Skip to main content

New top story from Time: ‘We Have a Deal.’ Joe Biden Gets His Bipartisan Moment on Infrastructure

https://ift.tt/3dcRLwT

President Joe Biden has long said he wants to show Americans that Washington can work to solve problems. In coming to a tentative agreement with a bipartisan group of senators to fund approximately $1.2 trillion in infrastructure spending, Biden took a step toward that goal.

A group of five Republican and five Democratic Senators met with Biden at the White House on Thursday and shook hands on an infrastructure package that, while half of the size of Biden’s initial American Jobs Plan proposal, would still represent the biggest investment in the country’s bridges in half a century, a historic investment in electric vehicles, and a significant expansion of Internet access for millions of Americans.
[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

“We have a deal,” Biden told reporters in front of the West Wing moments after concluding the talks.

It was a victorious moment for Biden, who has prided himself on his Senate dealmaking skills and had to fight criticism that his nostalgia for past negotiations is naive in the current political climate. This agreement signifies “breaking the ice that too often has frozen us in place, preventing us from solving the true problems of the American people,” Biden said. He sees working together with Republicans as part of a larger effort to defang partisan rancor and get Washington on course to solve problems the country faces. “There’s nothing our nation can’t do when we decide to do it together to do it as one nation,” Biden said. “It also signals to ourselves that American democracy can deliver.”

While Thursday’s deal marked a rare moment of bipartisanship—and perhaps provides evidence that Washington can work the way Biden believes it can—significant challenges remain. There are difficulties ahead not just in shepherding this framework into a bill for Biden to sign, but in implementing the rest of the $4 trillion economic agenda he laid out in the spring. The infrastructure plan does not include the $400 billion Biden had originally proposed to expand home and community based care, nor the 7% increase in the corporate tax rate. “This group did not want to go along with any of my family plan issues, the family care, tax credits, the human infrastructure that I talk about,” Biden said. These omissions will anger the progressive wing of his party and could potentially sink the deal, even though Biden made clear that he won’t sign a bipartisan package unless a separate proposal to increase funding for child care, paid leave, and other measures also comes to his desk.

The White House has been touting how Biden’s agenda is now moving on dual tracks: the bipartisan deal largely focused on “hard infrastructure” like the country’s roads and bridges, and a second package focused on “human infrastructure” like childcare and paid leave. The latter package could be passed on partisan lines under a budget procedure known as reconciliation that only requires a simple majority vote. “I’m not just signing a bipartisan bill and forgetting about the rest I proposed,” Biden said.

The negotiations on the second package may end up being more challenging than the ones the White House and the bipartisan group of Senators just spent weeks hashing out. With the slimmest majorities in the House and Senate, the White House and congressional leadership need nearly every single Democratic vote to get both of these bills to Biden’s desk. Already, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the lower chamber would not vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill until the Senate passes a reconciliation package to include the human infrastructure elements. But passing a reconciliation package that can appease moderates in the party like West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin and progressives like Senators Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts is no small feat.

Biden remained upbeat at the prospect that all of these priorities will ultimately pass through Congress and arrive at his desk. “My party’s divided, but my party’s also rational,” he said. “If they can’t get every single thing they want, but all they have in the bill before them is good, are they gonna vote no? I don’t think so.”

But the Senate is about to head out of town for two weeks, a long stretch of time in politics, leaving open the possibility that the agreement could be whittled away by punishing news cycles. For now, Biden and the Senators are moving forward on trust that each will stick to their end of the bargain. Biden evoked a quaint way of doing business that he recalls from his decades in the Senate, but has rarely been seen in recent years in Washington. He and a number of the Senators he met with on Thursday “go back a long way,” Biden said. “We’re used to doing one thing: give each other our word and that’s the end. Nobody questions it. They have my word. I’ll stick with what they proposed. And they’ve given me their word as well. So, where I come from, that’s good enough for me,” Biden said.

Those relationships have enabled Biden to inch forward on infrastructure while his predecessor repeatedly failed. Former President Donald Trump spent the first two years of his presidency trying to line up a $2 trillion infrastructure proposal. But Trump often blew up his own negotiated deals over Twitter when the details of a negotiation created blowback from the right. Trump derailed his own staff’s choreographed infrastructure rollout in June 2017 by denying that he colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and picking a public fight with former FBI director James Comey. Any pretense of pursuing infrastructure deals was totally quashed by Trump in May 2019, when he said he would refuse to discuss infrastructure proposals as long as he was under investigation by the Democratic-controlled House for his connections to Russia.

With Biden in the Oval Office, some Republicans are willing to set aside the political bloodsport to see if they can bring home solutions to aging bridges and roads and a lack of access to fast Internet. “We didn’t get everything we wanted, but we did come up with a compromise that’s going to help the American people,” Ohio Senator Rob Portman, a Republican, told reporters at the White House after meeting with Biden.

Whether that money makes it out the door will depend on whether this deal can stick.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Bihar: Stages collapse during Congress rallies in Darbhanga, West Champaran https://ift.tt/37QFnks

The stage on which Congress candidate from Jale assembly seat, Mashkoor Ahmad Usman was addressing a rally broke and collapsed in Bihar's Darbhanga on Thursday. In a similar incident, another stage collapsed and took down party leaders Imran Pratapgarhi and Akhilesh Singh along with several party workers who were on the dias, during a Congress rally at Bagahi Deoraj in Champaran.

New Dashboards Give a Window into Muni Service Changes

New Dashboards Give a Window into Muni Service Changes By Kate McCarthy An inspector manages Muni service. New dashboards that help inform changes to Muni service are now live at SFMTA.com/MuniData Many factors inform our decisions about Muni service adjustments. These include making sure changes to service support the SFMTA’s values, which are economic vitality, environmental stewardship, trust and equity. We also evaluate travel patterns. You can now explore these patterns using the new Muni data dashboards  (SFMTA.com/MuniData). When looking at possible Muni service changes, the first thing we do is turn to the Muni Service Equity Strategy for guidance. Using the Muni Service Equity Strategy, we prioritize providing Muni service along routes that more often serve people of color, members of low-income households, and/or those who are dependent upon transit service, including people with disabilities and seniors. We also use ridership data to analyze where riders are boa...

India reports first 6 cases of new coronavirus strain after UK returnees test positive https://ift.tt/3pA0T2j

India on Tuesday reported the first six cases of the new coronavirus strain after six people who had returned from the United Kingdom were tested positive for the new UK variant genome. According to the details, the new coronavirus strain cases were reported from Hyderabad, Pune and Bangalore. Samples of 3 UK returnees were tested and found positive for the new UK strain in NIMHANS, Bengaluru. The other two cases were tested at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad; while the last case was tested at the National Institute of Virology, Pune.

FOX NEWS: Ohio amusement park shut down after multiple fights break out Kings Island in Mason, around 20 miles north of Cincinnati, closed down 30 minutes early Saturday night after several fights among teenagers occurred, reports suggest.

Ohio amusement park shut down after multiple fights break out Kings Island in Mason, around 20 miles north of Cincinnati, closed down 30 minutes early Saturday night after several fights among teenagers occurred, reports suggest. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/3wsn8uI

PM Modi lauds IFS officers for their work towards serving nation, furthering national interests https://ift.tt/36HoEzw

Greeting Indian Foreign Service officers on IFS day, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that their work towards serving the nation and furthering national interests globally are commendable. Their efforts during the Vande Bharat Mission, which was launched to bring Indians home from abroad during the COVID-19 pandemic as international travel came to a halt, and other related help to our citizens and other nations is noteworthy, Modi added.

FOX NEWS: Bride's father asks stepdad to help walk her down the aisle in sweet viral moment A selfless gesture by the father of a bride was shared on social media in a viral moment of him surprising the girl’s stepfather by asking him to help walk her to the altar.

Bride's father asks stepdad to help walk her down the aisle in sweet viral moment A selfless gesture by the father of a bride was shared on social media in a viral moment of him surprising the girl’s stepfather by asking him to help walk her to the altar. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/ZkQ1Rpt

Better Connections from Bayview and Hunters Point to Downtown

Better Connections from Bayview and Hunters Point to Downtown By Enrique Aguilar To better connect southeast San Franciscans with downtown, the SFMTA debuted the 15 Bayview Hunters-Point Express in late January, coinciding with the return of T Third train service. Within weeks, average daily boardings reached 1,000 customers on this new service. The 15 Bayview Hunters Point Express  We added this route based on community feedback from the Southeast Muni Expansion Project in 2018, which prioritized a more direct trip to downtown from the Bayview. With the sudden rise of the COVID-19 pandemic and its disproportionate impacts on communities in the Bayview and Hunters Point, fast-tracking the project became critical to our transit planning. Adding service capacity and a direct connection between these neighborhoods and downtown is a crucial step in supporting the City’s economic recovery and increasing job access for essential workers using transit. Using data from the SFMTA Equ...

Plan Your Next Golden Gate Park Trip with Muni

Plan Your Next Golden Gate Park Trip with Muni By Eillie Anzilotti   A map of San Francisco showing Muni lines that offer direct service to Golden Gate Park, including: The 18 46th Avenue, the 29 Sunset, the 5 Fulton and 5R Fulton Rapid, the N Judah, the 44 O’Shaughnessy, the 33 Ashbury/18th Street, the 7 Haight/Noriega, the 43 Masonic and the 28 19th Avenue. Around each bus route shown on the map, a red zone shows the range within 1,000 feet of a stop, orange shows within 2,000 feet of a stop, and yellow shows within 3,000 feet. Here’s a fun fact: 70% of San Franciscans are within a 15-minute walk of a transfer-free Muni ride to the largest public space in our city: Golden Gate Park.   Especially as COVID-19 has heightened the importance of outdoor recreation and park access, SFMTA has made efforts to update Muni service to get people to Golden Gate Park. As of now, ...

New top story from Time: ‘I Should Be Presumed Innocent.’ Hong Kong Media Tycoon Jimmy Lai Criticizes His Arrest

https://ift.tt/342b8VJ Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai said he was arrested on “trumped up” charges, pushing back against landmark national security legislation that has raised questions about press freedoms and the future of the democracy movement. “They’re trumped up. I can’t go further on the details,” Lai said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Friday morning. “Before any evidence, they just claimed and presumed that I’m guilty. This isn’t the way the law is. I should be presumed innocent. We have never supported the independence of Hong Kong.” He said Hong Kong’s future as Asia’s main financial hub was uncertain if there was no respect for the rule of law under the new security measures. “The future of Hong Kong is the future of any other Chinese city,” he added. “Without the rule of law, the international financial center will be finished.” He added that the law sent a “very negative” message to the business community in Hong Kong and overseas. Lai has ...

अगर मैंने आत्महत्या की तो लोगों को पता होना चाहिए किसकी वजह से की - फूटकर रोते दिखे विकास गुप्ता

सुशांत सिंह राजपूत की आत्महत्या हर किसी को एक गहरा सदमा दे गई है और अब सुशांत के करीबी दोस्त विकास गुप्ता ने एक वीडियो में अपनी आपबीती सुनाई है। विकास इस वीडियो में बेहद टूटे हुए नज़र आ रहे हैं from टेलीविजन की खबरें | Television News in Hindi | TV Serials Update in Hindi – FilmiBeat Hindi http:/hindi.filmibeat.com/television/vikas-gupta-reveals-people-want-him-to-commit-suicide-cries-his-heart-out-for-sushant-singh-rajput-090284.html?utm_source=/rss/filmibeat-hindi-television-fb.xml&utm_medium=23.213.205.12&utm_campaign=client-rss