Two key Republican senators said President Joe Biden’s statement that he isn’t linking a bipartisan $579 billion infrastructure plan to a larger tax and spending bill will allow negotiations to move ahead.
Senator Rob Portman, a lead infrastructure negotiator for Republicans, said he “was very glad to see the president clarify” remarks he made Friday, which Republicans took as a threat to veto the infrastructure bill by linking it to the bigger legislation that the GOP says it won’t support.
“We were all blindsided by the comments the previous day, which were somehow these two bills were connected,” Portman said on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday.
“It was a surprise, to say the least, that those two got linked and I’m glad they’ve now been de-linked and it’s very clear that we can go forward with a bipartisan bill that’s broadly popular, not just among members of Congress, but the American people,” the Ohio Republican said.
The president and a bipartisan group of senators announced Thursday they had reached an agreement on new infrastructure spending. Biden suggested after the deal was struck that his signature on the final infrastructure bill was contingent on Congress also passing the much larger tax and social spending measure that Democrats are preparing.
With the deal hanging in the balance, Biden issued a statement Saturday saying his comments “created the impression that I was issuing a veto threat on the very plan I had just agreed to, which was certainly not my intent.”
Mitt Romney, also among a group of Republican senators who announced the infrastructure deal with Biden at the White House on Thursday, said he was concerned about Biden’s initial comments but thinks “the waters have been calmed by what he said on Saturday.”
“I do trust the president,” Romney, a Utah Republican, said on CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday. “At the same time I recognize that he and his Democratic colleagues want more than that
“Republicans will support” the infrastructure legislation “if it comes to the floor, but it’s not our choice,” Romney said. “Whether or not this legislation comes to the floor is up to Chuck Schumer and to a degree of course Nancy Pelosi.”
Biden plans to begin traveling the country on Tuesday to promote the bipartisan deal, with his first stop in Wisconsin, a White House official said Saturday. The goal is to build public support not only for the deal but for the social-spending and tax increases Democrats hope to include in the second piece of legislation, which would include elements of his American Families Plan.
“There is still a long way to go,” Portman said. “It’s impossible to get things done in Washington these days, so it’s a minor miracle when you can pull things together.”