Senate Overwhelmingly Passes $1 Trillion ‘Bipartisan’ Infrastructure Bill; Now Comes The Hard Part

The Hill reports, Senate passes $1T bipartisan infrastructure bill in major victory for Biden:

The Senate on Tuesday passed a roughly $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure deal, a significant win for President Biden and the first step on his top legislative priority.

Senators voted 69-30 on the bill, which was spearheaded by a bipartisan group of senators led by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio). Nineteen GOP senators voted with all Democrats to pass the legislation.

The bill is now heading to the House, where it faces an uncertain future and skepticism from progressives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has vowed she won’t take it up until the Senate passes the second part of its infrastructure two step, a sweeping $3.5 trillion spending package that includes Democrats’ top priorities.

But the Senate’s passage of the bipartisan measure on Tuesday gives a victory for Biden and the centrist-minded group that led the legislation, and placed big bets and months of time on the ability to get a bipartisan deal on infrastructure, one of Washington’s long-running legislative white whales.

The bipartisan deal includes roughly $550 billion in new funding, making it substantially smaller than the $2.6 trillion proposed by Biden earlier this year.

It includes money for new investments for infrastructure projects like roads, bridges, broadband, water and rail. According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analysis, the bill would add $256 billion to the deficit, though negotiators argue that “hard” infrastructure projects pay for themselves over time and that CBO didn’t give them full credit for their work.

“The new spending under the bill is offset through a combination of new revenue and savings, some of which is reflected in the formal CBO score and some of which is reflected in other savings and additional revenue identified in estimates, as CBO is limited in what it can include in its formal score,” Sinema and Portman said in a joint statement on the analysis.

[The] bill passed in the Senate on Tuesday put Republican splits on full display with former President Trump repeatedly lashing out at Republicans, including GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), for helping advance the bipartisan deal.

Dropped a house on that witch! Not much of a threat anymore.

“Nobody will ever understand why Mitch McConnell allowed this non-infrastructure bill to be passed. He has given up all of his leverage for the big whopper of a bill that will follow. … He is working so hard to give Biden a victory, now they’ll go for the big one, including the biggest tax increases in the history of our Country,” Trump said in a statement on Tuesday.

To pass the bill through the Senate, Democrats needed at least 10 GOP votes. Though they got several more than that, they also lost GOP senators who had helped advance the bill over earlier procedural hurdles.

Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), who is up for reelection next year, announced over the weekend that he could not support the deal.

“Having reviewed the Congressional Budget Office’s (CBO) estimated fiscal impact of this legislation as currently constructed, and frankly still not being comfortable with a number of the Democratic priorities contained in this version, I will vote ‘no,’ ” Young said in a statement.

And Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), who missed the vote because his wife is undergoing treatment for cancer, announced hours before Tuesday’s vote that he could not support the deal. He voted to advance it on Saturday.

[The] Senate’s passage of the bill tees up Senate Democrats to turn to their $3.5 trillion plan, which they will try to pass through the Senate without GOP support.

Passing the plan requires two steps: First, they need to clear a budget resolution that includes broad instructions and top-line figures on the subsequent bill.

The Senate is poised to vote on Tuesday to take up the budget resolution, which Democrats will be able to do on their own as long as all 50 of their members stay unified.

Stay tuned.

Before they can approve the budget, they’ll need to endure a marathon session known as vote-a-rama, where any senator can force a vote on anything they want.

After they clear the budget resolution, they will then spend at least a month drafting the spending package itself, which will include top priorities including expanding Medicare, immigration reform, combating climate change and universal pre-K.

The House is expected to wait until after the Senate passes the spending package this fall to take up the bipartisan bill, though moderates are ramping up efforts to pressure Pelosi into moving faster.

“So whatever you can achieve in a bipartisan way, bravo. We salute it. We applaud it. We hope that it will pass soon. But, at the same time, we’re not going forward with leaving people behind,” Pelosi told reporters last week. “All of these things are urgent, and we’re going to get them done together.”

Jamelle Bouie has a warning for those senators who place the pursuit of the mythical “bipartisanship” ahead of doing what is in the best interests of the American people as a whole. Sorry, Congress. Paying for Bridges Doesn’t Prove You Can Actually Function, alternate caption, Once Again, I’m Telling You That the Filibuster Doesn’t Actually Work:

“Infrastructure Week” has finally arrived.

On Sunday, a Senate supermajority invoked cloture on the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Negotiated by the Biden administration and a bipartisan group of 21 senators, the bill would authorize $550 billion in new spending over the next five years, with $110 billion in funding for roads and bridges, $66 billion in funding for freight and passenger rail, and hundreds of billions of dollars more to expand broadband internet access, modernize transit systems, update the nation’s electrical grid and improve water infrastructure.

If passed into law, which it almost certainly will be, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act would be the largest infrastructure bill in decades. And for those who hope to preserve the Senate filibuster against critics who blame the rule for the chamber’s dysfunction, the size and scope of the bill appear to be points in their favor.

“What you see is when we work together and really put the nose to the grindstone, we can get bipartisan support to move forward,” said Senator Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia, one of the Republican negotiators on the bill. “That’s what the bipartisan group did, so I think it blunts the argument on the filibuster.”

Or does it? The case against filibuster reform is that the 60-vote requirement to end debate ensures consensus on any given piece of legislation. The bills that pass, much less come to a vote, are those with broad support across the entire Senate. The infrastructure bill — a large package of new spending in all 50 states, as well as Puerto Rico — passes the test with flying colors. But that is exactly the problem.

Consensus in the Senate does not mean consensus among voters; it means consensus among partisan lawmakers in the context of equal state representation. It means that the bills that pass are those that lie outside of the partisan divide. But the people’s business — or the business of the United States, if you prefer — includes issues that fall along that divide. To require bipartisan consensus is to rule those issues outside the scope of congressional power. It’s to take the broad authority granted to Congress by the Constitution and render it nearly inert.

Consider climate change, which has already contributed to deadly heat waves and catastrophic wildfires in this country and abroad. According to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center, 64 percent of American adults say the United States should prioritize “reducing the effects of climate change to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations” and 59 percent believe the federal government is “doing too little” to address climate issues. But public consensus belies partisan division.

Phillip Bump of the Washington Post adds, The perverse argument against the bipartisan infrastructure bill: It wants to address climate change:

It’s a grim coincidence that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) massive new report was released on the same day that the Senate is poised to approve a compromise infrastructure package that scaled back President Biden’s proposals for addressing global warming. The package under consideration has significant components that will increase a transition away from current levels of fossil-fuel consumption, including improving the electrical grid and improving infrastructure for electric vehicles. But climate activists and legislators focused on the issue lament where it comes up short.

And yet — amazingly and predictably — one of the key arguments being made against the bill by far-right opponents is that it addresses climate change at all.

[F]or for those seeking to undercut the bipartisan bill — and to therefore deny Biden a big political win — the “Green New Deal” framing has proved irresistible.

On the question of priorities, 36 percent of Republicans say that the country ought to prioritize reducing the effects of climate change compared with 87 percent of Democrats. And 30 percent of Republicans say the government is doing too little on the issue, versus 83 percent of Democrats.

This partisan divide shows up in Congress, where it is magnified by the structure of the Senate. Republicans may be in the national minority on climate change mitigation, but that minority is a majority in many of the smallest and most sparsely populated states, where it can elect enough senators to filibuster and kill any stand-alone climate bill with fewer than 60 votes in favor.

A tyranny of the minority.

A defender of existing Senate rules might say that this is fine, that the Senate is supposed to work according to compromise and deliberation and that partisan bills should fail as a result.

Setting aside the fact that compromise and deliberation can happen within a partisan majority — or that even a substantial bipartisan majority can fall to the filibuster, as happened in 2013 when a 54-vote bipartisan majority was not enough to pass universal background checks in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre — it is simply not the case that the Senate categorically precludes partisan action.

On executive branch and judicial nominations, Senate rules allow partisan majorities to act. Likewise, the reconciliation process — by which Republicans passed their 2017 tax cuts and Democrats passed the recent Covid relief bill — is a carve-out that allows partisan majorities to act on budgetary items.

If the filibuster truly limited the actions of partisan majorities, it would be intolerable, and the filibuster reforms of years past, including the changes in 2013 under Harry Reid and in 2017 under Mitch McConnell, are a testament to that fact.

What we have instead of a system of forced consensus on all bills is a rule that allows partisan majorities to act in some cases and not in others, where the “other cases” encompass broad areas of policymaking and public concern. Yes, over the last six years large bipartisan majorities have passed laws on issues of low partisan salience and low public attention. But there is more to do in this country than pass the occasional transportation bill or consumer protection act.

Immigration, voting rights and democracy protection are, like climate change, areas of major concern to tens of millions of Americans. Inaction will shape the future character of the United States as much as action. But the parties are more divided than the public. And as long as the Senate privileges partisan minorities over everything other than overwhelming bipartisan majorities, there’s little chance of progress on any of our most pressing issues.

Which is to say that far from undermining filibuster reform, the pending infrastructure bill only underscores the need to free the Senate from the shackle of the supermajority.