Pelosi on infrastructure: ‘Hopefully we will have bipartisanship’

“But, nonetheless, hopefully we will have bipartisanship.”

The speaker said she’d instructed chairs for committees of jurisdiction to begin outreach to their Republican counterparts on upcoming legislation.

Pelosi said whatever package lawmakers end up crafting must be fiscally sound and that Democrats were examining tax credits, the tax code, the appropriations process and bonding authority among other ways to pay for new spending, which Republicans are likely to criticize.

“This is job creating, which creates revenue that comes back to the Treasury, unlike what the Republicans did with their tax scam in 2017, which gave 83 percent of the benefits to the top 1 percent, and debted to the tune of nearly $1.9 trillion … added to the national debt,” Pelosi said. “They should be the last people talking about what is too expensive for the American people as we meet their needs.”

In a separate interview on “This Week” on Sunday, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Senate Republican, said he would “really like to see bipartisanship on infrastructure,” but added that in the last Congress, House Democrats modified a major Senate highway package in a way that the Republican majority in the Senate couldn’t accept.

“They ignored what we have done in a bipartisan way,” Barrasso said. “If they would take the model we came up with in the committee and the Senate for highway and transportation, I think that’s a very good start. I talked with the secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg about it, and I think that is the model in which we should move forward on transportation and infrastructure.”

Source:Politico