Republicans Horrified at Biden’s Plan to Fix the Country by Taxing the Rich

In the spring of 2019, Donald Trump announced plans to bring about the infrastructure deal he’d been promising since he was a candidate. But, like other Infrastructure Weeks before it, the whole thing collapsed before it got off the ground. Trump exploded during a meeting with Nancy Pelosi after just three minutes, and continued his tantrum in the Rose Garden afterward as his Capitol Hill nemesis promised to “pray” for him. “I want to do infrastructure,” he said. “I want to do it more than you want to do it. I’d be really good at it. But you know what?” he demanded. “You can’t do it under these circumstances.”

And so another Infrastructure Week came and went without anything being done about the nation’s infrastructure. It was a running gag of the Trump era: Trump or Elaine Chao or someone else from the administration would announce plans to focus on bridges and roads, only to be derailed by some outlandish scandal: Trump praising neo-Nazis; Trump handing out classified intelligence to Russian officials in the Oval Office; or, in the case of that May 2019, Trump going berserk over “phony investigations.” Infrastructure Week was always meant to be a distraction from those scandals. But it was also always thwarted by them.

Now, Joe Biden is turning his attention to infrastructure and, unlike his predecessor, he has an actual plan: a $4 trillion proposal that would address the nation’s crumbling roadways and aims to repair the country’s social infrastructure, too, with provisions designed to improve access to health care and child care. The president is planning to lay out the plan on Wednesday and, because he does not spend 15 hours a day on Twitter free-associating to DVR’ed Fox News shows, it seems likely he’ll be able to pull off the announcement without the whole thing going up in flames. “The president has an ambitious goal,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters Monday. “He, of course, believes that investing in our infrastructure, continuing to create good-paying union jobs is front and center. But he also believes that we have an opportunity to rebalance...to address our tax code that is out of date...and some could pay more in our country that are not currently.”

In that last line, Psaki was referring to Biden’s plan to pay for his proposal, which involves things like raising the corporate tax rate and changing how capital gains are taxed. Economists are all in on this idea. But naturally, Republicans—including some former Trump administration officials—are pitching a fit. GOP operatives, including former Vice President Mike Pence former top aide Marc Short, have formed a group called the Coalition to Protect American Workers that aims not to protect American workers, but to keep Biden from raising rich peoples’ taxes—something Short told Axios would “stifle our economy as the country is finally emerging from a pandemic.”

In addition to an ad campaign, the group is planning to pressure Capitol Hill Republicans who might be toying with the idea of supporting parts of Biden’s vision—though it’s not clear how much work they’ll have to do on that front. GOP lawmakers have already been mobilizing against Biden’s plans, with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell saying recently that the president is going to “send our economy in the wrong direction.” “If you want to do an infrastructure bill, let’s do an infrastructure bill,” McConnell said at an event in Kentucky. “Let’s don’t turn it into a massive effort to raise taxes on businesses and individuals.” Expect the GOP to trot out variations on that line as Biden’s plan becomes clearer. Expect them, too, to do everything they can to keep it from going through—particularly given their objections to the $1.9 trillion COVID relief package Biden already signed.

Democrats, meanwhile, have hinted that they may use the COVID relief plan’s passage as a blueprint. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested last week that there may be a way to pass the president’s infrastructure bills through reconciliation, allowing Democrats to “move forward” without Republican support. But doing so would require a united front among Democrats, and that’s not quite the case right now. Joe Manchin, for instance, wants whatever passes to do so with Republican input. Even the stubborn West Virginia Democrat, though, has been critical of Republican resistance to the anticipated tax hikes, saying the position McConnell and others staked out was not “reasonable.” “Where do they think it’s going to come from? How are you going to fix America?” Manchin said last week. At long last, America may get an Infrastructure Week. What comes out of it, if anything, remains to be seen.