Biden Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, early on, a major theme of the Biden administration has been false advertising. We have the so-called COVID relief bill that broke a long bipartisan streak on pandemic response and only spent 1 percent of the money on vaccinations.

We have the reintroduction of a sprawling election takeover bill that Democrats wrote years ago under the guise that it is a commonsense voting rights bill.

We have a President who ran on protecting norms flirting with proposals to hot-wire the Senate rules and pack the Supreme Court. And then we have the latest example, where even one Ivy League expert says Democrats' spin ``does a bit of violence to the English language.'' They have assembled a patchwork of leftwing social engineering programs and want to label it ``infrastructure.''

Now, as I pointed out before, the first notable thing about the Bide administration's plan is what it doesn't focus on. Less than 6 percent of the alleged infrastructure bill would invest in roads and bridges. The total amount of funding it would direct to roads, bridges, ports, waterways, and airports combined--all together--adds up to less than what it would spend just on electric cars.

The far left sees a strong family resemblance between these proposals and their socialist Green New Deal. Yesterday, the House and Senate authors of that manifesto reintroduced it, while noting and boasting that the DNA of the Green New Deal is all over President Biden's legislative proposals. No wonder that White House's document rolling out the President's bill mentioned the words ``climate'' and ``union'' more often than ``roads'' and ``bridges.''

It would pick winners and losers in automotive manufacturing. It would force-feed the electrical grid some of the least reliable forms of energy. It would hector school cafeterias to stop using paper plates and force new standards and mandates on family homes.

And the relative pittance this proposal does allocate to actual infrastructure would have to creep through a tangled environmental review process. Without serious permitting reform, it won't build back better; it will build back never.

But at least some of these bad ideas have a tangential relationship to the actual concept of infrastructure, not so for some other statements we have heard from actual Democrats in recent days:

Climate action is infrastructure.

Police accountability is infrastructure.

Caregiving is infrastructure.

Supreme Court expansion is infrastructure.

Now, unsurprisingly, this liberal omnibus is not exactly an efficient engine for driving our economy. The White House's inflated claims of expected job creation have been fact-checked and received Pinocchios from the Washington Post.

Even under the rosiest scholarly assumptions--the rosiest assumptions--the White House's own favored estimates, taxpayers would pay more than $800,000 for each job the plan might create. Now, I know a lot of small businesses that could create more than one job if we handed them $800,000.

And then there are the tax hikes. This proposal is a Trojan horse to roll back the historic 2017 tax reform plan that helped spur big-time wage growth and the best job market in a generation before COVID-19. So the administration's proposal bears little resemblance to the bipartisan infrastructure bill Americans need and deserve. It just reads like customer service for the radical fringe.

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