‘Dumb son of a bitch’: Trump rips McConnell at Mar-a-Lago

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Jonathan Chait dives into the Republican opposition to the invoice:

Republican Senators say they might like to move a giant infrastructure invoice. They’re publicly begging Joe Biden to cease his partisan technique and sit down with them to barter a invoice each events can assist. The difficulty is that their calls for for the right way to produce this bipartisan settlement go round in circles.

However there’s a catch: They don’t like paying for it by elevating taxes on rich individuals — or, as Republicans delicately name them, “job creators.” All people is aware of that Republicans would reasonably let each final highway within the land crumble to mud and revert to touring by horseback and mule earlier than they raised taxes on job creators by a penny. “The worst method to pay for it’s to tax job creators,” says Wicker.

No shock that Republicans who begged for a “bipartisan” infrastructure invoice at the moment are so vocally towards it and demand it seem like a typical Republican giveaway to companies.

As Stephen Collinson at CNN notes, this invoice can remodel America, particularly because the Biden administration is taking a sensible and forward-looking method to what infrastructure actually means within the trendy economic system:

In a single instance, the President has stretched the definition of infrastructure to insert $400 billion within the invoice to revolutionize house well being take care of the aged and disabled. In one other he is additionally looking for billions to supercharge America’s improvement of electrical autos to satisfy one other political precedence — the elimination of fossil fuels within the combat towards local weather change. And, after a 12 months wherein thousands and thousands of employees relied on house web connections to work remotely, the plan additionally contains $100 billion to construct a high-speed broadband infrastructure that may attain the entire nation.

And President Biden’s response:

“It is form of attention-grabbing that when the Republicans put ahead an infrastructure plan, they thought the whole lot from broadband to dealing to different issues was … infrastructure. Now they’re saying that solely a small portion of what I am speaking about is infrastructure,” Biden stated. “So it is attention-grabbing how their definition has modified however they know we’d like it.”

It’s not simply broadband Republicans are objecting to. Even funding for pipes doesn’t fall inside their ridiculously slender and mistaken definition of “infrastructure.”

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On a remaining notice, James Downie at The Washington Publish will get to the foundation of the Republican opposition:

So how would Republicans pay for upgrades that they agree are wanted? Properly, there they sound just about stumped. “I’m open to solutions about that,” stated Wicker. “A technique you pay for it’s by seeing important improved financial progress,” steered Reeves — which, as CNN host Jake Tapper identified, “doesn’t actually reply the query.” […]

Bear in mind, at any time when the Trump administration launched one among its many ill-fated “infrastructure weeks,” Republicans hardly ever balked on the value tags — not as a result of these proposals had been at all times funded however as a result of they didn’t make the rich and large enterprise pay extra of their fair proportion. So if Biden does sit down with Republicans to speak about paying for an infrastructure package deal, everybody within the room must be clear on one factor: Republicans don’t actually care if this invoice — or every other Democratic invoice — is paid for. They simply don’t need their buddies masking the fee. The excellent news for Democrats is that view is a loser with voters.