On Monday (May 3), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, said no Republican senators were willing to support two infrastructure-related plans recently proposed by President Biden. That could lead to protracted negotiations, or Democrats could try to use the “budget reconciliation” process to bypass Republican obstruction and pass the bill alone.
Biden recently proposed a $2.2 trillion jobs package and a $1.8 trillion family package, both of which include roads, bridges, broadband, manufacturing, public schools, home care and other provisions. Biden also seeks to increase taxes on wealthy Americans and corporations, and raise capital gains taxes.
I think it’s worth discussing, but I don’t think there are Republicans — actually zero, no one — who would support this at a cost of $4.1 trillion,” McConnell said at a news conference in Kentucky. , a package that has infrastructure in it, but there’s a lot of other things.”
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican who leads several Republicans, has put forward a counterproposal worth about $600 billion.
McConnell said, “We’re willing to come up with a package of about $600 billion in size to deal with the infrastructure issues that we all agree on.” “If we’re going to address infrastructure, let’s address infrastructure.”
McConnell also appeared to disagree with Biden’s tax proposal, calling the 2017 tax bill, the former Donald Trump administration’s “most important domestic job accomplishment.” The Republican-led bill at the time lowered the corporate tax rate from 28 percent to 21 percent.
McConnell said, “We’re not willing to pay for this (Biden’s bill) by rescinding the 2017 bill.”
But in a May 2 interview, Cecilia Rouse, chairwoman of the Council of Economic Advisers (Biden), said the two bills are necessary because “we still have 7 or 8 million fewer jobs than we had last year “. She added, “We’ve been investing less in the economy for the last 40 years.”
She said, “Our strategy is to build a real partnership between the public and private sectors.”
If all Senate Democrats can unite behind a proposal, they can use the “budget reconciliation process” to pass their own legislation in the Senate without Republican support. Just as they did in the previous process of passing a $1.9 trillion epidemic relief bill.
However, some Democrats, including Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV), refused to pass the bill without bipartisan support. This adds to the uncertainty of whether Democrats can pass Biden’s bill on their own.
“For the sake of our country, we have to show that we can work in a bipartisan way,” Manchin said last week. “I don’t know what the rush is.”
Manchin also said he wants the bill to focus on “infrastructure in the traditional sense,” such as bridges, water projects, broadband Internet and roads.
Some Democrats, however, said they want to pass the legislation as soon as possible before lawmakers need to focus on the midterm elections.
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