GOP Senator: ‘Take Away The Extra Infrastructure Areas’ In Biden’s Bill

Appearing on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Wednesday, West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito stated that Congress should “take away the extra ‘infrastructure’ areas that the president has put into his bill.” She added that the Biden administration should not raise taxes to pay for their infrastructure bill because of the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

Squawk Box host Joe Kernan asked, “What would you like to do in terms of infrastructure and how much would you like to spend doing it?”

“What I’d like to do is get back to what I consider the regular definition of infrastructure in terms of job creation,” Capito answered. “So that’s roads, bridges, ports, airports, including broadband into that, water infrastructure. And we’ve already made, sort of, our first step there in our bipartisan way through our committee. We have a bill on water and wastewater structure; it’s about $30 billion dollars over five years and it works on some of the things that are aspirational in President Biden’s plan. So I think the best way for us to do this is hit the sweet spot of where we agree, and I think we can agree on a lot of the measures moving forward. How much, I would say, probably into the $600 or $800 billion — but we haven’t put all that together yet.”

“But I think that if we’re going to do this together, which we want to do and is our desire, we’ve got to find those areas and take away the extra ‘infrastructure’ areas that the president has put into his bill, like home health aids and school building and all of these kinds of things,” she continued.

Kernan noted that raising taxes to pay for the infrastructure bill would not be a good idea with inflation already a problem. He asked Capito how she would pay for her suggested bill.

“I don’t think there’s going to be much appetite for those of us on the Republican side who voted for the Tax Cuts and Jobs bill in 2017 to raise taxes,” Capito said. “What we saw in 2020, pre-pandemic, obviously, was higher wages, more people working, people who had trouble finding jobs were finding jobs and moving up in the employment chain, so to speak, so we were having the desired results. We had trillions of dollars moving back into this country as a result of that, no corporate inversions. I don’t know why we would go back to that and put our country in a position where we’re not competitive as we are right now.”

“So how do we pay for that?” she asked rhetorically. “This a huge question. … It’s going to have to come from a lot of different sources, but this is important … we cannot raise taxes now when we’re in such a precarious position moving out of this last year of pandemic.”

Asked if the Democrats would force their infrastructure plan through by using reconciliation, thus allowing them to pass the bill by using the 50-50 tie in the Senate and the tie-breaking vote from Vice President Kamala Harris, Capito answered, “I wouldn’t be being fully forthright here if I didn’t say that was my concern, that it is going to be a sort of march of folks going to the White House and us doing bipartisan work in our committees and in the end, it becomes a partisan instrument. Where I think we could really score some wins here for the country, is if we take the portions that we know we agree on and we move those through our committees.”

Meanwhile, Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman expressed his misgivings about any attempt by the Democrats to negotiate with Republicans, saying, “They are not doing any outreach that is significant.”

Senate Minority Whip John Thune stated, “I don’t think there is going to be any appetite among Republicans for doing anything that undoes any of the 2017 law. The question is whether they are willing to do a truly infrastructure bill or whether they want to do the big government bill, and if they want to do the big government bill, it is hard to see how you would get a lot of Republicans to vote for what they are talking about.”

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