Next week is Memorial Day, and that’s bad news for congressional lawmakers who had been hoping to reach a bipartisan accord on infrastructure this summer.
Lawmakers haven’t even come close to a deal on legislation and are set to blow past the Memorial Day deadline Democrats and President Joe Biden initially set for advancing a major infrastructure package.
Democrats are now growing impatient and increasingly eyeing a strategy to circumvent the GOP with a budgetary tactic that would allow them to pass the bill with just their own caucus and the tiebreaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris.
“We are getting down to decision time,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said Monday. “We can’t put this off indefinitely.”
Biden told reporters in the Capitol Democrats want a bipartisan deal.
“We just have to decide whether bipartisanship is going to work and be honest if it isn’t,” he said.
Even Republican negotiators say time for reaching an accord may be running out.
“I do think we’ve got about a week or 10 days to decide if we can work together on this or not,” Sen. Roy Blunt, a Missouri Republican and one of the negotiators, said on Fox News Sunday.
Hopes for a deal deflated over the weekend following the GOP’s rejection of Biden’s offer of a smaller, less costly infrastructure bill.
Biden lowered the cost of the measure from $2.25 trillion to $1.7 trillion in an effort to reach a compromise with the GOP.
But the scope and the cost are still far too big for Republicans.
A group of GOP Senate lawmakers last month proposed a much narrower infrastructure proposal with a price tag of less than $600 million.
“The number is too big because the scope of what the White House staff wants to call infrastructure is way too big,” Blunt said of Biden’s latest offer.
Biden’s infrastructure plan includes many spending items well outside the scope of projects involving roads, bridges, and waterways. Biden’s $1.7 trillion plan includes spending on green energy projects and electric cars as well as money for caregivers, among other things the GOP does not support in any infrastructure proposal.
The president has been determined to seek bipartisan cooperation on the measure. Biden has hosted Republicans at the White House several times in the past few weeks to listen to their concerns with his proposal, as well as the kind of infrastructure provisions the two sides can agree on.
But time is now running out, Democrats warn.
Cedric Richmond, a Biden senior adviser and former House lawmaker from Louisiana, said the president will make time for a deal if it’s realistic.
“If there’s meaningful negotiations taking place in a bipartisan manner, he’s willing to let that play out,” Richmond said on CNN’s State of the Union. “But he will not let inaction be the answer. And when he gets to the point where it looks like that is inevitable, you’ll see him change course.”
The timing is important to Democrats, who do not want to drag out the legislative process into the 2022 campaign season.
That’s because Biden proposes paying for much of his infrastructure with a big corporate tax increase and Democrats are eager to avoid making party lawmakers vote on tax increases anywhere near election season.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said earlier this month she is still optimistic a bill can advance by July 4 and that it could be bipartisan.
Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, a top GOP negotiator from West Virginia, said meeting a July 4 deadline would be difficult.
Capito told Bloomberg TV “the next two weeks will be the critical time spot” for determining if a bipartisan deal will be possible.
She told reporters in the Capitol Monday that despite the gridlock, “I’m not ready to call it quits.”
Republicans have been willing to increase their budget for infrastructure and even to include some of the green energy wish list items in the Biden plan, such as money to build more electric car charging stations.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he anticipated an infrastructure spending bill would cost up to $800 billion.
But Democrats appear unwilling to go lower than Biden’s latest offer.
“I’d be reluctant to go lower,” Durbin said. “It’s up to the president, but I think he’s made a good-faith effort.”
Republicans say they believe Biden is truly interested in a bipartisan deal, but the latest talks between GOP lawmakers and White House staff have not been as productive as the sit-downs with the president.
Senate Minority Whip John Thune, a South Dakota Republican, described negotiations Monday as reaching “a stalemate,” adding, “Hopefully that changes.”
