Today is Memorial Day, which President Biden held out as a deadline for negotiations on a bipartisan infrastructure package. I suppose we have “progress,” at least on setting a new deadline, about a week or two from now. But you can block out the spin of offers and counter-offers between the White House and Republicans. If you want to know whether there’s any progress being made, look to Senate Democrats, and whether they’re finally resigning themselves to going it alone.
The latest Republican proposal, touted at $928 billion, seems like it’s closing the gap with Biden’s new $1.7 trillion offer for “traditional” infrastructure projects like surface transportation, airports and waterways, and broadband deployment. But the GOP bill is far less than meets the eye. Only $257 billion of it goes above baseline levels of current programs; Republicans are counting spending that would have been done anyway within the context of their bill. While they are trying to create cleavages between the president and his staff by asserting that Biden would support a $1 trillion bill, what they’re offering in reality is about a quarter of that. Furthermore, there is already a bipartisan agreement on a highway bill at $304 billion that is recapitulated in this offer.
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