As negotiations for a bipartisan infrastructure plan take place, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell indicated that Republican lawmakers could potentially get behind an infrastructure bill worth up to $800 billion.
“The proper price tag for what most of us think of as infrastructure is about 6-to-800 billion dollars,” McConnell said during an interview with Kentucky’s PBS TV station KET.
McConnell’s remarks came just after the White House announced that President Biden will meet with several GOP senators to discuss his controversial $2.25 trillion infrastructure proposal.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that for Biden’s proposal to work, called the ‘American Jobs Plan’, there needs to be “human infrastructure” included in the bill.
Critics of the proposal have argued that his ‘infrastructure’ bill has very little to do with infrastructure, with McConnell describing it as a “bait-and-switch.”
“What we’ve got here can best be described as a bait-and-switch,” McConnell said when describing Biden’s $2.25 trillion proposal. The bill is “called infrastructure, but much bigger, with a whole laundry list of other things,” the Republican senator added.
GOP critics of the bill have also been disapproving of how Biden intends to pay for his multi-trillion dollar bill, as Biden plans to roll back former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts to pay for his proposal.
Meanwhile, Senator Shelley Moore Capito and several other GOP senators unveiled a counter-proposal focused on “core infrastructure” and “physical infrastructure” as opposed to the “human infrastructure” described by Pelosi. The $568 billion GOP counter-proposal would cost a fraction of Biden’s proposition.
In a tweet from Capito about the GOP-backed proposal, she maintained that Biden’s proposal “goes beyond what constitutes infrastructure.”
“I’m willing to hear ideas from both sides,” Biden said last week in Louisiana. ”I’m ready to compromise. What I’m not ready to do is, I’m not ready to do nothing.”
