President Joe Biden delivered a speech about the need for bipartisan cooperation in front of a Kentucky bridge on Wednesday afternoon — with one of his biggest congressional adversaries in attendance.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) met Biden at the airport and sat for his remarks just south of Cincinnati. The president thanked McConnell for his support of bipartisan legislation.
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“Mitch, it’s great to be with you,” Biden said. “I asked permission if I could say something nice about him. I said I’d campaign for him or against him, whichever helped him the most.”
The stop is part of a wider Biden administration push to promote its infrastructure plans, which were boosted last year with the passage of the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act. Vice President Kamala Harris delivered an infrastructure speech in Chicago, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg spoke in Connecticut, and infrastructure “czar” Mitch Landrieu will appear tomorrow in San Francisco.
All of the speeches are about bridges that will be renovated or replaced, in Biden’s case the Brent Spence Bridge, which carries traffic on I-75 and I-71 across the Ohio River.
Biden said the bridge opened in 1963 and was designed to carry 80,000 vehicles a day. Today, it carries 160,000 a day and has become the second most-congested truck bottleneck in the United States. It will be upgraded, and a second bridge to carry local traffic will be added across the river, which separates Kentucky from Ohio.
“We can work together,” Biden said. “We can get things done. We can move the nation forward if we just drop a little bit of our egos and focus on what is needed for the country.”
Despite the unity message, Biden took a dig at the chaos over choosing the next speaker of the House.
“Rep. Greg Landsman (D-OH) couldn’t be here today, he’s dealing with trying to figure out who’s going to be the next speaker of the House of Representatives. I wish him a lot of luck,” Biden said to laughter. “He may be the first freshman ever elected speaker of the House.”
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You can watch Biden’s full remarks here:
