A Wasted Republican Momentum On Infrastructure?
Left: Donald Trump (President of the United States from 2017 to 2021) and Mitch McConnell (Senate Majority Leader of the Republicans (2015-2021); two-time Senate Minority Leader (2007-2015; 2021-ongoing)
Republicans can still celebrate an election victory in Virginia all they want, but what they can't celebrate is a victory in Virginia that was pretty much wasted on them because it forced the Democratic Party, controls the White House and all two chambers of Congress since Biden's inauguration as President on January 20, 2021, to pass a major infrastructure bill that is now bound to go to President Biden's desk with a pen itching intensely to be used by the President to sign and transform the country that has never been seen since the 1950s when it comes to infrastructure.
Going through its final hurdle before it is signed by Biden, the United States House of Representatives controlled by Democrats narrowly, have passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bill that will fix America's infrastructure that is in dire need of an upgrade, passing the chamber in a vote of 228-206 (a familiar House vote if you're Bill Clinton), 13 Republicans voting with the Democrats despite 6 Democrat defections, all of whom progressive who argued that the bill doesn't go far enough and accused the Infrastructure bill of closeted corporate welfare. But no matter what they say, it is a big deal because of the impact it will have on Americans.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will bring $715B in investment to infrastructure projects of the Department of Transportation (DOT) headed by Secretary Pete Buttigieg, who you may remember ran for President in 2020 but saw his crumbled on Super Tuesday in the Democratic Party primaries dominated by Joe Biden, which was not anticipated. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill (as it's also called) gives needed funds to constructions or constructive upgrading of roads and bridges with $110 billion, power infrastructure at $73 billion, passenger and freight rail at $66 billion, broadband at $65 billion, clean drinking water at $55 billion, western water storage at $50 billion, public transit at $39 billion, airports at $25 billion, purification of water and soil at $21 billion, port infrastructure at $17 billion, electric vehicles at $15 billion, and then finally, $11 billion for transportation safety programs.
Among these funds, there are other provisions that will help American workers and lives, see more provisions and details about the bill in this link here.
But you know, President Biden is not the first President to prioritize infrastructure as a domestic holy grail, President Donald Trump was elected shockingly as President of the United States on the backs of white blue-collar workers in the rust belt states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennslyvania, Ohio, and Iowa, Iowa and Ohio flip flop back and forth from one party to another in presidential elections, Indiana only voted Democratic only once in 2008 since it started voting Republican in 1968; what's so special about Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennslyvania, is that they hadn't voted Republican since the Reagan years in the 1980s, and Trump gave the fading and rusting working-class towns a turnaround that the party that they had been voting for for decades hadn't seemed to be delivering, and one of the messages besides trade and immigration worries is the need to upgrade America's infrastructure.
2017, Trump had the White House for the Republicans as they themselves held comfortable majorities in two chambers of Congress, 52-48 in the Senate and 241-194 in the House of Representatives, more comfortable of a trifecta than the Democrats have now in 2021, just 50+VP - 50 in the Senate and only 222-213 in the House of Representatives, incredibly easy for Democrats to lose Congress in the midterms while at the same time comfortably easy for Democrats to defend in terms of geography in the modern era if they spend the right money, run the right candidates to replace their retiring comrades some of whom running for another office and few have joined the Biden administration, and the right message to voters.
With this trifecta in 2017, Republicans actually could've done an infrastructure bill as Trump demanded, and think about the implications on a presidential legacy that would have had Trump followed through with Republican support which seemed to be blind and compromising in Trump's favor, but what happened instead is that in the midst of a healthy economy, the Republicans became busy at focusing on the issue that got Democrats beaten up left in bruises in the 1994 midterms under Clinton and 2010 midterms under Obama: healthcare. Republicans wanted to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, widely known as "Obamacare" because it is a healthcare law that was advocated for and signed into law by President Barack Obama after it was passed by a Democratic-led Congress, which majorities were actually far comfortable than the Republicans'. But as it turns out to Republicans in 2017, as irritating Obamacare was for the American people in terms of its taxes and inefficient impact on getting Americans covered, that didn't mean Americans actually want to get rid of it because Obamacare makes it hard for healthcare companies to deny coverage to those with a pre-existing condition because for these healthcare companies, covering healthy people is cheaper vs. covering those aren't healthy, and it appeared Republicans want to return to that pre-Obamacare status quo, which garnered backlash against Republicans and when the Republicans finally failed to achieve their objective to repeal Obamacare legislatively, Republicans took a beating in the House of Representatives in the midterms in 2018, losing as high as 42 seats, the worst loss of seats that Republicans had suffered since the midterms of 1974 just immediately after Richard Nixon resigned as President in disgrace due to the Watergate scandal.
When the Democrats swiped a house majority (235-199) effective on January 3, 2019, during a petty government shutdown over a border wall that was supposed to be funded by Mexico as Trump promised in 2016, Democrats were actually willing to work with Trump on infrastructure, in fact, they actually had a bill ready, called the Moving Forward Act. But Trump killed all of it when he in a meeting with Democratic leadership tried to offer Democrats that they'll get an infrastructure bill through him only if they lay off their aggressive oversight of his administration, which Democrats refused and left the room with no deal at all.
Secondly, Republicans ideologically don't believe in huge government investments into people's lives and communities as part of their philosophy of fiscal conservatism and small government, which they believe is good policy. But a policy that has come back to haunt them when President Joe Biden does an infrastructure bill with both the Senate and House actually getting it done and is now imminently going to be signed into law by Biden. Biden and the Democrats now got something to show for when the economy does at some point recover while Republicans suffer the indignity of a lost opportunity to do something legacy-defining for Trump and themselves in uncertain and polarizing times like this. Making matters more undignifying for Trump and Republicans, some Democrats, including Biden himself, celebrated their historic infrastructure win by jokingly proclaiming "Infrastructure Week!", something Trump had always said about infrastructure but nothing on such was ever accomplished under Trump's watch.
Biden's pitch for an infrastructure bill, the President himself can tell you, wasn't an easy nor peaceful war to fight. When Trump learned that Biden is actually going to do an infrastructure bill, he tried to tell Republicans to sabotage the legislative process of such a bill knowing that if it passes, it will legacistically benefit Biden that Trump wishes for himself if only he himself had passed an infrastructure bill. Trump is known for his envy as part of his known narcissism. Not ever at all could Trump ever accept a President Joe Biden who wears the infrastructure crown that Trump himself could not get his small hands-on. Losing to Biden in the exact electoral college margin (306-232) that Trump himself was such a smug to call a landslide because that was Trump's winning margin in 2016, but unlike Trump's victory in 2016, Biden beats Trump in the electoral college in 2020 while winning the popular vote in a big percentage against an incumbent since Franklin D. Roosevelt's own landslide victory against President Hoover in 1932. That was already undignifying enough for Trump.
Biden's entire Build Back Better agenda was broken up into two bills: the Social Spending and Climate Action plan, and the Infrastructure bill itself. This caused a hot stalemate fight between his party's two dominant factions: progressives in the House and just 2 moderates in the Senate. The Senate passed the infrastructure bill and sends it back to the House of Representatives for them to agree on the Senate amendments, while the House passes the social spending package and sends it to the Senate for them to pass. But the Senate threatened to do either two things: vote the bill down or trim the bill the same way they trimmed the infrastructure bill. Well, that threatened to backfire on the Senate moderates in the Democratic Party with the party's progressives, who actually hold the key to the infrastructure bill's survival in the House, threatened to use that power to vote down the infrastructure bill, effectively threatening to destroy Biden's whole agenda into little pieces.
With Biden's poll numbers already down since the disastrous end to the U.S. War in Afghanistan, adding insult to injury was a COVID-19 pandemic prolonged by the Delta variant and many Americans refusing to get vaccinated, Biden is threatened with the political indignity of failing to pass an agenda that he promised to enact if he was elected President in 2020. Biden's stature as commander-in-chief and world leader was already violated by the Taliban in Afghanistan, it was already clear that President Joe Biden doesn't need more political embarrassment, but obviously, that's not the conclusion his Democratic Party came to when November 2, election day that is, would arrive.
The Republican Party of Virginia won control of all of Virginia's three statewide offices: the Governorship, the Lieutenant Governorship, and the Attorney General; and majority control of Virginia's lower chamber in the commonwealth's state legislature, the House of Delegates; and New Jersey's Democratic governor winning reelection in an unexpectedly close margin whilst New Jersey Democrats, fortunately, retained a trifecta there. Biden won both Virginia and New Jersey against Trump by double digits, and they were considered comfortably Democratic states. It was a big sign for unfriendly things to come for the Democratic Party with the 2022 midterm elections looming by the next year, and it was the Democratic Party who had nobody else to blame but themselves instead of each other but the party already did blame each other, making the Democratic civil war between moderates and progressives appear only pettier.
As I wrote in a previous blog post on this blog, the Democratic Party was in a position where they have an opportunity to save themselves from going into a midterm election with the chance of losing bad and losing big is pretty high, but no accomplishments to prevent an earthquake or prevent the thunderstorm from getting worse. Democrats realized from the disastrous election results in 2021 that they have to lower the temperatures of Democratic infighting and start getting legislation passed as quickly as possible, and wisely chosen on the Democrats' part, starting with the Infrastructure bill still stalled in the House of Representatives. Democrats, a risky move, decided to vote on the bill immediately and President Biden and his team worked the phones to members of Congress to figuratively gather up all the easter eggs into a basket of votes in the House that will get the Infrastructure bill to his desk right before Easter ends.
A big win for Democrats after a shallow night in Virginia, the House of Representatives, in a vote of 228-206, passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Biden has 13 Republican defectors to thank because had they not voted for the infrastructure bill, the bill could've crashed and burned in the House because of 6 Democrats, all of whom are a progressive group called The Squad, voted against the bill. Now the bill is now imminent to be signed into law by President Biden.
Realizing Biden and the Democrats' infrastructure legislative victory, Donald Trump and the right-wing were not so happy at all, especially not happy with the 13 Republicans who voted to give Biden a legacy-defining win that both Obama and Trump couldn't achieve for themselves. Trump blamed Mitch McConnell for not doing at all to block the Senate's earlier passage of the bill, not that he could anyway because Senate Democrats would've used the reconciliation process to dodge a Republican filibuster if 19 Republicans, McConnell among them, had all said nay to the bill, preventing a 69-30 vote which was exactly the filibuster-busting margin the infrastructure bill passed the Senate with.
Donald Trump becomes upset that Biden will actually have an infrastructure bill to run on and be added to his presidential legacy, while Trump in comparison has nothing to show for except corporate tax cuts, which is nothing special because the government had been cutting corporate taxes since Reagan, under Presidents from both parties until Biden, who wants to raise corporate taxes to pay for his Build Back Better programs. Adding insult to Trump's legacy, he was never a likable President both in polling and election performance of his party literally in one term since President Hoover, he raised an army of not very intellectually bright morons to storm the United States Capitol in hopes to force Congress to invalidate Biden's victory over Trump in the 2020 election, only for the insurrection to go nowhere and the fallout was horrible for the Trump side, Trump losing his social media channels and getting impeached for the second time on his way out, and the insurrectionists facing legal and social consequences.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act can't save the Democratic Party alone, what it can still do is that with the economy already appearing to improve with 531,000 new jobs added in October 2021, this Infrastructure bill will be a boon for job reports in the future as well as wage reports because according to Salary.com, the salary of an Infrastructure engineer is $106,861 as of October 2021, but salary can go as high as approximately $120,000, and that will help many Americans with inflation problems. But when the economy does recover, especially by the summer of 2022, it could make folks realize or give the Democrats' infrastructure bill credit for the recovery but Republicans trying to take credit may backfire because it may confirm that Biden is actually doing what he said he'd do, bring both parties together for the good of the economy.
In order for the Democratic Party to be saved by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act is that the economy will have to recover with the bill itself doing its job at speeding up the recovery, and then hopefully for the Democrats, when the economy does recover by late summer, Democrats can credit the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act as a reason why, especially when Americans get new better pipes, better broadband, better roads and bridges, and better electric grid and others. But what Democrats should still focus next is inflation, some progressives proposed that a living wage or just a $15 per hour wage and tie the wage to inflation could work, but Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema, two Democrats in a 50-50 Senate, are not on board, but Biden should still do something about the inflation problem, and there may be a way for Democrats in Congress to do something as well. But Democrats should also do manufacturing investment to further strip the Republicans of their working-class platform. Or maybe the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act already got that covered.
Republicans could've done infrastructure like they did under President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but they couldn't deliver because they were interfered by their ideological beliefs in small government and private enterprise, which Republicans can now privately tell you that it is a tremendous disadvantage and President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and the Democratic Party itself now allowed to say that they delivered a new infrastructure to the American people in the incoming midterm campaigns in 2022 is quite the indignity for Trump and the Republicans.
The Republican Party won a colossal victory in Virginia...for what?
All it did was it forced the Democratic Party in Congress to pass a major infrastructure bill that will benefit the country and Democrats will use as a talking point to win votes for the midterm elections that they couldn't do in the 2021 off-year elections.
That is why Democrats really won the day on November 5, 2021, after losing big on a shallow day on November 2, 2021.
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