Biden’s never-ending infrastructure week

Biden’s never-ending infrastructure week
During the Trump years, “infrastructure week” became a lame Washington in-joke. “It’s infrastructure week!” someone would tweet sarcastically to underscore the administration’s ongoing failure to deliver the bipartisan infrastructure package that Trump promised early in his presidency.

Biden has reversed the Beltway gag. The joke in Trump’s Washington was that it was that the president’s failure to deliver the bill meant that, Groundhog Day-style, it was always infrastructure week. In Biden’s Washington, it’s always infrastructure week because the president has failed to deliver on anything other than a bipartisan infrastructure package.

That means that…

Biden’s never-ending infrastructure week

During the Trump years, “infrastructure week” became a lame Washington in-joke. “It’s infrastructure week!” someone would tweet sarcastically to underscore the administration’s ongoing failure to deliver the bipartisan infrastructure package that Trump promised early in his presidency.

Biden has reversed the Beltway gag. The joke in Trump’s Washington was that it was that the president’s failure to deliver the bill meant that, Groundhog Day-style, it was always infrastructure week. In Biden’s Washington, it’s always infrastructure week because the president has failed to deliver on anything other than a bipartisan infrastructure package.

That means that every few days the president or vice president feels the need to jet somewhere — usually a Rust Belt state no more than a ninety-minute flight from Washington — to talk up the $1 trillion infrastructure bill the president signed into law three months ago. Biden will give a speech that very few people will pay attention to and head back to the White House. If he’s feeling energetic, he might take an electric vehicle for a spin too.

There’s a stolid, unexciting logic to the speeches: focus on the bread-and-butter politics of delivering government spending in a given region and hope for a favorable reception in the local media. And talking about electric vehicles, or a broken bridge, or solar panel production is certainly a less damaging use of the president’s time than heading to Atlanta to explain why anyone who disagrees with you is a hideous segregationist and that American democracy as we know it is on the brink of destruction.

But the emphasis on infrastructure also represents a retreat: an admission of failure on voting rights and Build Back Better, the two legislative priorities of this administration that have all but vanished from the conversation. There is a striking absence of a domestic agenda emanating from the White House at the moment. Perhaps, too, the administration is finally taking inflation seriously. The administration is reportedly considering a gas tax holiday, something proposed by Democratic lawmakers last week. Meanwhile, there are reports that Biden’s top economic advisers are pushing back against the idea that corporate greed is to blame for rising prices.

Ron Klain joined Senate Democrats for lunch this week and the behind-closed-doors talks were apparently light on discussion of a reconciliation bill and heavy on talk of inflation and the health of the US economy.

However, don’t expect the administration’s quietness on domestic policy beyond infrastructure to last long though. Biden is set to deliver his State of the Union speech on March 1. “I think the president is going to have some clear initiatives, especially in the State of the Union, on Covid, cost of living, crime, the essential challenges looking forward, and they’re going to be positive initiatives that really tackle these problems. He’s well aware of what’s going on and what’s on people’s minds,” said Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal after the meeting with Klain.

That at least suggests a presidency whose priorities are more aligned with voters’ concerns. And a focus on those issues would be a welcome change of tack. But let’s wait and see whether Biden’s big speech really does represent a reset. Until then, enjoy a few more infrastructure weeks.

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