Will Biden Fight For an Infrastructure Plan?
I won’t get my hopes up, but early emerging details from the plan are better than I would have expected.
As I and many others have noted in the past, before he was even sworn into office Joe Biden was expressing his desire to have a longstanding legacy as President, akin to someone like Roosevelt who shaped the nation for decades to come. While we’ve long been arguing that such a legacy would require bold, necessary action that was sufficient to meet this critical moment in American history, there have been a number of reasons to be skeptical about Biden’s willingness to go in that direction. After all, Biden’s administration made the infuriating decision that they were going to abandon the effort to get the $15 minimum wage into the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, and he has expressed clear resistance to cancelling student debt. That said, recent reports indicate that the long awaited infrastructure bill — which Biden intends to make the cornerstone of his Presidency — is one area where he might be taking a more hardline, aggressive approach in a positive direction.
In a recent piece in The Washington Post, Jeff Stein and Tyler Pager detailed how the President is planning a massive bill that will be broken down in two parts: infrastructure, and then on other priorities like extending the child tax credit that was in the covid relief bill. The $3 trillion plan is said to include free community college and universal prekindergarten, and of course hundreds of billions of dollars to repair waterways, roads, bridges, and rails. Also included is $100 billion for education infrastructure. $400 billion would go to combatting climate change, and $46 billion for climate research and development. Half of the $200 billion for housing infrastructure would be dedicated to housing for low income Americans.
Of course, details of this plan seem essentially meaningless when one considers that the Democratic party in the Senate would have to abolish or significantly reform the filibuster in order to get it through. Either that, or reconciliation, which Stein and Pager noted that there might be some reluctance to do.
That said, the details of the $3 trillion infrastructure plan come around the same time it was reported that after meeting with historians and the passage of a relief bill that didn’t get a single Republican vote, Biden is “fully prepared” to abandon bipartisanship and even push for nuking the filibuster to push his agenda through. Evidently, he also loves the narrative that he is bolder than Obama.
Personally, I will believe it when I see it.
As encouraging as some pieces of his infrastructure bill might be, the question is whether Biden will actually fight to get them in the legislation. Far too often, Democratic politicians use fundamentally necessary policy proposals as props to help them win an election or gain some brownie points in the press to cultivate the facade that they’re actually in favor of it, only to turn around and abandon it the first chance they get. Biden is no exception, and what should make this situation any different?
One might argue that a bold infrastructure plan has a better chance of passing than the $15 minimum wage because the donor class is not as uniformly opposed to it, but that does not mean Biden still won’t be up against Senators like Joe Manchin who are almost indefinitely going to take issue with parts of it. If the President really wants this piece of legislation to be his legacy, then one would hope that he would do what it takes to get it through. At this point, all we can do is wonder which of Biden’s goals will come out on top: the desire for a bold, FDR-like Presidency, or the desire to be known as the one who could “compromise”.
While it is still far too early to tell what the outcome of this legislation will be, if nothing else it gives us an insight into Biden’s admittedly deeply frustrating tendencies. Rather than having stances made up of his own steadfast principles and beliefs, he seems to be shaped instead by whoever is in his ear at the present moment. The historians who are urging him to take bold action might have his ear right now, but it’s easy to imagine what would likely happen after a few phone calls with Joe Manchin or anyone else who might have a vested interest in getting critical pieces of this legislation out before it passes.
Right now, we’ll just have to wait and see.
