It has been a long time since President Joe Biden first announced an infrastructure and jobs bill and over a month since a group of senators agreed on a bipartisan infrastructure package totaling $1.2 trillion, with $600 billion in new spending. Anything this large on a bipartisan scale is clearly fragile, and with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer trying to force a procedural vote on the bill on Wednesday, many Republican senators, including some of those who helped negotiate the bill, are having second thoughts.
The new struggle is with deciding how to pay for the bill after Republican senators forced the abandonment of a key funding provision. The provision, which had previously been agreed to, involved increased tax enforcement by the IRS. Tax raises on the wealthy and hiking the gas tax has also been ruled out, and the negotiators are looking at rolling back an obscure Trump-era pharmaceutical rebate rule that could be used to pay for it.
With paying the bill still in limbo, tensions across the aisle are rising as Schumer is prepared to call a vote on Wednesday to open debate on the bill (even before it is written). It will require 60 votes, 10 of which must come from Republicans due to the 50-50 majority, to pass.
With Biden and the Democrats preparing a get-it-alone $3.5 trillion additional spending bill via budget reconciliation, some Democrats are eager to at least begin debate over this first phase of the administration’s goals. This $600 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill includes funding for America’s physical infrastructure such as roads, railroads, transit, airports, broadband, and other public works projects. The much larger, partisan bill uses a loose definition of “infrastructure” to mangle in other priorities such as child and health care, education, labor laws, Medicare expansion, and more.
The GOP has argued that Schumer’s bid to advance the bill is premature and rushed, and has signaled that it wouldn’t support Wednesday’s vote. Republicans wanted to wait for a full writeup of the bill and for a cost estimate from Congress’s nonpartisan budget tracker to be released before opening debate. Some Republicans asked for the vote to be pushed back to Monday.
It seems odd that Schumer would try to muscle through a deal that had taken months of negotiations to achieve even as it gets increasingly clear Wednesday’s vote will fail. But even if the bill ultimately fails to clear the filibuster and pass the Senate, Democrats could just simply fold it into their planned reconciliation bill and pass it without any Republican support.
However, Schumer has successfully won over the support of key Democratic moderates in the Senate, including Joe Manchin (W.Va.), Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.), Jon Tester (Mont.), Jeanne Shaheen (N.H.), and Mark Warner (Va.). Despite Republicans insisting that Schumer is purposefully trying to derail the bipartisan infrastructure bill by forcing a Wednesday vote, but all of Schumer’s important swing votes are with him.
As Schumer tries to unite his caucus consisting of progressives like Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and centrists like Manchin and Sinema, he needs to show progress on advancing Biden’s legislation while still allowing for bipartisan talks, one of Manchin’s key demands. He also needs to make sure if the bipartisan deal falls apart, moderates will help pass the rest of Biden’s agenda.
It hasn’t been easy to get all of his members to agree with this tactic, and it took painful talks over a Tuesday caucus lunch to win over Manchin’s support. All of the moderates now believed that Schumer was genuinely hoping to pass the bill.
Schumer is also meeting with other Republican senators to demonstrate that he is accommodating toward the bipartisan infrastructure bill.
By setting up a vote on Wednesday, Schumer is hoping to push negotiations and get the bill passed quickly. If the vote fails, another vote can be called later. The need is especially urgent as progressive Democrats in the House have become increasingly vocal to pushing through large bills regardless of GOP support. Schumer is hoping to pass the bill before Congress breaks up for the August recess.
The willingness of the Senate Democrats to push for Wednesday’s vote could indicate support for the Democratic reconciliation bill. Reconciliation bills, which are limited to items pertaining to the budget, cannot be filibustered and only require a simple majority to pass. That bill will still need to be worked out and negotiations over what can and cannot be included in the bill could take months.
Schumer has insisted that even a failed vote on Wednesday will not cast an end to bipartisan talks, but progressives and many Republicans argue otherwise. We could still be many months away from seeing an actual “infrastructure week” happening.
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