Reconciliation Approved By Senate Parliamentarian Allowing for Pathway For Infrastructure Bill

 NPR

KELSEY SNELL

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Jonathan Ernst/Pool/Getty Images

A new decision from the U.S. Senate's nonpartisan parliamentarian means Democrats could advance more of President Biden's agenda without the support of Republicans.

The official's interpretation of Senate budget rules would allow the use of the reconciliation process more than once in a fiscal year, and it is viewed by Democrats as a possible strategy for moving top policy priorities with a simple majority, since getting the needed 10 Republican votes in a 50-50 Senate has proved difficult.

Details are still unclear as to how Democratic leaders might use the additional chance to pass budget-related policies.

"The Parliamentarian has advised that a revised budget resolution may contain budget reconciliation instructions," Justin Goodman, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said in a statement Monday. "While no decisions have been made on a legislative path forward using Section 304 and some parameters still need to be worked out, the Parliamentarian's opinion is an important step forward that this key pathway is available to Democrats if needed."

Democrats have been vague about those additional parameters and the potential limitations that might come with this legislative pathway. The ruling appears to mean a majority party could revise budgets more than once in a fiscal year — each time giving them access to reconciliation instructions.

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By The Numbers: Biden's $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

The decision comes as Democrats take up Biden's more than $2 trillion infrastructure proposal, which he unveiled last week.

Some moderate Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, have balked at its plan to increase the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%. (Manchin favors a smaller hike.) Party leaders have not released any legislative text or final details of the policies Biden outlined in his proposal, nor have they said how they would work to ensure that there would be unanimous support among Senate Democrats, something that would be necessary to pass the bill without any Republican support.

The parliamentarian's ruling could allow Democrats to break big packages, like Biden's infrastructure plan, into smaller pieces. That could potentially make it easier to pass elements of the sweeping agenda, by enticing Republicans to support some of its policies.

But using reconciliation also limits what elements can be in a bill. Earlier this year, the parliamentarian ruled that a federal minimum wage increase did not fit in the rules.

U.S. is Averaging Close to 3Million Vaccine Shots a Day

 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

In America today, there is good news. The Biden administration has rolled out vaccines at a faster pace than anyone foresaw. Today, President Biden announced that health care workers have administered 150 million doses of the vaccine and, at an average of 3 million shots a day, they are on track to administer 200 million by his 100th day in office. He is moving the date for states to make all adults eligible for a vaccine from May 1 to April 19.

The vaccines have dovetailed with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan from last month and the spring weather to speed up the economic recovery. Economists had expected a job gain of about 660,000 in March, but nonfarm payrolls actually rose by about 916,000. And now Biden has rolled out a dramatic new infrastructure proposal, the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.

In this moment, Republican lawmakers seem weirdly out of step with their party’s history as well as with the country. They are responding to the American Jobs Plan by defining infrastructure as roads and bridges alone, cutting from the definition even the broadband that they included when Trump was president. (Trump, remember, followed his huge 2017 tax cuts with the promise of a big infrastructure bill. As he said, “Infrastructure is the easiest of all…. People want it, Republicans and Democrats.”) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warns that Biden’s plan is a “Trojan horse” that will require “massive tax increases.”

Biden has indeed proposed funding the Democrats’ infrastructure plan by raising taxes on corporations from their current rate of 21% to 28% (but before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, that rate was 35%). It ends federal tax breaks for oil and gas companies, and it increases the global minimum tax—a tax designed to keep corporations from shifting their profits to low tax countries-- from 13% to 21%.

This is in keeping with our history. Americans since Lincoln have proudly used tax dollars to develop the country. During Eisenhower’s era, the corporate tax rate was 52% (and the top income tax bracket was 91%). The Newlands Act was designed to raise money through public land sales, but in 1928, when Congress authorized what would become Hoover Dam,[below] the Bureau of Reclamation began to operate out of the government’s general funds.

But it was Lincoln’s Republicans who first provided the justification for investing in the nation. In the midst of the deadly Civil War, as the United States was hemorrhaging both blood and money, Republican lawmakers defended first their invention of national taxes. The government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent need, said House Ways and Means Committee Chair Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT). When the nation required it, he said, “the property of the people… belongs to the [g]overnment.”

The Republicans also defended developing the country. In a debate over the new Department of Agriculture, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME), famous both for his crabbiness and for his single-minded focus on the war, defended the use of “seed money.” With such an investment, he said, the country would be “richly paid over and over again in absolute increase of wealth. There is no doubt of that.”

The Republican Party's roots lie in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in spring 1854, when it became clear that elite southern slaveholders had taken control of the federal government and were using their power to spread their system of human enslavement across the continent.

At first, members of the new party knew only what they stood against: an economic system that concentrated wealth upward and made it impossible for ordinary men to prosper. But in 1859, their new spokesman, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, articulated a new vision of government. Rather than using government power solely to protect the property of wealthy slaveholders, Lincoln argued, the government should work to make it possible for all men to get equal access to resources, including education, so they could rise to economic security.

As a younger man, Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because the settlers in the town did not have the resources to dredge the Sangamon River to increase their river trade. Had the government simply been willing to invest in the economic development that was too much for the willing workers of New Salem, it could have brought prosperity to the men who, for lack of investment, failed and abandoned their town. The government, Lincoln thought, must develop the country’s infrastructure.

Once in power, the Republicans did precisely that. After imposing the first national taxes, including an income tax, lawmakers set out to enable men to be able to pay those taxes by using the government to give ordinary men access to resources. In 1862, they passed the Homestead Act, giving western land to anyone willing to settle it; the Land-Grant College Act, providing funds to establish state universities; the act establishing the Department of Agriculture, to provide scientific information and good seeds to farmers; and the Pacific Railway Act, providing for the construction of a railroad across the continent to get men to the fields and the mines of the West.

In 1902, Republicans fascinated with infrastructure projects joined forces with southern Democrats desperate for flood control to pass the Newlands Reclamation Act. Under the act, the federal government built more than 600 dams in 20 western states to bring water to farmland. “The sound and steady development of the West depends upon the building up of homes therein,” President Theodore Roosevelt wrote. Water from the western dams now irrigates more than 10 million acres, which produce about 60% of the nation’s vegetables and 25% of its fruits (and nuts).

Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt combined this focus on infrastructure development with the need for work relief programs during the Depression to create the 1933 Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted trees, built fire towers, built trails, stocked fish, and so on. In 1935, Congress created the Works Progress Administration. During its existence, it employed about 3 million workers at a time; built or repaired more than 100,000 public buildings, including schools and post offices; and constructed more than 500 airports, more than 500,000 miles of roads, and more than 100,000 bridges. It also employed actors, photographers, painters, and writers to conduct interviews, paint murals of our history, and tell our national story.

As the country grew and became more interconnected, pressure built for a developed road system, but while FDR liked the idea of the jobs it would produce, building the road fell to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Three years after he became president, Eisenhower backed the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, saying, “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.” The law initially provided $25 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of road; at the time, it was the largest public works project in U.S. history.

Biden Unveils What He Calls A 'Once-In-A-Generation' Infrastructure Proposal

 NPR

DOMENICO MONTANARO

President Biden delivers a speech Wednesday unveiling his infrastructure proposal at a carpenter's training center in Pittsburgh.

Evan Vucci/AP

The country's infrastructure is badly in need of repair, both major parties agree. But for years they haven't been able to agree on a proposal, or how to pay for it.

In Pittsburgh on Wednesday, President Biden detailed a $2 trillion package that he said would lead to "transformational progress." Biden said this is "not a plan that tinkers around the edges," calling it a "once-in-a-generation investment" that will lead to "good-paying jobs" and "grow the economy."

He framed his effort as along the lines of other investments the federal government has made in history, such as the space race in the middle of the 20th century.

Biden said his proposal would be paid for in 15 years by raising taxes on corporations. He said he's open to other ideas, but Biden vowed Wednesday that no one making less than $400,000 a year would see their taxes increased. "Period," he said.

POLITICS

What's In Biden's $2 Trillion Infrastructure Plan

The president pointed out that millions have lost their jobs during the pandemic, while the top 1% gained in wealth. He said that "shows how distorted" the U.S. economy is.

"Well, it's time to change that," Biden said, adding, "It's time to build our economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not the top down."

The proposed taxes and the scope of Biden's plan — and where the money would go — are already rankling Republicans. The proposal has a heavy focus on climate change and the environment — including transitioning the auto sector from gasoline-based vehicles to electric, the creation of a Climate Conservation Corps and incentivizing private investments in wind and solar power.

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The effort to encourage the transition from gas to electric vehicles alone would get more money — $174 billion — than the plan would spend on repairs to highways and bridges — about $115 billion.

"A transportation bill, I think, needs to be a transportation bill, not a Green New Deal," Rep. Sam Graves, R-Mo., ranking Republican on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said during a recent hearing with Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg. "It needs to be about roads and bridges."

Biden's proposal includes $100 billion for expanding high-speed broadband, $100 billion for new school buildings and upgrades, and $100 billion for expansion of and improvements to power lines. It also has measures intended to fix racial injustices, such as replacing all of the country's lead pipes and service lines, and $105 billion for improving and expanding mass transit, as well as reconnecting neighborhoods that had been decimated and cut off from surrounding areas due to highway construction.

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"A Trojan horse"

The $2 trillion plan is one of two complementary measures the White House is rolling out that's intended to overhaul the economy. A second package focused on education, child care and other social programs is expected in coming weeks.

So far, there is little Republican support for what Biden has introduced.

"It's like a Trojan horse," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters in Kentucky on Wednesday before Biden's speech. "It's called infrastructure, but inside the Trojan horse it's going to be more borrowed money, and massive tax increases on all the productive parts of our economy."

McConnell said Biden called him Tuesday to talk about the plan — reportedly just the second time they've spoken since the president was inaugurated.

Biden confirmed that he spoke with McConnell and noted that there is Republican support for infrastructure — and yet nothing has gotten done in recent years.

"Why haven't we done it?" the president asked. "No one wants to pay for it."

Biden said he wants to engage in "good-faith negotiations with any Republican who wants to get this done, but we have to get it done," he said with emphasis.

"I hope Republicans will join this effort," he added, noting that he hopes businesses join, too, and that it gets broad American support.

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How some on the left feel

Without GOP support, it's unclear if Democrats would seek to pass the proposal through the Senate along party lines. For as many issues as Biden will have with Republicans in trying to get support for this plan, he also has to watch his left flank.

"It's disappointing," Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., told NPR's Danielle Kurtzleben before the package's unveiling. "The size of it is disappointing. It's not enough."

While she said she likes some of what's in the measure, such as improving water supplies, she overall described the amount of money it would allocate as "papitas, little French fries. It's nothing."

Ocasio-Cortez said she believes, in fact, that as much as $10 trillion is not even that "progressive." That's a number several Democratic presidential primary candidates used for their infrastructure and climate change proposals. There is already a $10 trillion measure put forward by Democratic Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and Rep. Debbie Dingell of Michigan.

"I think it's just the floor," Ocasio-Cortez said, noting that this is a "planetary crisis, and we're the richest country in the world."

POLITICS

Biden Faces 'Balancing Act' Advancing Clean Energy Alongside Labor Allies

Labor leaders, who were crucial to helping Biden win the presidency, have largely come out in support of the package.

"We are cognizant that workers will disproportionately suffer if we do not make the transition to a green economy in the right way," United Auto Workers President Rory Gamble said in a statement, adding, "We also need to ensure that this transition is stable, reliable and creates quality union wage jobs and flexible to market demand not relying on a one-size fits all solution."

Terry O'Sullivan, head of the Laborers' International Union of North America, praised the measure, saying it "will restore our economy and create hundreds of thousands of good union jobs."

But he also noted: "We also look forward to working with the Administration on insisting that the renewable industry does not short-change and cheat working men and women of good family-supporting pay and benefits on the jobs building this infrastructure."