This is the day Donald Trump finally became the infrastructure president
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Infrastructure week is finally here!
The Senate gave overwhelming bipartisan approval to a $1 trillion infrastructure bill on Tuesday to rebuild the nation’s deteriorating roads and bridges and fund new climate resilience and broadband initiatives, delivering a key component of President Biden’s agenda.
The legislation would be the largest infusion of federal investment into infrastructure projects in more than a decade, touching nearly every facet of the American economy and fortifying the nation’s response to the warming of the planet.
It would provide historic levels of funding for the modernization of the nation’s power grid and projects to better manage climate risks, as well as pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the repair and replacement of aging public works projects.
The vote, 69-30, was uncommonly bipartisan; the yes votes included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate Republican leader, and 18 other Republicans who shrugged off increasingly shrill efforts by former President Donald Trump to derail it.
The fact that Biden just did what Trump never came remotely close to doing will, I’m sure, not affect people who think that Trump is a secret economic populist at all, since it was always 100% about owning the libs and 0% about actual policy. (I’ll also note that one Missouri senator voted against this bill, and it wasn’t Roy Blunt.)
This bill is certainly a net positive and has a lot of useful funding. It should not, however, be used as evidence that the Senate’s current rules are just fine:
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.