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

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery

Powered Scooters Charge City’s Transportation Recovery By Jason Hyde The SFMTA is releasing its next round of Powered Scooter Share permits on July 1. Scooters remain a sustainable mode of travel and a complement to Muni and public transit service as the city recovers from the pandemic and San Franciscans begin to travel more. The SFMTA’s Powered Scooter Share Program is essential in ensuring that shared scooter operations support the city’s economic recovery in a safe, sustainable, and equitable way.  The SFMTA received four submittals for the permit program and will issue permits to two operators : Spin and Lime. Permits will be in effect for a one-year term, with the option to extend for another year at the discretion of the SFMTA based on compliance with various program metrics. While the new permit program does not set a limit on the number of scooters each operator may deploy, it does limit the overall citywide fleet size at 10,000. Starting at a base of 2,000 scooters...

Muni Highlights in 2021: More Service to More Destinations

Muni Highlights in 2021: More Service to More Destinations By Jonathan Streeter Our goal for Muni in 2021 was to match the service we offer with the changing travel patterns of an unpredictable era, as San Franciscans grappled with a second year of the COVID-19 pandemic.  To achieve this, we expanded on the core routes that formed the nucleus of our early 2020 pandemic network by adding and improving service in key areas throughout San Francisco. We focused on access in neighborhoods where essential workers live, as well as on adding service in busy corridors and even creating new lines. At the beginning of the year, even with our reduced schedule, 91% of San Franciscans were within two or three blocks of a Muni stop. This included 100% of residents in San Francisco’s neighborhoods identified by the Muni Service Equity Strategy . By summer 2021, we added enough additional service so that 98% of San Franciscans were within two or three blocks of a Muni stop. To the relief of ma...

Muni Metro Fix It! Week Improves Rail Service, Safety and Reliability

Muni Metro Fix It! Week Improves Rail Service, Safety and Reliability By Jessie Liang Overhead Line Department replacing wire and custodians cleaning metro station during Fix It! Week, April 19, 2022 A new quarterly effort to increase work time to accomplish necessary Muni Metro system maintenance in April 2022 was a resounding success. Here is a behind-the-scenes video recap . The maintenance initiatives aimed at making subway operations more reliable and preventing feature breakdowns. The maintenance teams were able to perform an entire month of work within the 10 days when subway service was substituted by bus service to provide SFMTA workers the extended Fix It! Week work window.  Every night after Muni Metro subway service hours, SFMTA maintenance crews work to maintain the tracks and equipment underground. On most nights, this gives our teams only about two hours to get work done. During the first Fix It! Week, from April 14 to April 23, 2022, buses provided substitute s...

Taking Muni to Bike San Francisco’s Iconic Rides

Taking Muni to Bike San Francisco’s Iconic Rides By Kate McCarthy Take your bike on Muni using the racks on the front of buses to access bike rides on the Great Highway, through Golden Gate Park and across the Golden Gate Bridge. Thousands of riders are expected to hop on a bike in May for National Bike Month and Bike to Wherever Day on Friday, May 20 . For people new to bicycling in San Francisco, using Muni buses to avoid our famous hills and reduce overall trip distances is a great way to get to iconic bike rides and scenic parks.   All Muni buses have bike racks on their front that can hold two or three bikes (only folding bicycles are allowed on Muni’s Metro trains and historic streetcars). Using the bike racks on Muni buses to transport your bike is easy! And, if you have questions while you are doing it, you can always ask the operator, who can assist you. Those looking to bicycle in parks, along the Great Highway, through Golden Gate Park or across the Golden Ga...

San Francisco's Taxi Medallion Program Moves Onward

San Francisco's Taxi Medallion Program Moves Onward By In early October, a San Francisco jury found that the SFMTA did not breach its taxi medallion program Lender Agreements with the San Francisco Federal Credit Union.  Throughout this litigation, the SFMTA has continued to focus its attention on supporting purchased medallion holders and drivers.  In fact, over a year ago, the SFMTA made an offer to settle the lawsuit by providing millions of dollars in loan forgiveness to medallion holders.  Unfortunately, the SF Credit Union opted to continue its lawsuit against us.  With the trial now behind us, we are hopeful that the Credit Union will engage in the necessary dialogue with us and agree to participate in a loan forgiveness program.  We understand the challenges faced by individuals who purchased taxi medallions.  Specifically, the fixed $250,000 price for a medallion is unsustainable, and needs to be lowered. Unfor...

Muni Forward Gets San Francisco Moving

Muni Forward Gets San Francisco Moving By Shalon Rogers The SFMTA’s Muni Forward program is delivering transit reliability improvements that are transforming the Muni system and enhancing the customer experience. With 80 miles of upgrades since 2014 that often bring travel time savings of 20% or more, Muni Forward is making a big difference in how San Francisco moves.  These upgrades, which can be seen in this Muni Forward Photo Map , draw from a “toolkit” of over 20 reliability and customer experience improvements, such as transit lanes that provided dedicated space for Muni vehicles to cut through traffic, transit bulbs that reduce delays at transit stops and traffic signals with transit priority that give the green light to transit vehicles as they approach the intersection, when possible. The recently completed Van Ness Improvement Project thrust Muni Forward back into the spotlight with San Francisco’s first Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) corridor. While the Van Ness Improve...

Smarter Traffic Signals Prioritize Transit and People

Smarter Traffic Signals Prioritize Transit and People By Robert Lim Have you ever wondered how traffic signals could better balance the needs of all road users, whether driving, bicycling, walking or taking Muni? The SFMTA is rolling out its Connected Corridor Pilot this month to use transit platform and traffic signal sensor data to inform signal timing adjustments. The pilot also aims to collect information to support transit efficiency and street safety improvements.  Traffic engineers use signal timing adjustments as a tool to prioritize the flow of travel in specific directions or for different travel modes – Muni, people walking or driving – to meet the changing demands of the road network across different timepoints in a day. The Connected Corridors Pilot seeks to push the envelope of innovation by investing in advanced technologies, funded through a U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT) grant. These tools will better position the city to serve the potential future ne...

New T Third Route in Central Subway Starting January 7

New T Third Route in Central Subway Starting January 7 By Mariana Maguire New T Third service via Central Subway starts January 7 with service between Sunnydale and Chinatown-Rose Pak Station. On Saturday, January 7, the T Third starts its historic new route, providing a direct Metro connection between Sunnydale and Chinatown-Rose Pak Station. Service runs Mondays through Fridays, 6 a.m. to midnight. every 10 minutes and Saturdays and Sundays, 8 a.m. to midnight every 12 minutes. The new T Third line vastly improves transportation to and from some of San Francisco’s most densely populated areas and major shopping corridors, expanding transit options and new connections. The new T Third route will travel north to the new Central Subway from 4th & King platform. It will no longer turn onto King Street or run along the Embarcadero and the Market Street subway. Also, the K Ingleside will now travel between Balboa Park and Embarcadero Station. New Connections Customers traveling...

FOX NEWS: Coronavirus: German Ikea parking lot used for Ramadan prayer An Ikea in Germany allowed some 800 Muslims to use its parking lot for a mass Eid prayer to commemorate the end of Ramadan on Sunday.

Coronavirus: German Ikea parking lot used for Ramadan prayer An Ikea in Germany allowed some 800 Muslims to use its parking lot for a mass Eid prayer to commemorate the end of Ramadan on Sunday. via FOX NEWS https://ift.tt/36xxQ7n

Free Muni for New Year’s Eve

Free Muni for New Year’s Eve By Stephen Chun For the 23rd consecutive year, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) will offer free rides on New Year’s Eve from 8 p.m. on Saturday, December 31 through 5 a.m. on Sunday, January 1. Extra Muni Metro Subway Service will be provided from 8 p.m. Saturday to 2:15 a.m. Sunday. Extra Owl Service will be provided from 10 p.m. Saturday to 5 a.m. Sunday This program supports San Francisco’s Vision Zero goal to eliminate traffic fatalities. Ride Muni Free New Year’s Eve  includes all Muni lines and routes. Clipper Card customers should NOT tap their cards to make sure they don’t get charged a fare. Muni Mobile passes will not be necessary. Metro fare gates will be open that night. All information, including schedules and stops, will be posted on New Year's Eve Free Muni and Extra Service or SFMTA.com/NYE . Clipper Card customers should NOT tap their cards to make sure they don’t get charged a fare. Don’t drink and ...