Biden Administration

Floor Speech

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Mr. PORTMAN. Madam President, I would like to start by thanking my colleague from Wyoming and my colleague from Iowa for their comments about where we are as a country 100 days into the Biden administration.

It has been discouraging that we haven't seen more bipartisan work and with regard to the border, having been down there a couple of weeks ago, particularly discouraging that we can't come up with a bipartisan solution that deals with the obvious crisis on the border.

Of course it is a crisis. Everybody knows that, including the Biden administration. The question is, What are we going to do about it? Some of us have laid out some proposals that we think would be very sensible, that could be done on a bipartisan basis. Yet we are not getting the kind of cooperation from the White House or the other side of the aisle, frankly, with regard to dealing with a clear crisis.

In my time here in Congress, I have tried to work to bring Republicans and Democrats together on issues. I think that is the best thing for our country. I think you get, actually, better legislation if you have input from both sides, and I think you also have more sustainable legislation.

If you don't work in a bipartisan way, what happens when there is a 50-50 Senate, as there is now, and where the Vice President can supply the tie-breaking vote, and if you do things on the basis of reconciliation or getting rid of the filibuster, which is what the Democratic majority currently would like to do, you end up lurching back and forth, don't you? So you pass Democratic legislation and then, when Republicans take over, Republican legislation.

We should be focusing on American legislation. In my office, we have had some success with this bipartisan approach. Sixty-eight of my bills were signed into law by President Obama, and 82 of my bills were signed into law by President Trump--on important issues like the eviction crisis, job creation, and natural resource protection. So it can be done, and President Biden knows that. He served here in the Senate. In fact, he took pride in coming together with Republicans and Democrats to actually have agreements on some of these tough issues.

Although I didn't vote for him because I thought that President Trump had better policy ideas, coming into this new administration, I was hopeful that President Biden would govern as he had campaigned. He promised, you remember, in his campaign to reach out to Republicans and Democrats alike. He talked about the need for unity. In fact, he gave that same speech in the primary and in the general election, which I thought took some courage, frankly, to do so in the primary because most of his opponents did not take that position. Yet, now having gotten elected, he seems to have forgotten the pledges that he made.

I listened to his inaugural address intently, as I hope a lot of Americans did--and certainly my colleagues did--and he talked again about reaching out, going back to the days when we could work together, and he focused on unity. I was very hopeful with the tone he set that day, and I said so at the time. Yet that rhetoric has not been matched by action. It hasn't been matched by action when it comes to key policy initiatives they have already put forward, including the latest COVID- 19 spending bill that passed in March.

Remember, despite a 50-50 Senate and very tight majority in the House of Representatives, there was no outreach to Republicans for the COVID- 19 legislation. Not a single Republican was consulted before unveiling the plan, and once it was out there, Democrats chose to work only among themselves and do it under what is called reconciliation, where they don't need a single Republican vote--this despite some of us having an alternative, which we actually presented to the White House. The next day, we were told: Thank you, but we are going to take the reconciliation approach, and we don't need any Republican input.

That is too bad because the COVID-19 issue, obviously, is one where there has been not just bipartisanship but nonpartisanship. Five times last year, we passed major COVID-19 legislative initiatives with huge majorities. In one case, the biggest bill, the CARES package, passed with a 97-to-0 vote here. So this is one where we had always been able to work together.

Unfortunately, the Biden administration chose the partisan path. Right now, the Biden administration is repeating this same mistake, as far as I can tell, because they have introduced their $2.3 trillion infrastructure package without consulting, again, any Republicans.

We now hear that the White House and some Democratic leaders may want to pass this latest partisan proposal by reconciliation as well. I hope that is not true because, again, this is an area--infrastructure--where we have been able to work together on a bipartisan basis and get things done. In fact, typically that is how it happens with infrastructure

Last Congress, we passed a bill out of committee on highways and bridges with a unanimous vote--not just a majority vote, a unanimous vote--by Republicans and Democrats. But the proposal they put forward, first, is not really about infrastructure because it dramatically expands the definition of ``infrastructure'' so that it is not at all what traditionally you would think or I would think of as the kind of hard assets--roads, bridges, ports, airports, transit, even broadband.

Even the most generous description of ``infrastructure'' applied to this bill means that less than 20 percent of it, 20 percent of $2.3 trillion, is about infrastructure. It is about other things. And we can have a debate on those other things, whether it is nursing home subsidies or whether it is subsidies to electric car companies or whether it is more childcare. Those are all issues we can discuss, but they are not, obviously, infrastructure issues.

Proposing to pay for this huge plan with taxes on American workers makes it even worse. So the $2.3 trillion plan is not mostly infrastructure--80 percent is not--but then the taxes that would apply to America and to American workers would be devastating, making us noncompetitive in the global economy again after finally we were getting our act together.

In 2018 and 2019, we saw a big increase in our economy, large increases in terms of employment. Also, wages were going up. We had the lowest poverty rate in the history of our country, going back to the 1950s, partly because we were putting in place policies that made sense in terms of tax reform to create more incentives to invest and bring jobs here to this country. That would all be changed under these tax increases that are being proposed to pay for this big, new Biden infrastructure package.

Making us less competitive in global markets and putting American workers at a disadvantage again is not the right way to go. The American people don't want that. The American people think we should be doing all we can to get businesses back on their feet right now so that people can get employment and so we can ensure that the economy continues to improve as we come out of the coronavirus pandemic.

Infrastructure, again, has always been so bipartisan. Why would, in this case, we want to take it down the partisan road?

Past Presidents, by the way, have shown that they can get big things done early in their administration. So during this first hundred days, there was an opportunity to reach out. I hope in the second hundred days, it will be different.

Let me give a couple of examples. When President Bill Clinton got elected, he worked with Republicans and Democrats to pass what was called the North American Free Trade Agreement. He got a lot of support from the Republican side of the aisle--in fact, even more than he got from the Democratic side of the aisle--and he pushed that through. Ronald Reagan's economic reforms of 1981 passed the Senate with an overwhelming margin of 89 to 11.

Last night, C-SPAN allowed us to look back in history at some of the speeches Presidents gave after their first hundred days. One was Ronald Reagan's speech to the joint session that I saw last night. It was amazing. Republicans and Democrats alike were standing because President Reagan said: ``I want to work with all of you.'' And he showed he would work with all of them by passing those economic reforms in 1981.

We should all want the Biden administration to succeed in putting in place bipartisan policies that help our constituents and help our country, but that can only happen if they agree to reverse course and engage with Republicans in a genuine way. That is clearly what the American people want. In a recent poll, a Washington Post and ABC poll, 60 percent of respondents, including two-thirds of Independents, said they wanted the Biden administration to work with Republicans to make these proposals bipartisan--twice the number that wanted him to pursue the partisan path chosen so far.

I suggest to my constituents in Ohio and all Americans who will be listening tonight: Don't just listen to the rhetoric; look at the action because the rhetoric thus far has not been matched by actions.

We were promised bipartisanship as a path toward unity. For the sake of our country, it is time to keep that promise.

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