Lawmakers in both parties have spent weeks negotiating unsuccessfully to find a deal on infrastructure.
Democrats are ready to move on and pass a bill without GOP support, but a small group of Republicans and Democrats are pitching a last-minute proposal they say can attract bipartisan support.
Five Senate Republicans and five Senate Democrats announced the deal on Thursday, calling it “a realistic, compromise framework to modernize our nation’s infrastructure and energy technologies.”
The group launched early discussions with the White House and hopes the plan can become the basis of a bill that will pass the Senate with bipartisan support.
But Biden is traveling in Europe and hasn’t signaled whether he will back the proposal yet. A White House statement Friday said, “Questions need to be addressed” about the plan and how it is paid for.
The president isn’t the only hurdle.
The measure leaves out top liberal wish list spending on “human infrastructure” and climate change mitigation. The bipartisan plan, which would be roughly $1.2 trillion, falls far short in both size and scope of Biden’s $1.7 trillion proposal.
Some of the bipartisan measure would be funded by indexing the gas tax to inflation, which would almost certainly raise the current $18.4 cents-per-gallon federal tax on unleaded gasoline. Biden and key Senate Democrats said they oppose an increase in the gas tax, but it’s not clear whether they would oppose indexing the tax.
Liberal Senate Democrats are balking at the bipartisan proposal. They want Biden and Democratic leaders to leave the GOP behind and pass a big infrastructure bill using the reconciliation budgetary tactic, which allows certain legislation to pass with only 51 votes.
Democrats believe taking up one large package would provide leverage to convince moderate Democrats who may not support non-infrastructure spending in the bill or Biden’s plan to pay for it by raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%.
“Why let Republicans decide the size of an infrastructure bill when reconciliation is a perfectly legitimate process (used unapologetically by the GOP when they were in power) to do a bill that will actually make a difference?” Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat, tweeted Friday. “It’s not cheating to use the rules.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to both please liberals and provide a path to passing a bipartisan infrastructure measure.
Schumer wants the Senate to pursue a bipartisan package on more traditional infrastructure projects and take up a second infrastructure bill that includes other spending, such as $400 billion to support caregivers and $100 billion in electric vehicle tax credits.
“It may well be that part of the bill that will pass will be bipartisan, and part of it will be through reconciliation,” Schumer said. “But we’re not going to sacrifice the bigness and boldness in this bill. We will just pursue two paths.”
The bipartisan deal emerged this week after talks collapsed between Biden and Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia. Biden said the GOP’s then-$928 billion plan fell short. Capito told reporters Biden pledged to agree to a $1 trillion offer, and she suggested the White House was moving the goalposts.
The latest bipartisan offer is more than $200 billion higher and includes the approval of key moderate Democrats Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Sen. Mitt Romney, a Utah Republican, touted the bipartisan agreement in a memo to constituents Friday.
“This investment would be fully paid for and not include tax increases,” Romney said. “Discussions are ongoing with colleagues and the White House, and the Senator remains hopeful that this plan can garner broad support from both parties.”
