[Congressional Record Volume 167, Number 69 (Wednesday, April 21, 2021)]
[Senate]
[Page S2091]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                          BIDEN ADMINISTRATION

  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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