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Republicans Free Biden to Act on His Own to Rebuild America
BY JOEL MCNALLY
There’s a certain freedom that comes with being a competent Democratic president eager to do all the right things for a nation in crisis immediately following an incompetent Republican president who did all the wrong things. Republicans are giving President Joe Biden even more freedom to act on his own by refusing to do anything at all to help Democrats clean up the multiple messes left behind by his Republican predecessor.
Not a single Republican Senator and few Republican House members voted to support Biden’s popular emergency relief bill speeding mass vaccinations to end the world’s deadliest, uncontrolled national pandemic and providing direct payments to most Americans for economic relief that simultaneously helps revive the U.S. economy devastated under the former president.
Now, most Republicans are opposing the American Jobs Plan, Biden’s second major legislative effort to continue that national revival by building the economy back better over the next 10 years. It would create millions of construction jobs to repair the nation’s crumbling infrastructure of roads, bridges and commuter systems and add millions of brand-new, well-paying, high-tech jobs that every industrial nation will need in the economy of the future.
WHERE WAS TRUMP’S PLAN?
The irony of Republicans opposing Biden’s infrastructure plan is throughout Donald Trump’s presidency Republicans kept claiming he was about to launch Infrastructure Week to announce his comprehensive plan to restore the nation’s infrastructure, which both parties agreed was long overdue. Infrastructure Week never came because their all-talk, no-action president was too busy watching himself and his gushing sycophants on Fox News and tweeting insults denigrating everybody he hated.
Now that Biden is ready to act, Republican leaders no longer consider upgrading the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure an important bipartisan issue. The real reason they suddenly oppose infrastructure spending, of course, is they don’t want to do anything to help Biden succeed in restoring a robust, thriving American economy out of the smoking ruins their own president created. That immediately puts Republican leaders in conflict with the overwhelming majority of the American people. A Morning Consult poll found 85% of Americans, including 82% of Republicans, agree that U.S. infrastructure was desperately in need of improvement. In fact, a Hart poll found large majorities of Americans supported Biden’s infrastructure plan whether they were told the actual 10-year cost of $2 trillion or double that amount. Geoff Garin, president of Hart Research, said Republicans have a problem identifying specific elements in Biden’s plan they oppose because “nearly all the investments in the plan are popular in their own right.”
HIGH-SPEED BROADBAND
An especially popular one with Republicans is a major modern-day investment in something their leaders don’t even consider “real infrastructure”—$100 billion to “bring affordable, high-speed broadband to every American.” Wisconsin would receive about $4 billion under the program expanding high-speed internet and access providing new job and educational opportunities to many of the nation’s most economically depressed Republican counties. Universal broadband would propel small town and rural America into the 21st century, the same way President Franklin Roosevelt’s rural electrification brought
those folks into the 20th century. Both urban and rural communities would benefit from $110 billion to upgrade U.S. water systems, finally replacing aging lead pipes that still risk poisoning the drinking water in 10 million homes, causing brain damage to young children in America’s oldest neighborhoods.
A big reason Republicans oppose Biden’s infrastructure spending is he would finance part of it by rolling back Trump’s only Republican achievement, his multitrillion-dollar 2017 tax cut that overwhelmingly went to multimillion-dollar corporations and wealthy individuals. That proposal is one of Biden’s most popular supported by nearly 70% of Americans who say corporations and the wealthy pay far too little in taxes, according to Gallup. They’re right, of course. Fifty-five of the nation’s largest corporations didn’t pay any federal income taxes last year on more than $40 billion in profits. Twenty-six of them have paid no federal income taxes since 2017. That’s one reason Forbes’ annual list of billionaires grew last year from 660 to 2,755 while tens of millions of working Americans were losing their jobs.
With Republicans refusing to help restore normal American life, Biden and elected Democrats will gladly accept credit for every popular measure they can pass. It won’t be easy since Biden can’t afford to lose a single Democratic vote in the Senate, but it’s not impossible. Democrats know they all win if they can stay united.
Biden remains willing to negotiate on details. It’s easier to negotiate within your own party than with Republicans who want you to fail. The reason infrastructure jobs bills used to be considered bipartisan, before Republicans stopped believing in democracy, was such bills are chock full of expensive building projects for every state. Successfully passing Biden’s could determine the outcome for Democrats in the elections of 2022 and 2024. In politics, that’s called too big to fail.
Joel McNally was a critic and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal for 27 years. He has written the weekly Taking Liberties column for the Shepherd Express since 1996.
