By Todd Lassa
Rebuilding infrastructure -- addressing the dangerous bridges and crumbling interstate highways -- was perhaps the only major issue with which House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, and her caucus agreed with former President Trump. After nine Infrastructure Weeks (plus Trump’s August 2016 campaign pledge) the last possibility under a Republican president of fixing the broken itself crumbled under the weight of the more-immediate coronavirus pandemic – even if the former president’s critics said COVID-19 didn’t seem to be of much concern to him.
It’s easy to forget that President Trump unveiled a $1.5-trillion proposal in February 2018, as The New York Times reminds us, but were overshadowed by a couple of White House scandals. In April 2019, with Pelosi re-installed as speaker after Democratic victories in the mid-terms, the White House and Capitol Hill Democrats announced they had reached agreement on a $2-trillion infrastructure package to upgrade highways, railroads, bridges and broadband. But Trump “stormed out” of a meeting to discuss how to pay for it, saying he would not return to negotiations until House Democrats stopped investigating him.
President Biden’s $2.3-trillion plan unveiled earlier this month isn’t much costlier. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has said “there would be no Senate Republican votes for the infrastructure bill,” columnist Juan Williams wrote in The Hill.“Full stop.” Capitol Hill Republicans say the bill is full of Democratic social engineering dream programs, and they’re opposed to Biden’s proposal to raise the corporate tax rate from the 21% historic low set by President Trump, on up to 28%.
To the Bernie Sanders/Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wing of the Democratic Party, $2.3-trillion isn’t nearly enough. But the Biden administration has signaled it is willing to negotiate with Republicans in order to get at least some support. The White House met with congress members from both parties on Monday, April 12. Biden will need to convince 10 Republican senators to vote for the package to avoid using the arduous reconciliation procedure (the Senate parliamentarian has ruled it is allowed a second time this fiscal year).
And even without the support of 10 Republicans to vote for cloture on a filibuster, Biden will have to convince fellow Democrat Joe Manchin III, senator from West Virginia, just to get to 51 votes, including Vice President Harris.
Key infrastructure provisions up for negotiation, according to the AP:
•$115 billion to modernize bridges, highways and roads.
•$85 billion for public transit to shorten the repair backlog and expand services.
•$89 billion to modernize Amtrak’s popular Northeast Corridor line and address its repair.
•$174 billion to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging systems, electrify 20% of school buses and electrify the federal fleet, including U.S. Postal Service vehicles.
•$100 billion to build high-speed broadband in order to provide 100% coverage across the country – a sort of 21st Century Tennessee Valley Authority project.
•$100 billion to upgrade the nation’s power grid resilience, and move toward clean electricity, and related projects.
•$20 billion to redress communities whose neighborhoods were divided by those Eisenhower-spawned highway projects. This affects mostly non-white neighborhoods.
•$111 billion to replace lead water pipes and upgrade sewer systems.
•$50 billion to improve infrastructure resilience to counter natural disasters.
•$180 billion in research & development projects.
•$300 billion for manufacturing, including funds for the computer chip sector (it would be nice during a pandemic not to have to wait for ships full of them to arrive from China), improved access to capital, and clean energy investment.
That’s $1.324 trillion, leaving nearly $976 billion for such programs as money to build, preserve and retrofit more than 2 million affordable houses and buildings and expansion of long-term services under Medicaid (at $400-billion, the single costliest line item).