It looks like the Senate may soon be voting on this ‘bipartisan’ infrastructure bill which Trump warned about earlier this week:
🚨🚨🚨🚨SCHUMER says a vote on cloture on the motion to proceed to bipartisan infrastructure bill “as early as tonight”
BIG procedural vote.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 28, 2021
Rob Portman, who leads the negotiations from the GOP side, says they do have an agreement on the major issues:
NEWS — @senrobportman is briefing on bipartisan deal.
“We now have an agreement on the major issues.” pic.twitter.com/uyapjYMQkQ
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 28, 2021
As of this past weekend, the only issue left to iron out was “how much money to direct to public transit”, according to Portman. My guess is that Republicans conceded on this issue.
According to the WSJ, the overall bill was to spend around “$600 billion above projected federal spending over five years on improvements to roads, bridges, transit and broadband access, among other areas.”
We’re learning some details about the bipartisan infrastructure deal
— $110 billion for roads
— $65 billion for broadband deploymentOne of the pay fors is going after unemployment insurance fraud.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 28, 2021
It is a far cry less than the near 4 trillion dollar bill that Democrats initially wanted. But remember, Democrats are the ones who couldn’t pass it because they couldn’t get Sinema and Manchin on board with it. It sounds to me like Republicans wanted to solidify Manchin and Sinema’s support behind this bipartisan bill, so they wouldn’t be tempted to vote on the outrageously massive bill to which some Democrats are still devoted.
In any event, we’ll probably learn much more about this bill later today as we approach a cloture vote.
So a quick update here — @SenJohnThune says he assumes most every Republican will want to read the bill before voting for cloture tonight.
So we’ll see how this shakes out over today.
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) July 28, 2021