By Todd Lassa

Hopes continue to fade that Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-WV, and President Biden will negotiate an infrastructure bill that could pick up sufficient bipartisan support –

60 votes – in the Senate. Biden and Capito plan to meet for negotiations one more time before the president leaves for a weeklong European trip Wednesday, although the gap between the White House’s latest best offer of a $1.2 trillion package and Capito’s sub-trillion-dollar counteroffer is farther apart than the dollar amounts show. That’s because a large chunk of the Republican’s top bid includes very little new money, most of it leftover COVID-19 relief funds. Meanwhile, the president seems to have given up on funding infrastructure by returning the corporate tax rate to 28%.

“The timing is not unlimited here,” said White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki Monday, The Hill reports. “Nor is the president’s willingness to compromise.”

If Biden-Capito talks go no further – and that would be the way to bet – option two, says The Hill, would be alternative proposals individually from Republican Sens. Rob Portman, of Ohio, Mitt Romney, of Utah or Susan Collins, of Maine, or from Capito’s Democratic counterpart from West Virginia, Joe Manchin III, who has no interest in ending the legislative filibuster and is a likely “no” vote if other Senate Democrats try to push it through the filibuster-proof reconciliation process.

Option Three is a bill circulating through the House of Representatives by Transportation and Infrastructure Chairman Peter DeFazio, D-OR, called the Invest in America Act [< https://thehustings.news/daily-news/> News & Notes, Friday, June 4].

Congress members like acronyms but INVEST is relatively descriptive – it stands for Investing in a New Vision for the Environment and Surface Transportation for America. While DeFazio’s bill addresses the nuts-and-bolts fixing and building that Republicans insist the bill should consider exclusively, it leaves cold progressive Democrats who thought some version of Biden’s original proposal would survive to bring FDR-LBJ-level funding to reweave the nation’s social safety net.

In his address to the joint session of Congress, Biden did not hold back on his plans to replace 40 years of supply-side economics with the Keynesian economics President Reagan took apart in the early 1980s.

“Trickle-down economics has never worked,” Biden told the House of Representatives and Senate in April. “It’s time to grow the economy from the middle out.”

Of course, the Trump Administration corporate tax cut to 21%, which apparently will remain in place, is the very epitome of trickle-down economics.

DeFazio’s INVEST in America Act throws out all of the social program funding without cheapening out by reusing unspent funding, as in the Capito proposal. The five-year, $574 billion plan would fund roads, bridges and highway safety to the tune of $343 billion, with another $109 billion for mass transit and $95 billion for rail. That will seem to progressive Democrats what the federal government should have been doing all along, at least as far back as 1981. No doubt, senators and congress members in some oil-producing states – looking at you, Texas and Oklahoma – will raise objections to DeFazio’s de-emphasis on private vehicle travel. The infrastructure bill, he says, is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to move our transportation planning out of the 1950s and toward our clean energy future.”

Depending on how confident the GOP is about success with Trump-backed candidates in the mid-term elections, even the DeFazio proposal could meet stiff opposition among the more strident MAGA Republicans. If Democrats can get some “unity” on this issue, it will be up to their leaders to parlay it into some unexpected victories in November 2022.