US Senate Passes Historic $1 Trillion Infrastructure Package

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The US Senate has passed a massive $1 trillion infrastructure bill that will provide hundreds of billions of dollars to modernize America’s crumbling transportation systems in a major victory for President Joe Biden and his Democratic Party.

And 19 Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, joined all Democrats in the upper chamber of Congress to support the bill in a rare bipartisan show in deeply divided Washington. The Senate, split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, voted 69 to 30 in favor of the bill, with one Republican abstaining.

McConnell said he was “proud” to vote for the deal and “prove that both sides of the political island can still come together around common sense solutions.”

The 2,700-page Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act will now be taken up by the House of Representatives, which Democrats control by a narrow margin.

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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would only consider the legislation at the same time as a separate $3.5 trillion budget bill that includes new social programs and climate measures, which Democrats plan to pass without Republican support. The Senate is scheduled to begin debating the measure on Tuesday evening. The House of Representatives, which is in recess, is unlikely to return to Washington until September.

Joshua Bolton, CEO of the Business Roundtable, welcomed the Senate vote and urged the Senate to “build on that momentum by returning to Washington to take up the bill and pass it during this extended recess.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Tuesday that Biden remains committed to passing both the infrastructure bill and the budget bill.

The infrastructure bill would allocate $550 billion in new federal spending over the next five years, modernizing America’s roads, bridges, and tunnels, as well as airports, railroads and the power grid. The proposal also includes investments to improve Americans’ access to broadband and clean drinking water.

The Independent Congressional Budget Office published an analysis last week indicating that the package would add $256 billion to the projected national deficit over the next decade.

But the architects of the bill, Democratic Senator Kirsten Senema of Arizona and Republican Rob Portman of Ohio, insisted that it would be “paid for” in full through revenue-raising measures, including reallocating about $200 billion in unspent relief money to Covid-19, delaying medical care. Rebates and refunds of unused federal funds earmarked for unemployment insurance.

The bill also includes a controversial plan that requires cryptocurrency transactions to be reported to the Internal Revenue Service, the federal tax collector. The plan is expected to raise nearly $30 billion for the treasury, but it has sparked outrage among investors and others in the crypto sector who say it will place undue burdens on crypto miners and software developers.

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The bipartisan infrastructure bill garnered significant Republican support despite repeated interventions from Donald Trump, who has threatened to withhold support for members of the former US president’s party who backed the package.

Banned from most social media platforms over his role in the January 6 attacks on the US Capitol, Trump has sought to reassert himself on the political scene ahead of next year’s midterm elections, when control of the House and Senate will be. grabbed.

The former president, who has not ruled out running for the White House again in 2024, issued a statement Tuesday saying “no one will ever understand why Mitch McConnell has allowed the non-infrastructure bill to pass,” calling the Senate Republican president “the most overblown man.” in politics “.

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