President Joe Biden said he would meet with Senate Republicans to discuss the party’s $928 billion infrastructure proposal, reviving hopes for a bipartisan deal after talks stalled last week.
Biden told reporters Thursday he has not yet read the details of the GOP proposal, which is far narrower in scope and lower in cost than the president’s latest pitch for a $1.7 trillion infrastructure bill.
Biden did not reject the much smaller GOP bill outright. Instead, he said the two sides would get together and talk about it, which some viewed as an encouraging sign the president is not willing to abandon a bipartisan deal on infrastructure.
“We’re going to meet sometime next week, and we’ll see if we can move that,” Biden said. “And I’ll have more to say about that in time.”
Lawmakers and Biden are quickly running out of time to strike a bipartisan deal.
Some Democrats say they are eager to bypass the GOP and try to pass legislation unilaterally using a special budgetary tactic that allows certain bills to win approval with only 51 votes instead of the usual 60.
But Biden and a group of GOP lawmakers have refused to walk away from the possibility of winning Republican votes on a final infrastructure package.
Biden talked by phone Thursday with the Senate’s lead GOP negotiator, Shelley Moore Capito, a West Virginia Republican.
Biden characterized the call as “a good conversation” but warned there aren’t many days left to exchange offers.
“I told her we have to finish this very soon, and there’s another Republican group that also wants to talk,” Biden said. “But we’re going to have to close this down soon.”
The two parties remain at odds not only on cost but on the scope of the bill and the mechanism to pay for it.
Biden’s latest $1.7 trillion proposal leaves intact a plan to raise corporate taxes from 21% to 28%, which is a nonstarter with GOP lawmakers, who lowered corporate rates in their signature 2017 tax cut legislation.
The Biden plan includes significant spending on programs that are not traditional infrastructure projects. For example, Biden wants to spend $400 billion to assist caregivers for the elderly, and he would designate $100 billion for electric vehicle tax credits.
Biden’s latest proposal shaves about $600 billion off his initial proposal, mostly by cutting traditional infrastructure projects.
Republicans have rejected the $1.7 trillion package as far too expensive and broad.
The latest GOP offer leaves out caregiver funding and the electric vehicle tax credits and sticks to funding projects directly related to roads, bridges, waterways, and broadband.
The proposal would not require a tax increase and would instead use money already allocated in the federal budget for highway spending as well as some unspent COVID-19 aid funding.
Republicans who have been negotiating in person with Biden for the past few weeks say the president told them privately he would agree to an infrastructure bill with a price tag as low as $1 trillion.
“We have achieved that goal with this counteroffer,” Capito said Thursday. “But we’ve also done something that has stayed true to what our beliefs are when we very first started this endeavor, and that is sticking to the core, physical infrastructure. I think that’s what the American people think of when they think of infrastructure.”
