On infrastructure, do Republicans want to strike a pose or build things?
Opinion by E.J. Dionne Jr.
The verb “to posture” is not widely used by normal human beings, but it was invoked all the time when I covered the New York state legislature, back when politics wasn’t nearly as polarized as it is now.
There was an admirable, if peculiar, honesty to admitting that what was being said wasn’t actually what was meant. Typical off-the-record comments ran from “We’re taking this posture now to try to get us to X,” X being the real goal; or “He’s posturing so he looks tough to his caucus before he tells them they have to cave.”
The problem with Washington in 2021 might be described as posturing without a purpose — beyond scoring points against the White House. The Republican dance around President Biden’s infrastructure proposal almost makes me nostalgic for the sincerity of cynicism.
We know several things about the politics surrounding Biden’s big investment plan. First, he wants to do far more than congressional Republicans will support. Second, the GOP doesn’t want to pay for any plan with a corporate tax increase. Third, Republicans will say that whatever is passed should happen only on a bipartisan basis.
Which comes down to this: Do a whole lot less; pay for it our way, or not at all; and maybe we’ll produce 10 GOP votes in the Senate to pass the bill in a normal way, rather than through the more cumbersome “reconciliation” process. That would require only the 50 votes Democratic senators can deliver on their own, plus Vice President Harris’s tiebreaker.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/on-infrastructure-do-republicans-want-to-strike-a-pose-or-build-things/2021/04/17/eed8501c-9ef4-11eb-9d05-ae06f4529ece_story.html
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