Infrastructure

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, I was disappointed to learn yesterday that President Biden had walked away from negotiations on infrastructure spending with Senator Capito.

For several weeks, the ranking member of the EPW Committee has been engaged in good faith on finding common ground with the administration. She has led several of our colleagues in literally exhaustive efforts to put a bipartisan deal within reach.

Senate Republicans proposed historic investments in the kinds of things most Americans would call actual infrastructure. They met and exceeded the President's own threshold demands, and then they were left at the table.

Our colleagues weren't wrong to bet on bipartisanship. For one thing, it is what the American people actually deserve. For another, as I have noted before, infrastructure investments have historically featured overwhelming bipartisan consensus. But an agreement requires that actually each side is willing to give up some of what it wants. And as we learned yesterday, President Biden is unwilling to let go of some of the most radical promises he made to the leftwing of his party.

From the day the White House rolled out its first ``infrastructure'' plan in March, it has been clear that the left's definition of the word is evolving faster than even some Democrats can actually keep up with. Medicaid expansion is now infrastructure, paid leave is now infrastructure, and job-killing tax increases to hold the assortment all together.

At every step of the way, Republicans have focused on targeted investments in roads, bridges, airports, waterways, and broadband infrastructure the American people actually need.

But yesterday, President Biden showed that his patience for the smart, bipartisan approach was wearing thin. He directed Democratic leaders in Congress to get ready to ram through more expansive, unrelated spending unilaterally.

Meanwhile, Senator Capito and our colleagues on the EPW Committee continue to demonstrate that bipartisan infrastructure investment is actually still within reach.

In April, the Senate passed their water infrastructure bill by a count of 89 to 2. And just a couple weeks ago, the committee reported out a historic investment to surface transportation, and they did it unanimously. It is disappointing that President Biden has been unwilling to follow the Senate's productive example.

And now some of our colleagues have signaled that they intend to use this month to depart from that example, themselves. The Democratic leader has laid out a partisan agenda he seems to hope will illustrate that the Senate is somehow broken.

Remember, the Senate is 50-50--50-50. The American people did not hand the Democrats a mandate in the Senate. This series of radical proposals has no chance of becoming law, but every intention of justifying reckless changes to the way the body actually operates-- plans to jam hospitals, schools, and small businesses with new high- stakes tests of ``wokeness,'' to dramatically curtail Americans' right to keep and bear arms, and, of course, to tip the scales of our electoral system permanently in their favor.

Yesterday, the radical parade began with an attempt to use the cause of paycheck fairness as cover for placing unprecedented new legal burdens on American employers. Wage discrimination on the basis of sex has been illegal for 60 years. Wage discrimination on the basis of sex has been illegal for 60 years. What Democrats proposed yesterday was to kick down carefully constructed protections to leave even the smallest American business at risk of unlimited liability in workplace cases-- listen to this--even where malice plays no part. Their bill would force workers to opt out of, rather than into, class-action suits--in other words, a gift-wrapped bonanza for the trial bar. Unsurprisingly, that gambit not only failed to pass; it failed to even unite a majority of the Senate.

So if our colleagues intended to actually earn support for consensus steps on paycheck fairness, they might have considered subjecting their proposal to scrutiny through the normal legislative process--perhaps a markup or even a committee hearing.

Well, apparently when your agenda is designed to fail, regular order is just a waste of time.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source