How Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill beat the odds

WASHINGTON – President Joe Biden’s decades of Senate experience and his personal faith in compromise paid off on Tuesday, when his $ 1,000 billion infrastructure bill was passed by the Senate in a rare bipartite approval vote.

The vote was the culmination of months of intense work by the White House and a bipartisan group of 10 senators, who negotiated a dizzying series of compromises that pushed the bill forward through a deep Senate. Split.

In the end, 19 Republicans crossed party lines on Tuesday and joined the 50 Democrats in voting for massive new investments in roads, bridges, broadband access, public transportation and green energy .

The vote was a massive justification for Biden’s belief that despite its obscure rules, the Senate still functions basically as it was meant to – a belief that many of Biden’s Democratic colleagues do not share.

For this to work, however, a remarkable set of circumstances had to come together over the past few months, a perfect storm of politics and politics.

At the center of it all was Biden himself, a career senator who his aides say is fully aware that the success of his first term as president is inextricably linked to the success of this infrastructure bill.

Throughout the spring and summer, Biden traveled across the country touting the infrastructure bill in a series of high-profile presidential visits.

Back in Washington, Biden personally embarked on legislative drama at defining moments.

In May and June, the president hosted Republican and Democratic senators at the White House for private and frank meetings in the Oval Office to discuss what they needed to see in the bill in order to gain their support.

Some senators needed an extra hand. Biden has met at least three one-on-one meetings with Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, a centrist Democrat who insisted from the start that the bill be bipartisan, and who then helped shape possible legislation for compromise.

After a meeting, Sinema said she and the president discussed, among other things, the importance of expanding rural broadband in her home state.

The bill that was passed on Tuesday provides $ 65 billion to expand broadband access to underserved communities.

But it’s not just the centrists that Biden is courting.

In mid-July, the president met in the White House with progressive Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, his former rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

At the time, Sanders, who chairs the powerful Senate Budget Committee, publicly called for a much larger human infrastructure package than most moderate Democrats thought they could support, somewhere in the $ 6 trillion range. dollars, nearly double what the White House envisioned. .

Outside of Washington, the mere mention of a $ 6 trillion Democrats-only bill was enough to get some vulnerable Democrats to reconsider whether they should support the infrastructure bill. or the reconciliation bill.

Biden needed to come to an early agreement with Sanders to avoid any dissent in the ranks.

Sanders also wanted something specific from the White House: the president’s support for a plan to expand Medicare coverage to include dental, vision and hearing care.

A day after Sanders and Biden met on July 12, Democrats unveiled their long-awaited human infrastructure plan.

Much of the plan was based on promises Biden made to voters during his 2020 presidential campaign. But there was one last-minute addition: Medicare coverage for dental, vision and hearing.

After Tuesday’s vote, Biden said there was a lesson to be learned from the way the infrastructure bill was negotiated.

“The lesson learned is to be willing to speak and listen,” he told reporters at the White House. “Listen. Call people. And I think the lesson learned is to expose people to other points of view.”

“That’s why from the start I have sat with people and listened to their positions. Some people agree with where I am and some disagree. So I think it’s a question. listen, that’s part of democracy, ”Biden said.

As Biden and his fellow Democrats struggled to unite behind the simplified infrastructure bill and its sister bill, the $ 3.5 trillion expansion of the social safety net, their task was made easier. by a unique dynamic within the Republican caucus.

One was an unusually high number of Republican retirements announced to the Senate this cycle.

Unlike a typical senator, who is pressured to gain grassroots support in his party to survive a primary, and then support the entire state to be re-elected, incumbent senators are not under such pressure.

They are free to vote according to their conscience, regardless of whether these votes could harm them on election day.

Of the five Republican senators who plan to retire next year, three have crossed party lines to support the bill.

Rob Portman of Ohio led the GOP negotiating team, doing more than just about anyone except Biden to secure the finish line deal.

Two other outgoing senators, Richard Burr of North Carolina and Roy Blunt of Missouri, also lent their support to the deal at crucial times.

Burr signed in mid-July, helping answer questions about whether a deal that had been struck by a small group of senators could win a larger coalition.

Blunt voted for the bill in its first big test, a procedural vote in late July to begin a formal debate on the bill.

There is one more Republican whose support for the deal probably did more than any other senator to ensure the bill’s bipartisan success: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.

During his tenure as leader of the Republicans in the Senate, McConnell has carved out a reputation for himself as a sort of Reaper for Democrats’ fetish legislation, always ready to spell the end.

But this time around, McConnell held back.

Instead of blocking the bill up front, as many expected, McConnell tacitly let negotiations go and left the door open to a deal he would give Republicans the green light for.

As the summer wore on and the bill progressed through the Senate, the question of why McConnell hadn’t terminated the deal turned into something of a board game in Washington.

Several factors are probably at play here.

One is that infrastructure is universally popular with voters, and McConnell knows that as well as anyone.

“He’s a very pragmatic person. I think he knows everyone wins somehow if it’s real, hard infrastructure,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer, a Republican from Dakota from North, in a recent interview with the Associated Press.

Another boon to the bill is the fact that residents of McConnell’s home state of Kentucky are likely to see disproportionate benefits from its provisions, such as federal highway projects and expanded rural broadband funding.

Another thing that works in favor of the bill is the broader Senate debate on filibuster, the 60-vote threshold needed to move most bills through the chamber.

Biden has resisted growing calls from Progressive Democrats to remove filibuster, which critics say is an outdated and fundamentally unfair rule.

For McConnell, letting the infrastructure bill pass with more than 60 votes “is a good demonstration that it can preserve filibuster while having meaningful bipartisan legislation,” Cramer told the AP.

“And at the end of the day he has a riding in Kentucky that he probably thinks is pretty good.”