One of President Trump’s major campaign promises was his $1 trillion infrastructure plan, but now even staunch infrastructure advocates in the Republican party don’t see that happening any time soon.
In an interview with The Hill, Sen. John Thune, a senior Republican and chairman of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee wasn’t optimistic about seeing an infrastructure bill in the near future.
“I’d like to see infrastructure get done,” he said. “But I’ve always said, that in terms of how things are sequenced, it’s more likely that they would do tax reform first. And that might push infrastructure into sometime next year.”
Other Republicans agreed.
“You know I love infrastructure … but I think we have to do tax reform,” said Sen. Deb Fischer, chairwoman of the Commerce subcommittee on surface transportation.
It seems that Republicans are mostly in agreement that for transportation to get done, tax reform needs to be pushed through first. But both the House and Senate have burned through a lot of time and energy trying to push through a healthcare bill that has hit one wall after another.
That an Infrastructure bill won’t be passed this year seems like a foregone conclusion. There are only 65 legislative days left in the year after the August recess.
In order for Sen. Thune’s estimate that we’ll be seeing an infrastructure bill sometime next year to come to fruition, Congress will need to either pass a healthcare bill or put it on the shelf and then plan, push, and pass a tax reform bill which will likely shine a spotlight on differences between Congress’ and the White House’s ideas including those on trade and foreign import taxes.
To make matters more difficult, once the 65 legislative days in this year are up, we’ll be in an election year and it will be that much more difficult to pass any major legislation.
If and when the GOP agenda does swing back to Infrastructure, it will take time to actually hammer out the details. While the White House says it plans to release an infrastructure proposal this fall, it will be the Administration’s wish list, and will likely be very different from any legislation that either the House or the Senate votes on.
Infrastructure is still on everyone’s minds, but it seems like it’s stuck in second place. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised that the legislative agenda would be moving on to “tax reform and to infrastructure” even as he is still pushing toward the healthcare vote.
Source: gobytrucknews, marketwatch, thehill, thehill, thehill, dtnpf
So yet another campaign promise by Trump is broken. Mexico ain’t paying for the wall, U.S. taxpayers are. The whole Middle East thing was not solved in 30 days. Obamacare will not be repealed. Social Security and Medicare are no longer “off the table”, as promised. Now infrastructure is back-burnered. The list goes on and on. Trump has proven himself to be a poor negotiator, a lousy deal-maker, and a weak ineffective leader laughed at by world leaders. Are you tired yet from all the winning ?