final passage to
September. And while 21 senators endorsed a theoretical infrastructure framework
this month, only five Republicans and five Democrats signed on to the final
compromise with Mr. Biden that was announced at the White House on Thursday.
After
offering a brief update to their colleagues before leaving Washington for two
weeks, the lawmakers will now have to persuade enough Republicans and Democrats
to support the framework.
Delay could
add political pressure. The House Republican campaign arm began sending out
news releases after the deal’s announcement holding swing-district Democrats
responsible if their colleagues “blow up a bipartisan bill.” And Senator Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said Mr. Biden’s demand that the
compromise move in tandem with a Democrats-only economic package undermined his
stated commitment to bipartisanship.
“Really?
Caving completely in less than two hours?” Mr. McConnell said. “That’s not the
way to show you’re serious about getting a bipartisan outcome.”
Some of the
negotiators were already rejecting the idea of conditioning an infrastructure
bill on the reconciliation package.
“There’s no
need for that,” said Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine. “It seems to
me that we should get this done.”
Senator
Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire, said it was not necessary to pair
the two.
“I would
hope that we trust each other a little more than that,” she said. “But I
appreciate that there are those who want to feel like there’s an opportunity to
get other pieces that the president outlined in his families plan into another
bill.”
Several
liberal lawmakers declined to say whether they would support the bipartisan
agreement, saying they needed to see more details. But they all said their
support hinged on a reconciliation package.
Representative
Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, warned that progressives had more than
enough votes to kill the infrastructure deal in the narrowly divided House.
“It’s not
worth it for us as a country, let alone a party, to pass a very narrow
infrastructure bill that doesn’t benefit as many people as it should benefit,”
said Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York. “And I
think that we’ve won that case.”
Mr. Biden
conceded that the package did not contain everything he wanted, but he called
it the largest investment in public transit in American history and the largest
investment in rail lines since the creation of Amtrak.
It would be
funded through an eclectic array of measures, anchored by increased federal
enforcement of existing tax laws to collect more of the money owed by high
earners and corporations. Lawmakers would also repurpose some previously
borrowed funds from pandemic relief efforts, including $80 billion from the
supplemental unemployment benefits that two dozen Republican governors have
moved to terminate before they were set to expire in September. They would also
allow states to sell $30 billion in toll credits to fund infrastructure
projects and to partner with private companies on them.
Negotiators
also agreed to offset some of the cost by assuming that investing in
infrastructure will increase economic growth, by making people and companies
more productive, and thus generate $60 billion more in tax revenue in the
future.
White House
officials said on Thursday that Mr. Biden would push Democrats to use the reconciliation
bill to address parts of his economic agenda that were not a part of the
discussions with Republicans, including longtime liberal priorities such as
universal preschool and community college access and huge infusions of funding
in renewable energy to combat climate change.
Mr. Biden
has proposed financing much of that spending through an ambitious rewriting of
the tax code. The Senate Finance Committee is already working on three targets:
corporations that profited handsomely from the 2017 tax cut, oil and gas
companies, and affluent individuals.
“I will in
no way, shape or form support throwing those kinds of priorities and other
concerns overboard,” Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who is the Finance
Committee chairman, said on Thursday. “They happen to be directly connected.”
Nicholas
Fandos contributed reporting.
Jonathan
Weisman is a congressional correspondent, veteran Washington journalist and
author of the novel “No. 4 Imperial Lane” and the nonfiction book
“(((Semitism))): Being Jewish in America in the Age of Trump.” His career in
journalism stretches back 30 years. @jonathanweisman
Emily
Cochrane is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress. She was
raised in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida. @ESCochrane
Jim
Tankersley is a White House correspondent with a focus on economic policy. He
has written for more than a decade in Washington about the decline of
opportunity for American workers, and is the author of "The Riches of This
Land: The Untold, True Story of America's Middle Class." @jimtankersley
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário