Infrastructure deal thoughts

 We finally have an infrastructure package.

Let me start on a very general level and say that I'm skeptical as a matter of principle. Even if the 2,702-page, $1.2 trillion bill were meticulously confined to matters of what until this year had been commonly agreed upon as infrastructure, it would merit skepticism. Many are the county-government meetings I've covered during which funding for road-and-bridge projects was shown to be substantially federal, and the question has always surfaced in my mind, why did this money leave our locality in the first place? There's nothing esoteric about the reason. It's been thus for nearly a century. It allows Representatives and Senators to preen about the bacon they've brought home to the district or state.

Now, to the point about how the bill, for all its non-infrastructure provisions, mainly sticks to what it's ostensibly about. 

Really?

Here are a few more examples of things in the infrastructure bill:

• $50 million for Central Utah Project Completion
• $5 billion for low/zero emissions school buses
• $2.5 billion for a carbon storage commercialization program
• $21.5 billion for clean energy demonstrations
• $75 million for the Denali commission
• $14.2 billion for the Federal Communications Commission
• $3.4 billion for the Federal Buildings Fund
• $3.5 billion for Indian Health Service

The descriptions of these payouts — I mean, grants — are ludicrous: $250 million for reducing truck emissions at ports. A $500 million grant for the Healthy Streets Program allows cities to "provide funding to deploy cool and porous pavements and expand tree cover to mitigate urban heat islands, improve air quality, and reduce flood risks.”

The bill includes $75 million for the Open Challenge and Research Proposal pilot program, which provides grants for proposals to “research needs or challenges identified or determined as important by the Secretary.” And it proposes a “federal system funding alternative advisory board” that must appoint “advocacy groups focused on equity,” among other things.

As I say, legislators love strokes, and a certain kind of legislator, even in this hyper-tribal age in which most Democrats are progressives to at least some degree and most Republicans are Neo-Trumpists who have moved far from the party's recognizable pillars, revels in wearing the "bipartisan" label, in being seen a being driven by "the interests of the country as a whole.". That is a major factor at work here:

it's important to understand the almost mystical allure of bipartisan dealmaking in Congress, especially in the Senate. In parts of official and high-status Washington, bipartisan deals are seen as a good unto themselves, almost independent of what's in them. And for a certain type of lawmaker, that allure has an even greater appeal now, in the post-Trump era, when one of the Senate's own is in the White House. Biden himself is a true believer in the power of across-the-aisle dealmaking. 

But consider the major players involved in the group that hammered this out. They are not representative of their parties as currently comprised:

. . . the makeup of the gang isn’t necessarily representative of the future of either the Democratic or Republican Party. Four of the five core GOP negotiators voted to impeach Trump this year, and Portman is retiring. On the Democratic side, Sinema and Manchin are increasingly lonely supporters of preserving the legislative filibuster.

You know what this means. This is easy fodder for the Kurt Schlichter/Marjorie Taylor Greene/Dinesh D'Souza crowd. The message writes itself: "This is what you get from effete, spineless pretend Republicans. They sell you out and acquiesce to even more dangerous levels of debt and centralized control of American life." And that point can't be dismissed. And it will ensure that most Republicans running for, and getting elected to, office in the midterms will be Neo-Trumpists. 

Democrats are now emboldened as they set their sights on the even more statist, culture-mutilating and costly budget bill they view as "tandem" legislation:

The measure would expand access to Medicare, balloon paid family and medical leave, create federal child-care programs, establish “free” universal pre-k and community college, impose green mandates on energy producers, increase subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, and impose “fees” on industries that emit carbon and methane gases.

What could have been done differently? It's fun to imagine that Romney, Cassidy, Portman - heck, let's include Sinema and Manchin - could have found it within themselves to dig in their heels and say, "Nope. Still too much irrelevant stuff in there, and still too much risk of ballooning the debt." But what-if games are not a very productive use of anybody's time. 

The reality is not pretty, but that makes it pretty characteristic of 2021 post-America.