Infrastructure

Floor Speech

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Mr. THUNE. Madam President, I am feeling a sense of deja vu this morning. In March, Democrats used reconciliation to pass a massive, partisan bill that served as a cover for a collection of payoffs to Democratic interest groups in Democratic States.

Now, just over a month later, we are facing the prospect of round 2. Democrats are once again looking at reconciliation to pass a massive, partisan piece of legislation that serves to cover a long wish list of liberal priorities. The subject this time, of course, is infrastructure--like COVID relief, a subject that Republicans are very ready to tackle, but, just like with their COVID bill, Democrats aren't showing a lot of interest in bipartisan cooperation. Once again, their message seems to be ``Go along with everything we want or be completely excluded from any part of this bill.''

As I said, Republicans would be happy to take up infrastructure legislation. Our Nation is overdue for additional infrastructure investment. But an infrastructure bill should be focused on actual infrastructure: roads, bridges, airports, waterways, and digital infrastructure like broadband.

Democrats have some of that in their bill, but they also have been very busy expanding the definition of ``infrastructure'' to include a whole host of Democratic priorities. One Democratic Senator tweeted:

Paid leave is infrastructure. Childcare is infrastructure. Caregiving is infrastructure.

Well, actually, no, they are not. Neither is the Civilian Climate Corps or community colleges or support for Big Labor. None of those things are infrastructure.

Now, it may be that some--and I say ``some''--of Democrats' noninfrastructure proposals are things that we should have a discussion about here in Congress, a bipartisan discussion, but they are not infrastructure, and they don't belong in an infrastructure bill. Democrats should stop rewriting the definition of ``infrastructure'' to suit their purposes. The word ``infrastructure'' is not, in fact, anything that Democrats say it is. ``Infrastructure'' has an actual meaning, and it is not childcare or assistance for unions.

Even Democrats' actual infrastructure spending is frequently problematic. Democrats' infrastructure proposals would cost $2.2 trillion. Less than 6 percent of that--less than 6 percent--would be spent on roads and bridges. Under the Democrats' plan, spending on electric vehicle promotion would exceed investments in roads, bridges, ports, and waterways combined. That includes tax credits and rebates for electric vehicles, measures that will primarily benefit wealthier car buyers and leave rural States like South Dakota, where electric vehicles remain impractical, behind.

The bill also includes a massive sum for transit and high-speed rail--substantially more than the bill spends on highways, roads, and bridges--despite Americans' limited interest in rail travel.

On the tax front, Speaker Pelosi has expressed her interest in including a lifting of the current cap on State and local tax deductions. Now, this one is really interesting. It is a very interesting priority for Democrats, considering that repealing the SALT deduction would mostly benefit wealthy taxpayers, including that evil 1 percent whom Democrats are always talking about. But I guess sometimes principle has to take a back seat to keeping Democratic donors happy.

While we are talking about taxes, let's talk about how Democrats plan to at least partially--and I say ``partially'' because a lot of this could go on to debt--pay for this bill. Democrats would like to partially pay for this legislation with the largest corporate tax increase in a generation. They would sharply increase the corporate tax rate, once again putting American companies at a disadvantage next to their foreign competitors and threatening American jobs and wages. It is pretty hard to think of any worse proposal right now, with our economy still trying to recover from the effects of the pandemic.

What, in effect, you are doing when you are raising taxes dramatically--when I say ``raising taxes dramatically,'' I am talking the largest or highest tax rate in the developed world. We will be leading the OECD when it comes to taxation of businesses if the Democrats get their way and raise the tax rate on businesses from 21 percent to 28 percent. What you are doing when you do that is not punishing some corporation; it is punishing workers who work for those companies. This is about jobs. It is fundamentally about jobs. When you raise taxes on businesses, it hurts jobs.

Now, there is a history of bipartisan collaboration on infrastructure legislation. Our last major transportation infrastructure bill, the FAST Act, was supported by both Democrats and Republicans, and it was a remarkably successful bill. Last Congress, the Environment and Public Works Committee here in the Senate developed bipartisan transportation infrastructure legislation. There is absolutely no reason--no reason-- why we couldn't replicate past bipartisan success in this Congress.

The word is that next week the Democratic leader is going to bring up a bipartisan water infrastructure bill that recently passed the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee unanimously. I hope he will. That should be a model for a larger infrastructure bill, not the partisan process that Democrats embraced with their COVID legislation and not the partisan, wasteful proposal full of noninfrastructure- related measures that Democrats have put forward.

I saw an op-ed the other day that pointed out that ``President Biden promised to usher in a golden age of bipartisan cooperation, but instead he is showing a reverse Midas touch--taking issues that once united Republicans and Democrats and making them partisan and divisive.'' Sad but true. But the President has a chance to turn that around with infrastructure.

It is not too late for Democrats and the President to sit down at the table with Republicans and develop a substantial, bipartisan proposal that would address our country's infrastructure needs without spending taxpayer dollars on wasteful or extraneous proposals.

I am encouraged that President Biden is meeting with Republicans on infrastructure legislation, but I hope these meetings are not just for show. The President, as we all recall, met with Republicans on COVID legislation, too, before rejecting bipartisan cooperation. Let's hope he will choose a different path this time.

It is not too late for the President to start fulfilling his inauguration promise of unity and bipartisanship. He should start with this infrastructure bill.

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