Biden’s Infrastructure Paves the Road to Ruin
The White House has found a way to tuck the Green New Deal into an innocent-sounding public works package.
A few weeks ago, Joe Biden sat down with historians to see how he could change America in a way no other president had. Wednesday, we found out his plan: he’s going to bankrupt us. The FDR wannabe didn’t even wait until the ink on his $1.9 trillion dollar blue-state bailout (a.k.a. “COVID relief”) was dry before trucking off to Pittsburgh and announcing he wants to spend $2.25 trillion more. Conveniently disguised as an “infrastructure bill,” the White House has found a way to tuck the Green New Deal into an innocent-sounding public works package. His puppets in the media might sell it that way, but the Republican Party is calling it what it is: highway robbery.
“We know that 80 percent or more of people in this country — Democrats and Republicans support investing in infrastructure,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki insisted. Well, that would be great, conservatives said, if it actually invested in infrastructure. But this proposal isn’t about fixing a few potholes. If it were, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) pointed out, Republicans might be on board. “There would be bipartisan support for a serious, targeted infrastructure plan,” he tweeted. But that’s not what this is. “Unfortunately, less than six percent of this massive White House proposal would go to roads and bridges. It would spend more on electric cars than on roads, bridges, ports, airports, and waterways combined.” It’s a trojan horse, he argued, “for massive tax hikes and job-killing Left-wing policies.”
Policies, Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.) pointed out on “Washington Watch” Wednesday, that have more to do with racial justice, climate change, elder care, “affordable housing,” violence prevention, and forced union membership than any meaningful repairs or construction. “Let’s be very clear here,” Perry said. “Even the prime sponsors of the Green New Deal in the Senate said this is not an infrastructure package. It’s the Green New Deal. [We’re talking about] billions of dollars being spent on things like electric vehicle charging stations. Just think about that.” How many of you would think it’s appropriate for your taxes to pay for gas station construction? “The private sector built them, because they could fund those with private equity and make money on their investment. But yet now, we’re going to compete with the private sector and try and force you to pay for it — and then force you to drive an electric vehicle when we have the grid collapsing in places like California and Texas.” It’s concerning, he said.
Then, to top it all off, Biden plans to slam the brakes on American growth and force more companies to send jobs overseas. “Under Biden’s plan,” former President Trump argued in a statement, “if you create jobs in America, and hire American workers, you will pay MORE in taxes — but if you close down your factories in Ohio and Michigan, and move all your production to Beijing and Shanghai, you will pay LESS. It is the exact OPPOSITE of putting America First — it is putting America LAST!” This legislation, he warns, if it passes, “would be among the largest self-inflicted economic wounds in history… The result will be more Americans out of work, more families shattered, more factories abandoned, more industries wrecked, and more Main Streets boarded up and closed.”
Biden’s predecessor certainly has a stake in the matter, having slashed the taxes that this White House plans to raise to pay for everything. The administration is talking about hiking the corporate tax rate from Trump’s 21 percent (which was a double-digit drop) to 28 percent. In other words, we’re going to destroy the one thing that’s really fueled our job creation and economic growth these last few years. And somehow Biden believes that will make us more competitive with China? No one is quite sure how since American businesses will be paying more than China’s 25 percent corporate tax rate.
The whole plan is another example of the striking contrast between our two parties. Democrats believe government is the job creator — that if we just give more money to the government, it’s going to create jobs. But those jobs don’t have a multiplying effect on the economy. Only the private sector jobs do that, because they aren’t taking any money out of the economy involuntarily. They take profits, reinvest them in expansion and growth, and that has the multiplying effect. It’s basic economics.
And while Joe Biden likes to play the “I’m-only-going-to-tax-the-rich” card, the reality is that even Left-leaning economists agree that low-income and middle class families will suffer with fewer jobs, lower pay, and smaller returns on their investments. As for the corporations, conservatives aren’t as sympathetic. Will that higher tax rate hurt the economy? Yes, and it’s going to hurt everyday Americans. But corporate America is getting what they asked for: liberal policies. Most of these woke CEOs are in the hip pocket of the Left, fighting their cultural battles — helping to give rise to these Leftists. And that’s where these crushing, anti-free market policies come from.
Just look at what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) tweeted about Biden’s plan: “This is not nearly enough.” It’s $2.25 trillion dollars and a major increase in taxes — and still it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough for the socialists who think government should control everything and take care of everything. But those people don’t live in the real world. It’s the private sector that creates good, lasting jobs. It’s what makes America competitive. All this will do is pour cold water on the economic recovery we’re experiencing. And in the end, it’ll be what most radical policies are: a dead-end — because the government is never capable of doing what the free market can.
Originally published here.
Filibluster? Dems Big Plan to End Senate Debate
There are 44 standing rules in the Senate, but only one seems to get all of the attention: the legislative filibuster. For Democrats like Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), it’s suddenly become quite a nuisance. Instead of being able to ram every outrageous idea on their wish list through Congress and on to Joe Biden’s desk, they’ve had to confront a sobering reality — that’s not how the U.S. Senate works.
The founders didn’t want two Houses of Representatives. They wanted a body that would deliberate, pursue consensus, and act as the lower chamber’s accountability party. One of the ways they did that was by giving the minority party a voice — something that’s desperately needed now in a country as divided as ours. Under the original rules of the Senate, small groups of members could grind the debate to a halt by “filibustering.” In those situations, the majority had a choice: they could “take heed” of the other side’s complaints or let their legislation die. Usually, as USA Today’s James Robbins explains, “it was easier just to make a deal.” In the old days, it took two-thirds of the Senate to end debate and move to a vote. In 1975, that number was lowered to 60. That means, with the exception of a handful of spending bills, today’s Democrats would have to find nine more votes than they have to pass anything on their agenda.
That’s a frustrating proposition for whoever is in the majority, but especially for far-Left Democrats. For starters, their policies are too radical to get the 60-vote support any legislation requires. Hitting that number would mean toning down their extremism. And almost no Democrat, these days, is the slightest bit interested in that. Back when she was in the minority, Senator Kristen Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) used to say, “If you don’t have 60 votes yet… it just means you have to work harder.” Now that she’s in the majority, she’s not interested in working harder or finding consensus. She, like almost every other Democrat, wants to change the rules so that there’s no debate, no working together, no listening to the other side. In other words, forget unity. Just give us everything we want.
The smart men who built this country understood the nature of power. They knew that if one party got its hands on both chambers and the White House, the temptation to ignore half of the country would be great. So they decided not to run the Senate like the House. They wanted conversation, give-and-take, and forced (if need be) cooperation. As Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in his incredible speech on the Senate floor, the founders wanted to “ensure that federal laws in our big diverse country earned broad enough buy-in to receive the lasting consent of the government.”
Now, instead of working to find middle ground, Democrats want to blow up the system entirely and let a simple majority rule. It’s incredible, Senator James Lankford (R-Okla.) pointed out on “Washington Watch.” Under Donald Trump, Democrats used the filibuster more than any party in history — and now, two months later, they’ve decided it’s “overused,” “racist,” and needs to be abolished? So it wasn’t racist when the Democrats filibustered four months ago and now, magically, it is? “That is absolutely absurd,” Lankford argued. “This is not a relic of racism. This is a stabilizing part of our government where we have dialog for the majority to listen to the minority — no matter who’s a majority or minority — and then to be able to walk for common ground. So this is a good thing, not a racist and evil thing.”
If this had been on the ballot, McConnell said, “Does anyone really believe the American people were voting for an entirely new system of government by electing Joe Biden to the White House and a 50/50 Senate?” Back in 2017, 33 Democrats and two dozen Republicans wrote a letter to Chuck Schumer and to Mitch McConnell arguing that there shouldn’t be any changes to the filibuster. Donald Trump and other Republicans were tempted to do away with it — just like Democrats are now — but McConnell resisted. These 60 or so senators backed him up, insisted that we need to protect the rights of the minority voice. Now, Lankford pointed out, “all but two of those Democrat senators have all said, ‘No, we just need to [kill] it.’”
What’s the difference between then and now? Democratic control.
“The uniqueness about the filibuster is this forces is the one place in government where all sides have to be heard. That is a benefit to us, not a detriment to us. It doesn’t happen in the Supreme Court or in the White House or in the House of Representatives. It only happens in the Senate, where we make sure that every single bill, every single issue, all voices are heard, the debate is finished, and then you move forward towards the common ground. We’ve got a lot of common ground as Americans. But if you get a situation where it’s a simple straight majority on everything, then… we’ll have rapid transitions in our nation where we’re used to having stability in our nation.”
Originally published here.
Blinken Wrong about His Predecessor’s Rights
The State Department launched its 45th human rights report Tuesday — but after Secretary Antony Blinken’s latest comments, no one is quite sure what “rights” we’re actually talking about. Under Biden, the administration has been pretty clear that they aren’t interested in the Constitution’s definitions or even moral law. They want to go back to cloaking their social activism in “freedom.” And destroying the State Department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights was only step number one.
“There is no hierarchy that makes some rights more important than others,” Blinken argued. “Past unbalanced statements that suggest such a hierarchy, including those offered by a recently disbanded State Department advisory committee, do not represent a guiding document for this administration. At my confirmation hearing, I promised the Biden-Harris administration would repudiate those unbalanced views. We do so decisively today.”
Unbalanced? Is that what Joe Biden’s administration thinks about hundreds of years of biblical, moral, and legal consensus? Former Secretary Mike Pompeo could only imagine. “It was sad to hear,” he said on “Washington Watch,” “that the work of the commission that I had put together [with people] from every major religion, people from across the political spectrum [had been abolished].” The whole point of that project, he said, was “understanding human rights. We are each made in the image of God and there are certain set of rights that come with that. And in the American tradition, our founders talked about that and thought an awful lot about that… but it comes back to these fundamental rights that we each have — because, in fact, we are endowed by our Creator with them and not from some government. And now, to watch this administration declare that the government can, in fact, create rights or destroy rights, and that these are political creations, not things that are inherent in the traditions of our country and in the nature of humanity…”
After eight years of Barack Obama abusing the term “rights” and slapping that term on things like abortion or LGBT extremism, Pompeo’s desire was to get back down to the bedrock of human rights, the foundation. What are those universal human rights that can’t be taken away from government?
As discouraging (and expected) as this week’s news from Blinken was, Pompeo pointed out that regardless, “The State Department didn’t take away any of our rights yesterday. They simply repudiated the central understanding of the American tradition of human rights…” Not, that’s a dangerous proposition, he said, “to suggest somehow that government can grant a set of rights for all of humanity, because we know different nations will come to different conclusions.” Even inside the United States, people come to different conclusions. But no matter what the Biden administration does, “they can shelve [our report], they can deep-six it, but the work has been done. It’s out there. We can use it as a guide point…” even if this State Department does not.
Look, Pompeo reminded everyone, this was inevitable. “Even before [our commission] had written its first order, held its first meeting, it was attacked by the progressive radical Left as threatening to them. I don’t know what’s threatening about a historical review of the foundational underpinning of the human rights tradition in the United States of America. I would have thought that [this would have been taken] seriously. It would have been welcomed by the human rights establishment. But in fact, it was not.”
And why not? Because they have their favorite causes and priorities that they want to reward that are deeply disconnected from the central understandings of the United States of America. “You talk about reproductive rights. There was no administration in history that supported women’s health the way that ours did. And there was no administration in history that protected the rights of the unborn with the same seriousness.” This administration is headed down a completely different path. “They’re clearing the deck so they can advance their priorities, which are not rooted in fundamental freedoms and fundamental rights.”
At the end of the day, it’s disheartening. But Mike’s message to Americans who care about these deeply-held beliefs and freedoms is: don’t be discouraged. “I think Churchill had it right in the end. When we’ve exhausted all the other possibilities, the United States gets it right. And I am I am confident that faith leaders across the world, faith leaders all across America, will return our nation to the fundamental understandings that our founders had. And these ideas of protection of the unborn, these ideas about religious freedom, the central understanding of human beings being created in the image of God, and therefore having these inherent rights, [will be] central to the way we think about our country. We will prevail. We will be successful in the United States, will continue to be the most exceptional nation in the history of civilization.”
Originally published here.
This is a publication of the Family Research Council. Mr. Perkins is president of FRC.
