As anyone with a pulse in the last 12 years could have predicted, Republican bad faith disguised as "negotiating" has taken the American Jobs Plan (the "infrastructure bill") down a dead end. It's clear they're not interested in getting this key part of the Biden agenda enacted and, of course, never were. But this time (unlike the drawn out "negotiations" in 2009 over the Affordable Care Act that only served to give Republicans time to whip up frenzies about "death panels" and "socialized medicine"), Democrats aren't going to be held hostage forever:
Senate Republicans negotiating with the White House sounded dour notes on Monday evening and are mulling whether to even make a counteroffer to President Joe Biden’s proposal last week. Democrats are increasingly calling for Biden to consider going it alone rather than see the GOP water down his agenda.
An unofficial deadline for a bipartisan accord on infrastructure hits a week from now and negotiators are some $1.5 trillion apart, with severe differences in both size and scope, after more than a month of talks. Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) said Republicans won’t come up “anywhere near the number the White House has proposed,” and Democrats are even more skeptical that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will green-light a deal they find palatable.
“We’re too far apart. Because I think Mitch’s ultimate purpose is not compromise but delay and mischief,” said Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), who sounded less urgent notes in an interview last week. Biden is “entitled to his judgment on this but if I were in a room with him, I’d say it’s time to move on.”
It is time to move on. There's been plenty of the necessary performative "bipartisanship" for the media and for those Senate Democrats needing to show they went more than half way to accommodate a party that doesn't wish to be accommodated.
The party of the recurrent, failure- to- launch "infrastructure week"
believes the purpose of government is to redistribute wealth, not
broadly through good paying jobs and tax reform, but through "trickle down" tax
giveaways to corporations and the wealthy. Even when they had control of the House, Senate and White House, they couldn't find a way to overcome their aversion to spending money on public works, after passing a $1.9 trillion tax cut that only exacerbated our fiscal posture while not doing anything for economic growth. Of course, they're even less likely now to lift a finger to help out when Democrats are in charge, especially if it involves rolling back their disastrous 2017 tax cut.
We should expect Republicans to head for the microphones and the Republican- wired media, as some are already laying the bad faith groundwork for blaming President Biden for not capitulating to their demands:
Republicans similarly had made clear to Biden that they couldn’t support tax increases to pay for the infrastructure package, [West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore] Capito added, only to have the White House reaffirm its plan to raise rates on corporations when it submitted its latest counteroffer. Days later, the senator said the move left her and her colleagues wondering, “Are you not hearing us?” [Ed.: they hear you, they just think you're full of shit.]
Asked about the GOP’s characterization of Biden’s position, White House spokesman Andrew Bates said the president would not “negotiate through the press.”
“But after making a good faith, compromise offer that moved over 10 times as much toward his Republican colleagues’ position as they did toward his, the president’s view is that the onus is on them to make a counter offer,” he added in a statement. (our emphasis)
There won't be a counteroffer, at least not one that exists in the real world. They're not geared to be a partner in government, only as a vehicle for generating lies and grievance. No bridges there.
