Somehow it’s infrastructure week, again.
President Donald Trump has declared it infrastructure week once again, but whether it produces anything more tangible than the countless infrastructure weeks before remains to be seen.
Trump is scheduled to meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the White House Tuesday to discuss the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads.
“This is a president who likes to build things. ... This is a great place where Democrats and Republicans can come together,” White House spokesperson Sarah Sanders said on Fox & Friends, noting that while the primary purpose of that meeting is infrastructure, she “certainly wouldn’t be surprised if immigration comes up.”
In other words, this meeting could either result in Trump’s greatest bipartisan achievement or end in another public blow-up over immigration policy. Who’s to say?
Pelosi requested the meeting earlier this month — a signal that Democrats may be trying to reopen talks with the president about issues like infrastructure and prescription drug pricing, which they’ve described as bipartisan priorities. And on Monday, a coalition of progressive and moderate Democrats in the House introduced a resolution detailing specific tenets they’d like to see in an infrastructure plan including a major focus on public, not private, investment.
Trump, who has promised “the biggest and boldest infrastructure investment in American history,” has yet to actually deliver on anything of the sort. Every once in a while, the White House tries to build momentum around a plan, releasing some vague outline before Trump diverts attention to something else. This has happened so many times that the prospect of “infrastructure week” has become a running joke among lawmakers and congressional aides.
It’s also worth noting that Trump, Schumer, and Pelosi have a complicated history that hasn’t resulted in many compromises. The last time they tried to broker an agreement over immigration and spending, the government shut down for the longest period in its history. Congress still hasn’t passed any immigration reform since.
Infrastructure might be less politically fraught, but it still has potential sticking points. One of the chief issues Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on is how exactly to pay for potential upgrades to America’s transportation, telecommunications, and energy systems. Democrats especially are interested in a proposal that relies on federal spending, rather than contributions from the private sector or the states. They also want a package that calls out the need for investment in clean energy.
Going into Tuesday, reports indicate that Trump is more open to Democrats’ vision than even his own advisers are. There’s a chance that will lend itself to less fighting and more building.
Every week is infrastructure week
The trope of the elusive “infrastructure week” has been repeated so often since the start of the Trump administration that it’s become a running joke.
Ever since Trump was elected, infrastructure has been touted as one of the few policy areas where he could actually get something done. The problem is, despite repeated attempts to tackle the issue, the administration hasn’t been able to accomplish much at all.
As an NPR report points out, this failure is due to both the administration’s lack of a clear plan and the myriad scandals that happened to emerge every time the White House has tried to focus on infrastructure. In June 2017, for example, the first of many “infrastructure weeks,” FBI Director James Comey was gearing up to testify in front of the Senate Intelligence Committee after Trump had unceremoniously fired him. Later that summer, when Trump issued an executive order streamlining the permitting process for infrastructure projects, he did so in the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
As a result, the White House still has yet to offer a proposal that Congress would consider, two years into this administration. Trump isn’t entirely alone in wanting to get something done, however. Democrats have expressed an interest in a bipartisan infrastructure plan: Both Pelosi and Schumer have noted that infrastructure and prescription drug pricing might be the two rare areas where they could partner with the White House moving forward.
“These are two that we are very optimistic we can accomplish,” Pelosi said in April.
What this package ultimately looks like is very much up in the air. It’s not yet clear whether this meeting will result in the start of concrete discussions, or if it will simply go the way of every other “infrastructure week” before.
When it comes to infrastructure, money is the sticking point
On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump talked about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan. According to Axios, his current infrastructure dreams are twice as big: He reportedly told the House Ways and Means Chair Richard Neal (D-MA) that he wants to spend close to $2 trillion on infrastructure. That latter figure would put him on par with Democrats’ desired spending.
But his executive budget has only called for $200 billion in funding from the federal government, in line with a proposal the White House outlined last year. As Vox’s Matt Yglesias explained, that proposal includes a more restrictive federal funding-match program for states and cities, where local governments assume more financial responsibility for projects; a rural block grant program for new roads; and public-private partnerships for infrastructure projects. The White House says that only $200 billion in federal funding can transform into $1.5 trillion in actual investments.
Democrats, however, are going to want most of the spending to come from the federal government. They haven’t yet arrived at a number for how much they’re willing to put in, but Pelosi has previously said she’s open to a $1 trillion proposal, though she favors a plan that could go up to $2 trillion.
In both Trump’s past proposal and the one Democrats are eyeing, there’s an open question of how the federal government would cover these costs.
In short, the debate all comes down to money: The big questions center on how much the country will invest, and where this funding is coming from.
As Vox’s Ella Nilsen has reported, infrastructure costs have traditionally been paid for by a gas tax, though this funding stream has been diluted over time by multiple factors, including inflation. A previous plan from now-retired Pennsylvania Republican Bill Shuster, then the chair of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, called for trillions of dollars to be invested in “projects of national significance” — relating to the nation’s highways and other transit — and included increases to both the gas and diesel taxes.
In another plan Senate Democrats laid out last year, lawmakers proposed raising the corporate tax rate to 25 percent and a slew of other reversals to a massive package of tax cuts Republicans had passed. As expected, such tax hikes were incredibly unpopular with Republicans at the time, who slammed them as an effort to undo gains that workers had made.
“Repeal all these bonuses, pay raises, new jobs, and new investments? Talk about a nonstarter,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last spring.
This time around, the payment mechanism for the infrastructure plan is already emerging as a very strict non-negotiable for Democrats. “Unless President Trump considers undoing some of the 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy, Schumer won’t even consider a proposal from the president to raise the gas tax, of which the poor and working people would bear the brunt,” a source close to Schumer said.
Interestingly, there isn’t even agreement within the Trump administration on this point. As Axios reported, Trump doesn’t actually favor the public-private partnerships approach that was the backbone of his 2018 plan. Instead, he’s more interested in committing to federal spending.
There are a few other sticking points besides money
Neither Democrats nor Trump are attending the Tuesday meeting with a specific plan, Axios’s Jonathan Swan notes (though House Democrats introduced a resolution Monday laying out a road map in broad strokes). As an administration aide told Swan, the gathering is intended more to keep the conversation going than to land on explicit policy specifics outright.
“Nobody wants to lay down specific markers. Nobody wants to rule in; nobody wants to rule out,” the aide said.
Democrats do have some guardrails they’d like to put on a potential plan, however. In addition to their focus on how funding is allocated, they’re interested in including both labor and environmental protections in the final proposal, Pelosi and Schumer noted in a letter to Trump on Monday.
“A big and bold infrastructure project must be comprehensive and include clean energy and resiliency priorities,” they write, while laying out their key demands. “[It] must have strong Buy America, labor, and women, veteran, and minority-owned business protections.” Pelosi and Schumer frame these priorities as pivotal tenets, alongside the need to infuse new federal spending into the plan.
The conflict between infrastructure investment and environmental protections has flared up before in the past: When Trump signed an executive order streamlining the infrastructure permits process last year, Democrats raised concerns that it removed stringent requirements that vendors would have to meet, to ensure that construction and development did not harm the environment.
And last winter, Schumer wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post laying out the need to make renewable energy projects a priority of any infrastructure plan. “We should provide permanent tax credits for clean-energy production and storage, electric vehicles, and energy-efficient homes,” he wrote. “We should invest in conservation, wildlife and deferred maintenance on our public lands, because this can both mitigate the impacts of climate change and grow the outdoor economy.”
The long complicated history of Trump and “Chuck and Nancy”
It’s not just the potential policy pitfalls that the three leaders will have to navigate on Tuesday: Trump and his meetings with “Chuck and Nancy” also have a long and complicated history.
It hasn’t always been bad: The first glimmer of possible bipartisanship governing under Trump came in September 2017, when he sat down with the two Democratic leaders and struck a deal to raise the debt ceiling and pass a disaster relief spending package after Hurricane Harvey, even bypassing Republican leadership.
Weeks later, Pelosi, Schumer, Trump, and other White House officials sat down over Chinese food to talk immigration. Democrats offered a border security package — not including funding for the wall — in exchange for enshrining protections for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program into a law, which Trump signaled he was open to. Nothing came of it.
We know that Trump likes shows of bipartisanship; on several occasions, he has held televised roundtable meetings with Democratic and Republican lawmakers on a range of issues from immigration to gun control, at which he seemingly agrees to any and every policy he’s presented with.
But when it comes to actual policymaking, Pelosi, Schumer, and Trump haven’t been able to find common ground since that debt ceiling deal; quite the opposite.
When they all got together to broker a deal on government spending in December 2018, negotiations broke down and eventually led to the longest government shutdown in US history — one that only ended when Trump caved to Democrats’ demands. A year prior, a meeting to hash out a compromise on immigration policy in January 2018 ended in all-out partisan warfare, making it clear that Trump really wasn’t interested in compromise with the Democrats at all.
The relationship hasn’t mended.
from Vox - All https://www.vox.com/2019/4/29/18522472/infrastructure-trump-nancy-pelosi-chuck-schumer
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