Right now, US Congressman Rodney Davis is watching closely the infrastructure debate and the possible agreement coming out of the US Senate. Senate Democrats are weighing spending as much as $6 trillion on their own infrastructure package.
“I think that could be good for Illinois. Good for the country, if there’s a deal. I’m not optimistic that Speaker Pelosi and leader Schumer will want a bipartisan deal because they won’t get their liberal wish list of the Green New Deal crap, getting rid of the Trump tax cuts and raising costs and fees and taxes on every single American.” said Davis.
Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has repeatedly insisted that infrastructure talks are currently on two tracks: The first track is bipartisan, while the second track will include priorities that have no chance of getting GOP support.
Senate Budget Chair Bernie Sanders has been pushing for a large expansion of Medicare into Democrats’ plan. Sanders said he opposed the emerging bipartisan agreement.
Another thing, Davis is concerned about up at Capitol Hill is the fact that the Capitol is still closed.
“How do we get Washington D.C. open again? It’s a disaster that we don’t have visitors. We don’t have the ability to let school groups in the Capitol. This is something that needs to happen. I led letter just last week with over 130 of my colleagues asking speaker Pelosi to open the darn Capitol back up again,” said Davis.
Davis said he had not idea why the Capitol is still closed. COVID-19? Jan. 6?
“She’ll (Pelosi) use every excuse in the book. It’s COVID it’s Jan. 6. It’s something that happened yesterday at 2 p.m. that we don’t even know about. Who knows. We have an interior perimeter fence around the Capitol buildings still, and that has got to come down. We’ve got to figure out a way to secure the Capitol. We can do that by better planning, making sure intelligence is shared, making sure people do their jobs as they were supposed to do. And clearly did not do. But there is no reason to keep school. There’s no reason to shut down the legislative branch of our country, just because you think it’s the right thing to do with no evidence as to whether or not it is,” said Davis.
President Biden is under fire for giving Russian President Vladimir Putin a list of 16 U.S. critical infrastructure sectors that should be off-limits to cyberattacks, with Republicans saying the entire U.S. should be off-limits.
Davis said this is concerning when it comes to things like rebuilding roads and bridges.
“If they’re going to set targets that are based upon the far-left policies of the Democrats in Washington and elsewhere, I mean if he’s talking about things like that overseas, imagine what they’re going to want to put in an infrastructure bill,” said Davis. They can spend $6 trillion, but it’s going to cost $20 trillion when all they care about is raising the cost of rebuilding a road, because they want to know the carbon footprint of every piece of gravel that goes into it.”
Davis said the way the national media covered Biden at the G7 was just disgusting.
“President Trump would have been called him a stooge of Russia and a stooge of Putin, no matter what he did, if he would have done the exact same thing as Biden did, he still would have been accused of colluding with Putin to go against all the other leaders. It’s frustrating,” said Davis. “I don’t think came out of there a winner, and I don’t think that puts us on a good footing for future foreign relations, trade agreements, etc.”
Davis said he doesn’t know of a specific number of infrastructure coming to his district, 13th congressional district.
“This is the issue. What they (Democrats) want to do is they want to run an infrastructure bill that’s what we call off reauthorization. If our normal reauthorization for our highway and transit programs would go through, then we could identify, individual projects and how our districts across the country are going to appoint to benefit. But what the president is talking about…is doing an infrastructure bill that would be off of our reauthorization process then, and it would include the Democrats. To what we call a reconciliation process. It’s going to be moderate Democrats negotiating with AOC, and that could not be good for American taxpayers and certainly not good for actual tax dollar efficiency,” said Davis.
During the House Transportation & Infrastructure Committee’s highway bill markup June 9 and 10, Davis spoke in support of several amendments to the highway bill.
