[ad_1]
“We would not have gotten the support of our colleagues, including Mitch McConnell,” Romney said. “What if we had extensive negotiations and agreed on a number, and then he would come back and double the number?” … Why, that would have made the whole process irrelevant.
And Biden’s promise will be tested in the coming weeks as Democrats negotiate this larger spending bill: it should include money for transportation and infrastructure that the party could, in theory, use for s ” support the work of the bipartite group. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) Has said Biden has pledged not to “double down” on the group’s work, so he will be watching Democrats closely to see if that violates their deal.
Nonetheless, the president’s vow proved a stable rail for the tumultuous negotiations that lasted for months and seemed hopelessly stalled at least half a dozen times – until the last minute. The bill was passed by the Senate on Tuesday after taking more than a month to pass bullets into legislation, an achievement for both Biden and the bipartisan gang of 10 senators who took the initiative to invest $ 550 billion in new spending on roads, bridges, broadband and ports.
It was the kind of victory on a long-drawn-out issue that former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump sought but never won. Even so, the arduous road to passing a bill that simply floods every state with money reflects how exhausting even the most basic progress has become in Congress.
Senators and the White House have occasionally found themselves in public disputes, such as Biden’s short-lived pledge to withhold his signature on the bipartisan bill until he also receives the social spending program from the Democrats, which could approach $ 3.5 trillion. Other disputes were private, such as a last-minute GOP rebellion over extending Davis-Bacon minimum wage levels to new areas of infrastructure.
This story, based on interviews with members of the bipartisan group and congressional advisers, highlights the major challenges they faced in reaching a major deal on a topic so old that it spawned its own joke in Washington. . But the Senate finally got its infrastructure week.
“The shit started to happen”
As successful as the infrastructure gang is, it has become clear that there are limits to what 10 of them in a room can take. In mid-July, Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) First posed what some of his colleagues didn’t really want to hear: Some of them had to step down or the gang would go around in circles forever. .
“[Biden’s] enough given this kind of negotiations, [and] at some point, if you have too many people around the table, you just can’t achieve the narrowness you need, ”said Louisa Terrell, director of the White House’s Office of Legislative Affairs.
The suggestion took a few days to materialize. Eventually, senators appointed Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and White House adviser Steve Ricchetti as proxies to complete some of the work.
When it came to bizarre issues like public transit funding formulas, Tester recalled thinking that “whether it’s 18.6% or 19.2%, or whatever they come up with, I’ll go. “
“Once we had Ricchetti and Portman in the room, then shit started happening,” he added.
Tester and Romney perfectly sums up the unique profile of the bipartisan gang, which formed after the 2020 election to fight coronavirus relief. The first is a fat farmer from Montana who lost three fingers in a meat grinder; the latter is a capped businessman who became governor and candidate for the presidency of the GOP.
The other members of the group are Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), Mark Warner (D-Va.), Joe Manchin (DW.Va.), Jeanne Shaheen (DN.H.), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Susan Collins (R-Maine ), Cassidy and Portman. Finally, 11 other senators approved their work.
This is exactly the type of team Biden would have joined in his own 36-year Senate career.
A tenuous alliance fueled by tennis
However, the composition of the gang is not necessarily representative of the future of the Democratic or Republican Party. Four of the top five GOP negotiators voted to impeach Trump this year, and Portman is retiring. On the Democratic side, Sinema and Manchin are increasingly lone supporters of preserving legislative filibuster.
Sinema and Portman are the de facto leaders of the infrastructure gang; they couldn’t be more different. The button-down Portman avoids controversy, while the enigmatic Sinema is hated by the Liberals and reveled in ignoring their anger. Murkowski called it an “unlikely partnership”, but it worked: the duo were often seen chatting in the corners of the Capitol or on the ground, Sinema leaning on the crutch she needed for a broken bone as Portman listened and quietly served.
“There was a pragmatism that came from Portman about, you know, just breaking through methodically,” Murkowski recalls. When negotiators tried to reopen things that had already been agreed, the Alaskan said, Sinema would tell them, “You, stop this. We have already resolved this.”
Discussions over infrastructure began in mid-March, when Sinema contacted Portman shortly after Democrats adopted their $ 1.9 trillion Covid bailout. Over the next several months, members of the bipartisan group met in one form or another more than 50 times, according to Romney, and kept a lively text string alive.
Murkowski described Romney as the most talkative texter, to which he replied, “My wife accused me of talking too much. Then maybe.”
The group socialized too. Collins, Romney and Warner attended a tennis tournament this month, as the Senate considered their bipartisan deal. Manchin hosted numerous parties on his houseboat, including one attended by Senator Lindsey Graham (RS.C.), who tested positive for Covid days later and spooked the whole room.
Hit the walls from both sides
A day before Republicans blocked an initial vote on their plan in July, Portman and Sinema met with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and told him they needed more time to complete the legislation, according to a source. of the GOP close to the negotiations. In the final days before the crossing, Sinema camped out in Schumer’s office, where he asked her if she had 60 votes for everything that had been mentioned.
As the negotiations dragged on, the anguish outside the group was at its height. Committee leaders complained that their collective jurisdiction was being ignored and the Liberals pressured the party to abandon the Republicans altogether. Republicans wondered why their colleagues were negotiating with the majority, knowing Democrats were preparing a multibillion-dollar social spending bill.
“There are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle… who wanted to see this fail because it was in their own partisan interests to do it,” Shaheen said. “When you have more people who want the compromise to fail [rather] than winning, then that’s a problem for the country.
It was not clear whether 10 Republicans would even vote to advance the legislation until the day of the first successful procedural vote. And more liberal colleagues suggested to Warner during negotiations that the Democrats in the group could bail out their Republican counterparts, adding his $ 550 billion in new spending to the party line’s $ 3.5 trillion social spending bill. .
Warner refused. “In our guts, we knew that” wouldn’t work, recalls Warner. “Leader Schumer knew it. The White House knew it.
Instead, Portman and Ricchetti kept talking – and the group continued to write what became a 2,702 page bill.
Water under bridging funding
And even after the bill appeared to be completely finished on the first day of August, the negotiations weren’t over. As staff members scoured the gargantuan legislation, Romney noticed that a water project in Utah had been omitted.
The entire group of 10 gathered to call parliamentary experts from each party and ask if they could respond later. But given that it took more than a month to draft the measure, and with senators already eager to go on August vacation, they recalled a clear message from the majority and minority secretaries: “You would be really wise to do away with that. before depositing it.
Those words foreshadowed a tough final round, where disputes over amendments disrupted attempts to make last-minute changes to the bill. The Senate spent an additional eight days reviewing the text of the bill and burning hours of free time, as senators wrangled over simple voting schedule agreements. It was a fitting ending, given the incredible hardships the group faced along the way and the potentially long wait that the bill now faces in the House.
For Biden and the bipartisan gang, his time in the Senate is an undisputed triumph for their marks of crossing the aisles. But as big as their twelve-figure expense bill is, the group members insisted that a simple compromise to update America’s roads and bridges should barely fit in.
“What we did shouldn’t be news,” Tester said. “The fact that it is, I think, indicates why this place is broken.”
Laura Barrón-López contributed to this report.
[ad_2]
Source link