Top Republicans are lining up against President Joe Biden’s infrastructure and climate spending plan, hoping for better luck souring voters on the administration’s jobs agenda than they experienced attempting to defeat the popular $1.9 trillion package billed as coronavirus relief.
Biden is proposing taxpayers invest $2 trillion on comprehensive infrastructure and climate modernization, rebuilding transportation hubs and corridors, upgrading power grids, and projects to rehabilitate the environment. The legislation, a potential jobs boon just as the economy is recovering from the pandemic, could enjoy broad voter support, as infrastructure revitalization often does. Indeed, infrastructure was high on former President Donald Trump’s to-do list, although he failed to act on the priority during his term.
But just as Republicans warned with Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Recovery Plan, they are sounding the alarm that there is more than meets the eye to the similarly dubbed American Jobs Plan.
“Democrats are offering to hamstring the economy with higher energy bills and higher taxes,” John Barrasso of Wyoming, the No. 3 ranking Senate Republican, said in a statement. “President Biden should change course and look to our bipartisan highway bill from the last Congress if he is really interested in improving our infrastructure.”
In the House, the Republican Study Committee, an influential caucus of conservatives led by Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, was also quick to dismiss the American Jobs Plan as a liberal sham. In a lengthy statement issued Wednesday by the RSC Steering Committee, the group said Biden’s latest spending plan would “undermine our economic recovery, and harm small businesses that have struggled to stay afloat during the pandemic.”
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Republicans are highlighting the $2 trillion in taxes Biden would raise to pay for the package, including a hike in the corporate tax, from 21% to 28%, they claim would kill any jobs the bill might create and make rival China more competitive for businesses than the United States. Additionally, Republicans argue, the president’s proposal is nothing more than a climate boondoggle, the partisan Green New Deal, dressed up as consensus infrastructure spending.
“Biden promised to ‘build back better’ — but the country he is building up, in particular, is China,” Trump said in a statement, riffing on the president’s 2020 campaign slogan. “The Biden plan will crush American workers and decimate U.S. manufacturing.”
Biden unveiled the American Jobs Plan Wednesday in Pittsburgh, the heart of the old Rust Belt. He said the proposal was based on a vision “not seen through the eyes of Wall Street or Washington” but rather from the vantage point of middle-class and blue-collar people like those he grew up with in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a small community near Wilmington, Delaware.
“It’s time to rebuild,” the president said to assembled union members at a local training center. “It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and the middle out.”
If swift Republican opposition to Biden’s infrastructure and climate spending plan and the message the GOP deployed against the proposal appear familiar, it’s because they are. The party was just as fast out of the gate in February rejecting the American Rescue Plan and using similar arguments to derail the legislation, which cleared Congress over unanimous GOP opposition. Voters across the spectrum were unconvinced, giving the $1.9 trillion spending law high marks in public surveys.
Biden’s overall job approval has held up since, clocking in at nearly 54% in the latest RealClearPolitics average.
Some Republican strategists say Biden might be less fortunate this time around. Pandemic relief was a top priority of most voters.
Even though Democrats shoved a laundry list of long-sought-after liberal reforms and expenditures into the American Rescue Plan, voters overlooked them because they were pleased with the measures related to the coronavirus — and anxious to benefit from them. Although infrastructure has always enjoyed the support of Democrats and Republicans, and despite an economy that is improving but still struggling, infrastructure registers low on the list of voter priorities.
The potential lack of urgency over Biden’s proposal could create political space for Republicans to draw attention to aspects of the package voters oppose might oppose, a development that could bottle it up in Congress or sink the president’s job approval ratings.
“We can surmise that an infrastructure-focused package will start out with less support, or softer support, than a COVID relief package,” GOP pollster Patrick Ruffini said.
