Sen. Joe Manchin said President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal “needs to be changed,” signaling the bill may encounter roadblocks in the Senate.
Manchin, a key vote in an evenly divided upper chamber, expressed concerns about the $2.25 trillion “American Jobs Plan,” particularly the accompanying framework raising the corporate tax rate, which he argued could harm businesses.
“As the bill exists today, it needs to be changed,” he told Hoppy Kercheval, the host of Talkline on West Virginia Metro News, according to multiple outlets.
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The senator from West Virginia said a handful of his Democratic colleagues agree that raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% would be problematic.
“It’s more than just me, Hoppy,” he continued. “There’s six or seven other Democrats who feel very strongly about this. We have to be competitive, and we’re not going to throw caution to the wind.”
Manchin said last month he would insist it be 100% paid for by measures such as “at least” increasing the corporate tax rate to 25%.
Biden unveiled the $2.25 trillion plan, along with the corporate tax hike, in Pittsburgh on Wednesday, a bifurcated approach bundled together as part of the “Build Back Better” package.
The proposal has drawn criticism from Republicans, who are particularly opposed to the corporate tax hike.
“That package that they’re putting together now, as much as we would like to address infrastructure, is not going to get support from our side because I think the last thing the economy needs right now is a big, whopping tax increase,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Thursday.
Biden, who vowed to have a “good-faith negotiation” over the proposal with Republicans in the Oval Office, has reversed course, chiding the GOP for conflicting stances on infrastructure.
“If the Republicans argue that we don’t need infrastructure now, they’ve been talking about the need for it for years,” he said on Friday.
Some Democrats argue Biden’s plan doesn’t go far enough.
“We’re looking at ideals and what we think is the actual investment that can create tens of millions of good union jobs in this country that can shore up our healthcare, our infrastructure, our housing, and doing it in a way that draws down our carbon figures to help us get in line with IPCC standards. We’re talking about realistically $10 trillion over 10 years,” liberal Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said.
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Sen. Tom Carper, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said last month the panel hoped to hold a vote on infrastructure legislation in May. Rep. Peter DeFazio, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, told Reuters that May is also the “tentative timeline” to pass the bill through his committee in Congress’s lower chamber.
