Biden administration
Subterms
More stories
Obstructing Governance as a Substitute for Public Policy
It is hard to figure out why it seems so difficult to be a white guy in today’s America, even though I am a white guy and should be able to figure it out. The problem seems to be that there are just too many people in America who are not white guys, or even white guys and gals combined. Whenever this feeling seems to overwhelm some white guys, their solution to the perceived problem is to try to preclude something that non-white guys want: entry into the country, voting rights, equal opportunity, racial justice, access to meaningful health care and, way too often, the simple desire to live in peace or continue to live at all.
So, now that the mass shootings have started again in earnest in America after seemingly taking a small break during the height of pandemic restrictions, it is again mostly white guys out front depriving lots of others of their lives and sense of security. Of course, who can forget the hordes of white guys storming the US Capitol a few months ago trying to prevent their fearless leader from the perceived insult of a permanent return to his beloved mansion in Florida.
Escaping Thucydides’ Trap: Keeping the Peace Between Rising and Reigning Powers
READ MORE
It is worth asking who these white guys are who continue to board their trains to nowhere, callously leaving misery, destruction and even death in their wake. Some are among the really challenged people in America. Among other things, they seem to be intellectually incapable of seeing the connection between incredibly easy access to firearms and mass human slaughter in the American landscape. Find an assault weapon, and you are likely to find a challenged white guy.
However, those white guys fueling the nation’s resistance to humane immigration policies, to easy access to the polls to affect democratic change, to a racial reckoning and equal opportunity, to universal access to meaningful health care, and even to a comprehensive public health response to the pandemic are all on the same trains to nowhere, along with their gun nut buddies. Tragically, they enable America to fail and they empower each other to add critical mass to their efforts.
Many of these white people live in neighborhoods with a lot of other white people, only some of whom share their views. Some live in more diverse neighborhoods or pockets of poverty where they often hide their views until, for some reason, they have had enough of “others” and snap. But a whole bunch of these white people were among the 74 million people who voted for Trump in the last election.
Thwarting Efforts to Govern
Worse yet, they and their Republican cohorts are now determined to thwart any Biden administration effort to govern. Governing is not the same thing as being a government. Governing is, in its most basic sense, the exercise of authority thru the making of policy and the administration of that policy. President Joe Biden often has the authority to act, but to exercise that authority within America’s constitutional framework requires collaboration with, and the cooperation of, other institutional elements of that framework.
.custom-post-from {float:right; margin: 0 10px 10px; max-width: 50%; width: 100%; text-align: center; background: #000000; color: #ffffff; padding: 15px 0 30px; }
.custom-post-from img { max-width: 85% !important; margin: 15px auto; filter: brightness(0) invert(1); }
.custom-post-from .cpf-h4 { font-size: 18px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
.custom-post-from .cpf-h5 { font-size: 14px; letter-spacing: 1px; line-height: 22px; margin-bottom: 15px; }
.custom-post-from input[type=”email”] { font-size: 14px; color: #000 !important; width: 240px; margin: auto; height: 30px; box-shadow:none; border: none; padding: 0 10px; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-pen-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: center right 14px; background-size:14px;}
.custom-post-from input[type=”submit”] { font-weight: normal; margin: 15px auto; height: 30px; box-shadow: none; border: none; padding: 0 10px 0 35px; background-color: #1878f3; color: #ffffff; border-radius: 4px; display: inline-block; background-image: url(“https://www.fairobserver.com/wp-content/plugins/moosend_form/cpf-email-icon.svg”); background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 14px center; background-size: 14px; }.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox { width: 90%; margin: auto; position: relative; display: flex; flex-wrap: wrap;}
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label { text-align: left; display: block; padding-left: 32px; margin-bottom: 0; cursor: pointer; font-size: 11px; line-height: 18px;
-webkit-user-select: none;
-moz-user-select: none;
-ms-user-select: none;
user-select: none;
order: 1;
color: #ffffff;
font-weight: normal;}
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox label a { color: #ffffff; text-decoration: underline; }
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input { position: absolute; opacity: 0; cursor: pointer; height: 100%; width: 24%; left: 0;
right: 0; margin: 0; z-index: 3; order: 2;}
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:before { content: “f0c8”; font-family: Font Awesome 5 Free; color: #eee; font-size: 24px; position: absolute; left: 0; top: 0; line-height: 28px; color: #ffffff; width: 20px; height: 20px; margin-top: 5px; z-index: 2; }
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:before { content: “f14a”; font-weight: 600; color: #2196F3; }
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input:checked ~ label:after { content: “”; }
.custom-post-from .cpf-checkbox input ~ label:after { position: absolute; left: 2px; width: 18px; height: 18px; margin-top: 10px; background: #ffffff; top: 10px; margin: auto; z-index: 1; }
.custom-post-from .error{ display: block; color: #ff6461; order: 3 !important;}Take immigration policy as an example, since there is often talk of “comprehensive immigration reform.” The Biden administration can determine policy and administer elements of that policy through executive action. It can humanely allow Latino children to enter the United States and then make sure that they have a bed, a blanket and enough food to sustain them. After that, figuring out how these immigrant minors should be processed and treated becomes much more complicated, unless it is viewed as a component of a much larger US immigration problem that requires “comprehensive reform.”
Enter Congress, enter the Republicans in Congress, enter the white guys on the trains to nowhere and that comprehensive reform is almost certainly doomed. So, what happens to the children? With some luck, they disappear into the fabric of the world of undocumented immigrants striving to find a place in a nation where a lot of white guys don’t want them to be.
Although the immigration example is bad enough, there is more bad news from the white guys on the trains to nowhere. They don’t seem to want anybody but themselves to have a go at voting. It would be nice to say that this effort will fail in that exceptional “model democracy” known as America. But hold on, the white guys have a plan: You change the voting rules to get better results. This is easier than changing the policies, programs and personalities that many of the voters rejected under the old rules.
Just to make sure that nobody mistook the latest white guy effort at voter suppression for a serious effort to make voting easier, those wacky Republicans in the Georgia legislature, aided and abetted by the Republican governor, just criminalized providing food and water to their fellow citizens waiting in voting lines. That is, of course, only part of what they did, but enough to fully demonstrate the lengths to which the white guys on the trains to nowhere will go to preserve their shrinking political influence.
You see, prior voting practices in Georgia often left voters of color waiting in longer lines than their white counterparts, so instead of legislating to reduce wait times for everybody, someone came up with the bright idea of making it harder to wait in line. (This plan will work even better if the white guys also make it a crime to sell those little cooler bags to anyone who isn’t a white guy.)
The Key That Unlocks the Door
I wish I were making this up, but I am not. The Biden administration’s capacity to govern is being challenged not by people who have a sincere agenda of constructive reform for the nation, but by those same kind of white guys on their trains to nowhere who have just criminalized giving grandma a drink of water while she waits in line to vote.
Even some things as potentially lifesaving for white guys as wearing masks and seeking COVID-19 vaccines seem challenging to way too many of them. While they should overwhelmingly embrace these measures if for no other reason than if only people of color get vaccinated and white guys die off, their situation gets even more desperate. Yet the world has watched while many white guys on their trains to nowhere have overtly contributed to tens of thousands of COVID deaths in the US and continue to try to thwart coordinated government efforts to address the nation’s pandemic and public health crisis.
For some reason, even their significant contribution to the deaths of so many has failed to pause the white guys on their trains to nowhere long enough to stand back so that those of good will in government have the space they need to function and the support they need to govern.
For as long as the mindless obstruction continues, the nation’s governmental institutions will be significantly impeded from pursuing the long-delayed promise of a more just and equitable America. And it will be that much harder to demonstrate that good government is the key that unlocks the door.
*[This article was co-published on the author’s blog, Hard Left Turn.]
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More
- in US Politics
Janet Yellen calls for global minimum corporate tax rate
The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, made the case for a global minimum corporate tax rate on Monday as the Biden administration faces opposition to its plans to raise rates on US businesses.Yellen’s comments come as Republicans and some Democrats have pushed back on Joe Biden’s proposed $2.3tn infrastructure investment bill. The bill would be funded in part by raising rates on US business and closing loopholes that allow domestic and foreign corporations to take advantage of lower taxes overseas.“Competitiveness is about more than how US-headquartered companies fare against other companies in global merger and acquisition bids,” Yellen said in remarks to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. “It is about making sure that governments have stable tax systems that raise sufficient revenue to invest in essential public goods and respond to crises, and that all citizens fairly share the burden of financing government.”The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been working on a new set of cross-border tax rules that would include a global minimum tax rate for multinational corporations.Yellen’s comments are a marked departure from the isolationism exhibited under the Trump administration and the treasury secretary underlined the need for international cooperation.“Over the last four years, we have seen first-hand what happens when America steps back from the global stage,” Yellen said. “‘America first’ must never mean ‘America alone’.”Biden’s plans would reverse some of Trump’s landmark tax cuts, increasing the corporate tax rate to 28% from 21% and increasing the minimum taxes paid on US companies’ foreign income while making it harder for foreign-owned companies with US operations to shift profits to low-tax countries.“President Biden’s proposals announced last week call for bold domestic action, including to raise the US minimum tax rate, and renewed international engagement, recognizing that it is important to work with other countries to end the pressures of tax competition and corporate tax base erosion,” Yellen said. “We are working with G20 nations to agree to a global minimum corporate tax rate that can stop the race to the bottom.” More
- in US Politics
Fauci hits back at rightwing criticism and says attacks on him 'bizarre'
Anthony Fauci has described attacks on him from Republicans as “bizarre”, after a barrage of criticism from senior GOP figures.The infectious disease expert, who has led the US effort against Covid-19, was forced to defend himself after a former Trump official called him “the father of the actual virus” and the senator Lindsey Graham followed other Republicans in urging Fauci – Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser and the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to travel to the US-Mexico border.Speaking to Fox News, Fauci said he had become a scapegoat for rightwing figures.“I’ve been a symbol to them of what they don’t like about anything that has to do with things that are contrary to them, anything outside of their own realm,” he said.In a flurry of tweets on Friday, Graham, from South Carolina, told Fauci: “You need to go to the southern border and witness in person the biggest super-spreader event in the nation.”Graham was referring to thousands of migrants being held in overcrowded conditions. The administration has said asylum seekers are tested for coronavirus on arrival in the US. It was unclear what Graham thought a Fauci visit would achieve.“It’s a little bit bizarre, I would say,” Fauci said. “I mean … Lindsey Graham, who I like, he’s … you know, he’s a good person, I’ve dealt with him very, very well over the years, you know, equating me with things that have to do at the border? I mean, I have nothing to do with the border.“Having me down at the border, that’s really not what I do.”Fauci, 80, has served seven presidents since 1984, leading the fight against Aids and HIV before emerging as the trusted public face of attempts to contain the coronavirus pandemic.On Wednesday Peter Navarro, who served in various roles under Donald Trump, launched a bizarre rant during an interview with Fox News.Asked about Fauci’s comment that his pursuit of a vaccine was “the best decision [I] ever made”, Navarro said: “Fauci is a sociopath and a liar. He had nothing to do with the vaccine. The father of the vaccine is Donald J Trump.“What is Fauci the father of? Fauci is the father of the actual virus.”Fauci responded, asking: “How bizarre is that? Think about it for a second. Isn’t that a little weird? I mean, come on.”Last week Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, accused Fauci of remaining silent over conditions at the border. An Alabama congressman also urged Fauci to get involved. In February Marco Rubio, a senator from Florida, criticized Fauci, saying his job “is not to mislead or scare” the American public.Fauci demurred when asked to respond.“I am so busy trying to do some important things to preserve the health and the safety of the American people that I can’t be bothered with getting distracted with these people that are doing these ad hominems,” he said. More
- in US Politics
How Biden's $2tn infrastructure plan seeks to achieve racial justice
Joe Biden has said his $2tn plan to rebuild America’s “crumbling” roads, bridges, railways and other infrastructure would rival the space race in its ambition and deliver economic and social change on a scale as grand as the New Deal. The president has also vowed his “once-in-a-generation” investment will reverse long-standing racial disparities exacerbated by past national mobilizations.Embedded in his sprawling infrastructure agenda, the first part of which Biden unveiled this week, are hundreds of billions of dollars dedicated to projects and investments the administration says will advance racial equity in employment, housing, transportation, healthcare and education, while improving economic outcomes for communities of color.“This plan is important, not only for what and how it builds but it’s also important to where we build,” Biden said at a union carpenters’ training facility outside Pittsburgh last week. “It includes everyone, regardless of your race or your zip code.”His proposal would replace lead pipes and service lines that have disproportionately harmed Black children; reduce air pollution that has long harmed Black and Latino neighborhoods near ports and power plants; “reconnect” neighborhoods cut off by previous transportation projects; expand affordable housing options to allow more families of color to buy homes, build wealth and eliminate exclusionary zoning laws; rebuild the public housing system; and prioritize investments in “frontline” communities whose residents are predominantly people of color often first- and worst-affected by climate change and environmental disaster.The plan also allocates $100m in workforce development programs targeting historically underserved communities and $20m for upgrading historically Black college and universities (HBCUs) and other minority-serving institutions (MSIs), and quadruples funding for the Manufacturing Extensions Partnership to boost investment in “minority owned and rurally located” businesses.Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party (WFP), said it was clear Biden had been listening to activists and understood the interlocking challenges of racial injustice, climate change and economic inequality.“This is not race-neutral – it’s actually pretty aggressive and specific,” he said, noting the coalition of Black voters and women who helped Biden clinch the Democratic nomination and win the White House.Perhaps the boldest pieces of the proposal is a $400bn investment in care for elderly and disabled Americans. In his speech, Biden said his agenda would create jobs and lift wages and benefits for the millions of “unseen, underpaid and undervalued” caregivers, predominantly women of color.Ai-jen Poo, co-founder and executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, called it “one of the single most impactful plans to address racial and gender inequity in our economy”.Poo said the coronavirus pandemic, which disproportionately hurt women and people of color, showed just how critical care workers are to the wellbeing of the nation. And yet many of these workers still struggle to care for themselves and their families.Poo believes Biden’s plan can do for caregiving and the economy what past jobs programs did for manufacturing, turning dangerous, low-wage jobs into opportunities for upward mobility and security. Home care workers have been excluded from labor protections – Poo said this effort places them at the forefront.“There’s nothing more fundamental and enabling to our economy than having good care for families,” she said. “Without that, nothing else can function – we can’t even build roads, bridges and tunnels without care.”Biden’s plan also provides for $100bn for high-speed broadband internet alongside provisions to improve access and affordability, which White House officials say will help to close the digital divide between white and Black and Latino families.“The internet is a tool that all of us rely upon,” said Angela Siefer, executive director at National Digital Inclusion Alliance. “And when certain segments of the population, particularly those who have been historically left out, don’t have access to the tools, they fall even further behind.”Biden said his plan would help drive down costs by increasing competition and providing short-term subsidies for low-income households. Siefer said these measures are important, but she was skeptical rates would fall enough to make high-speed internet affordable for low-income families without more permanent subsidies.Improving digital literacy is also critical to confronting racial inequality, Siefer said, adding: “To really achieve equity, we have to get beyond the thinking: let’s just make it available.”The proposal also includes $5bn for community based violence-prevention programs, an investment Black and Latino activists have long argued will help reduce the impact of gun violence.The administration has suggested additional efforts to close the racial wealth gap, like universal pre-kindergarten, affordable higher education and improved family leave, will come in the second piece of what could be a $4tn program.Republicans accuse Biden of delivering a “Trojan Horse” to fund progressive initiatives.“Biden’s plan includes hundreds of billions of spending on leftwing policies and blue-state priorities,” the Republican National Committee said. It singled out parts of the bill that aim to tackle racial and gender inequality, such as “$400bn for an ‘unrelated’ program for home care that ‘was a top demand of some union groups’.”While many senior Democrats welcomed the plan, many progressives have said it doesn’t go far enough. They have called for $10tn over the next decade to confront climate change, including more robust investments in renewable energy and a target of shifting the US to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.Biden has said he is open to negotiation and hopes he can attract Republicans to the plan. The president suggested Republicans would rush to act if they learned the drinking water on Capitol Hill flowed through lead pipes.As Congress begins the process of turning Biden’s blueprint into legislation, progressive groups are mounting a campaign to pressure lawmakers to embrace an even more ambitious agenda. The WFP is part of a coalition of groups staging protests to demand Congress deliver “transformational economic recovery”.“If you’re going to be big and bold, be big and bold and solve the problem fully,” Mitchell said. “We are at a crisis moment and we won’t get another shot.” More
- in US Politics
Republicans claim Biden $2tn infrastructure plan a partisan tax hike
Republicans opposed to Joe Biden’s proposed $2tn infrastructure bill claimed on Sunday that it was effectively a partisan tax hike that allocated too much money to electric vehicles and other environmental initiatives.On CNN’s State of the Union, Mississippi governor Tate Reeves was asked if his state could use some of the $100bn Biden proposes to spend on fixing roads and bridges neglected for decades amid gridlock in Washington and paralyzed public spending.Yes, he said. But.“There’s no doubt that Mississippi could use our fair share of $100bn,” Reeves said. “The problem with this particular plan, though, is although the Biden administration is calling it an infrastructure plan, it looks more like a $2tn tax hike plan, to me. That’s going to lead to significant challenges in our economy, it’s going to lead to a slowing GDP … it’s going to lead to Americans losing significant numbers of jobs.”Biden proposes funding his plan by raising corporate tax rates and making it more difficult for corporations to utilize offshore tax shelters.Reeves had other complaints. While Biden proposes to spend billions on roads and bridges, he said, he also proposes to “spend more than that on the combination of Amtrak [railways] and public transit. And what’s even worse, [Biden’s bill] spends $100bn on clean water, which Mississippi could certainly use, but it spends more than that … to subsidize electric vehicles.“That is a political statement. It’s not a statement on trying to improve our infrastructure in America. And so it looks more like the Green New Deal than it looks like an infrastructure plan.”The Green New Deal is a set of policy priorities championed by prominent progressives including Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as a way to meet looming environmental challenges while boosting the economy and reducing inequality. It is not enacted law or a formal part of Biden’s policy plans. Nonetheless, Republicans from Donald Trump down have seized on it, claiming it represents a determination to take away gas-guzzling cars and even the right to eat meat.On ABC’s This Week, the Missouri Republican senator Roy Blunt asked: “Why would you pass up the opportunity here to focus on roads, bridges, what’s happening underground, as well as above the ground on infrastructure, broadband, all of which wouldn’t be 40% of this package?“There’s more in the package for charging stations for electric vehicles … than there is for roads, bridges and airports and ports. When people think about infrastructure, they’re thinking about roads, bridges, ports and airports.”The Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, said this week he would “fight them every step of the way because I think this is the wrong prescription for America. That package that they’re putting together now, as much as we would like to address infrastructure, is not going to get support from our side.”Democrats could attempt to pass the package using budget reconciliation, a procedure that allows for a simple Senate majority rather than 60 votes. But even if successful it would mean abandoning portions of the plan that do not impact taxes and spending.Biden has repeatedly emphasized the need for bipartisanship. Politicians from both sides have claimed willingness to reach across the aisle.Reeves told CNN he “believes we can come up with a plan” but opposes the tax-funded price-tag. Blunt said it was “very unlikely” Republicans would vote to reverse Trump’s 2017 corporate tax cuts, suggesting instead “new funding sources, figuring out how if you’re going to spend all this money on electric vehicles, which I think is part of the future, we need to figure out how electric vehicles pay for using the system just like gas-powered vehicles have always paid for it with a gas tax.”Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, vowed to work with Republicans.“I’ve got a lot of respect for Senator Blunt,” he told ABC, “but I’m going to work to try to persuade him that electrical vehicle charging infrastructure is absolutely a core part of how Americans are going to need to get around in the future, and not the distant, far off future, but right now.Asked if it was “a realistic prospect to expect Republicans are going to come around”, Buttigieg said: “I think it can be. I’m having a lot of conversations with Republicans in the House and Senate who have been wanting to do something big on infrastructure for years. We may not agree about every piece of it, but this is one area where the American people absolutely want to see us get it done.”The Republican Mississippi senator Roger Wicker told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I’m all for working with the administration on an infrastructure bill. And let me tell you, I think I can work with Pete Buttigieg. I spoke to him the day he was nominated. We’ve been trading phone messages for the last three or four days in an effort to talk about this bill. I think Pete and I could come up with an infrastructure bill.”But Wicker also brought out the stumbling block to such thoughts of progress.“What the president proposed this week is not an infrastructure bill,” he said. “It’s a huge tax increase, for one thing.” More
- in US Politics
Don't expect Biden to trumpet lofty aims for his rescue plans – he's simply Mr Fix-it | Robert Reich
Joe Biden is embarking on the biggest government initiative in more than a half-century, “unlike anything we have seen or done since we built the interstate highway system and the space race decades go”, he says.But when it comes to details, it sounds as boring as fixing the plumbing.“Under the American Jobs Plan, 100% of our nation’s lead pipes and service lines will be replaced – so every child in America can turn on the faucet or fountain and drink clean water,” the president tweeted.Can you imagine Donald Trump tweeting about repairing lead pipes?Biden is excited about rebuilding America’s “infrastructure”, a word he uses constantly although it could be the dullest term in all of public policy.The old unwritten rule was that if a president wants to do something really big, he has to justify it as critical to national defense or else summon the nation’s conscience.Dwight Eisenhower’s National Interstate and Defense Highway Act was designed to “permit quick evacuation of target areas” in case of nuclear attack and get munitions quickly from city to city. Of course, in subsequent years it proved indispensable to America’s economic growth.America’s huge investment in higher education in the late 1950s was spurred by the Soviets’ Sputnik satellite. The official purpose of the National Defense Education Act was to “insure trained manpower of sufficient quality and quantity to meet the national defense needs of the United States”.John F Kennedy launched the race to the moon in 1962 so that space wouldn’t be “governed by a hostile flag of conquest”.Two years later, Lyndon Johnson’s “unconditional war on poverty” drew on the conscience of America reeling from Kennedy’s assassination.But Biden is not arousing the nation against a foreign power – not even China figures prominently as a foil – nor is he basing his plans on lofty appeals to national greatness or public morality.“I got elected to solve problems,” he says, simply. He’s Mr Fix-it.The first of these problems was a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans – Biden carries a card in his pocket with the exact number – and its ensuing economic hardship.In response, Congress passed Biden’s $1.9tn American Rescue Plan – the most important parts of which aren’t $1,400 checks now being mailed to millions of Americans but $3,600 checks a child paid to low-income families, which will cut child poverty by half.Now comes his $2tn American Jobs Plan, which doesn’t just fund roads and bridges but a vast number of things the nation has neglected for years: schools, affordable housing, in-home care, access to broadband, basic research, renewable energy and the transition to a non-fossil economy.Why isn’t Biden trumpeting these initiatives for what they are – huge public investments in the environment, the working-class and poor – instead of rescue checks and road repairs? Why not stir America with a vision of what the nation can be if it exchanges fraudulent trickle-down economics for genuine bottom-up innovation and growth?Even the official titles of his initiatives – Rescue Plan, Jobs Plan and soon-to-be-unveiled Family Plan – are anodyne, like plumbing blueprints.The reason is that Biden wants Americans to feel confident he’s taking care of the biggest problems but doesn’t want to create much of a stir. The country is so bitterly and angrily divided that any stir is likely to stir up vitriol.Talk too much about combating climate change and lose everyone whose livelihood depends on fossil fuels or who doesn’t regard climate change as an existential threat. Focus on cutting child poverty and lose everyone who thinks welfare causes dependency. Talk too much about critical technologies and lose those who think the government shouldn’t be picking winners.[embedded content]Rescue checks and road repairs may be boring but they’re hugely popular. Sixty-one per cent of Americans support the American Rescue Plan, including 59% of Republicans. More than 80% support increased funding for highway construction, bridge repair and expanded access to broadband.Biden has made it all so bland that congressional Republicans and their business backers have nothing to criticize except his proposal to pay for the repairs by raising taxes on corporations, which most Americans support.This is smart politics. Biden is embarking on a huge and long-overdue repair job on the physical and human underpinnings of the nation while managing to keep most of a bitterly divided country with him. It may not be seen as glamorous work, but when you’re knee-deep in muck, it’s hard to argue with a plumber. More
