Senate Republicans are set Wednesday to filibuster President Joe Biden’s bipartisan $570 billion infrastructure deal because the text of the legislation is not ready to study.
“At least four Republicans, including two central to crafting the deal, are signaling they will vote against the motion to start the debate if the package is not finished,” the Washington Times wrote Tuesday.
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), an original bipartisan negotiator of the deal, said he thinks “there’s a unanimous point of view that we shouldn’t vote on a motion to proceed until people know what the summary is of the bill.”
“They haven’t seen the numbers, they haven’t seen the pay-fors. A small group of us has, but the overall group hasn’t, and until we do, until we’ve ironed out the remaining issues, Wednesday is premature,” he explained.
“There’s absolutely no reason why he asked to have the vote tomorrow, and it does not advance the ball,” said Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME). “It does not achieve any goal except to alienate people.”
But Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is continuing to rush the bill for a procedural vote, despite the text of the legislation being unread by the Senate.
“The Senate Democrats are keeping our foot on the gas pedal,” said Schumer. “For weeks, I have said we have a busy summer with a long to-do list … and I know both sides are working very hard to turn the bipartisan infrastructure framework into final legislation.”
“All a yes vote on the motion to proceed means is simply that the senate is ready to begin debating a bipartisan infrastructure bill,” he said. “No more, no less.”
Schumer is presumably rushing the bill through the Senate as summer recess approaches amid two other crucial initiatives of raising the debt ceiling and passing the trojan horse $3.5 trillion infrastructure package. The former must take place before recess begins after August 6.
With both the bipartisan deal and the trojan horse package linked together on a two track system, as Democrat lawmakers have designed the strategy, the failure of one could doom both.
Therefore, the success of the bipartisan deal is very important to Biden, whose whole agenda is on the line only six months after his inauguration.
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