President Biden just announced an agreement with a bipartisan group of Senators for an infrastructure bill. This, in my view, is a big deal, and a major victory not only for President Biden, but us progressives, too. Why? Because:
While this doesn’t include everything President Biden and Democrats wanted in the infrastructure portion of his proposed jobs bill, it is a great starting point. And, in my view, it’s a great achievement for the following reasons:
-It demonstrates that President Biden was sincere during the campaign and since that he would prefer bipartisanship if possible.
-While it doesn’t include everything Democrats and progressives wanted, and it does include compromises, especially in terms of funding, it is a great place to start.
-Democrats can still build on this legislation later on, using the reconciliation process to pass additions with a simple majority, including many things included in the jobs bill not included in this infrastructure bill.
-It’s another major political achievement for the Biden administration even though there likely will be some push-back, from both the right and left.
In other words, while this doesn’t give the president and Democrats everything they wanted...it’s not a bad starting point, especially considering that we can come much closer to what he did propose incrementally, with additions later on.
While many of my progressive friends may disagree with me, it’s been my view for a long time that incremental progress in the right direction is far better than no progress at all and most certainly better than going backwards, which is where Republicans always seem to want to take us.
This serves as a great starting point for getting more and more of the bold proposals outlined by President Biden in his original jobs bill. There seems to be very little downside.
This also seems like smart politics to me.
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