Source: United States Senator for Ohio Rob Portman
Portman Served as Lead Republican Negotiator for the Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act
November 15, 2021 | Press Releases
WASHINGTON, DC – This evening on the Senate floor, Senator Portman celebrated the enactment into law of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act, landmark legislation he helped to craft that will provide hundreds of billions of dollars to repair, upgrade, and modernize our nation’s roads, bridges, ports, and other key infrastructure assets.
Portman, who served as the lead Republican negotiator of this legislation, highlighted how it will benefit both Ohio and the nation by building out hard assets that will improve our productivity and competitiveness, create hundreds of thousands of good-paying jobs, and serve as a counter-inflationary force on the economy at a time of surging inflation. He thanked the bipartisan senators with whom he worked to develop the legislation, and called today’s signing a victory for the American people.
A transcript of his remarks can be found below and a video can be found here.
“Mr. President, for many years now, there is a joke that presidents have what’s called ‘Infrastructure Weeks’ – where they talk about infrastructure and the need for us to move our country forward and fixing our outdated system of roads and bridges, freight lines, our ports. We are as a country behind other countries in terms of investing in infrastructure. And yet Infrastructure Week comes and goes without any progress.
“Well, today we had a true Infrastructure Week because the President of the United States signed legislation that came out of this body that was bipartisan, that helps to repair our infrastructure in ways that is historic in the sense that it is a broader infrastructure bill than we have passed around here in decades.
“So it’s a big day for infrastructure and therefore a good day for my constituents in Ohio and people all around the country. People who are stuck in a traffic jam, or maybe people who are worried about the bridge they’re going over, whether it’s safe or not, which is the case of a big bridge in my community, or whether it’s people that don’t have access to high–speed Internet and therefore can’t do their school work or be able to start a business or be able to get their telehealth. If you’re a veteran in Ohio and you want to access telehealth, it’s tough to do it in about one-third of our state because you don’t have high–speed Internet.
“So there are a lot of different things that are in this legislation that will help the people who I represent. We have a lot of aging infrastructure in Ohio on the water side. So our water infrastructure includes a lot of lead pipes still, as an example, and therefore drinking water issues. But we also have a lot of edicts that have come down from the federal government saying, ‘You’ve got to stop the combined sewage overflow,’ and so on. And our local municipalities just can’t pay for the changes that are required. This will help them as well.
“In Cleveland, Ohio, we have a few decades old, I think it’s a 47–year–old transit system. And the cars, frankly, are being taken off track because they just have gotten to the point they can’t be used anymore and yet it’s way too expensive. The funding in here for transit will be very helpful to Cleveland, Ohio.
“In my own community, we have a bridge that people have been talking about fixing for literally 25 years because I’ve been involved in that discussion when I was in the House and now in the Senate. And the problem is the bridge was constructed assuming a certain amount of traffic, and yet the amount of traffic has more than doubled. As a result, they’ve taken the shoulders off the bridge in order to create more room for another lane. As a result, when you have a flat tire or an accident, God forbid, on the bridge, which unfortunately happens too often, there is no place to go and therefore it causes even more safety hazards.
“The bridge is a bottleneck every single day. Not just at rush hour. I can go there in the afternoon, 2:00, 3:00 in the afternoon and people are backed up on this bridge. And a lot of the people who are backed up, by the way, are people who are in business. It is 18-wheelers that are trying to get through because it’s the confluence of I–71 and I–75, two major interstates. So it’s a big economic issue. All that lost time in commuting every day across that bridge and all the lost time in terms of the freight has a big economic impact. Billions of dollars they say. Three percent of America’s commerce goes across that bridge every day. So it’s a real problem.
“We have never been able to figure out how to fix it because we can’t accumulate enough money – locally, state, federal – to be able to make the big change that has to occur, which is building another bridge, expanding and fixing up the current one. It’s been frustrating. This legislation that was signed today will finally provide the tools to do that. They’ll have to apply like any other project around the country. It’s a grant that’s based on merit, but the grant is specifically focused on major bridges like ours where you have this economic impact that our so called functionally obsolete, meaning they’re carrying more traffic than they should be. Ours is carrying twice as much. So it should fit very well.
“But they’re going to have to come up with a local match as well. I’m confident that that can be found. The local match will be less now than it would have been before. Before we did have a tough time finding that local match and we’re not able to move forward. But people in my community, they’re ready for this bridge to be fixed.
“The Brent Spence Bridge is something I’ve heard about again my entire career, and I’ve gotten a little bit of funding here and there to help do the environmental impact statement or do the engineering, but to actually get in there and do it is going to be extremely expensive. And you’re not going to find two, three-plus billion dollars without this kind of a federal commitment. So that’s in this legislation as an example.
“It’s also helpful that this legislation deals with our ports because one of the issues right now we’ve got with the supply chain crisis is that things are just not moving through our ports as quickly as they should, in part because our ports have fallen behind. I mentioned other countries that spent more infrastructure. Countries like China spend a lot on their ports.
“China spends more than we do, as do other countries, because they know that if you spend money on infrastructure, you get a more efficient economy that leads to higher productivity. That in turn leads to economic growth and more tax revenue coming in, frankly. These are all factors that should be considered in looking at an infrastructure bill. It’s not like normal spending that might be stimulative spending that goes out the door right away. This spending will happen over two, three, five, 10, even 15 years for these major projects.
“And then these assets that you’re investing in. Let’s say it’s a port or let’s say it’s freight rail or let’s say it’s the bridge in Cincinnati or the infrastructure that’s a water infrastructure issue in northeast Ohio because of lead pipes, what is fixed will last for a long time. So it’s an investment in a long–term asset.
“Right now, our country is facing historically high levels of inflation, highest inflation we’ve had in more than 30 years, and it’s a big problem. Everything’s gone up. Gas, I heard yesterday that now gas has gone up 50 percent this year. Two weeks ago, it was 42 percent. But all I know is that it’s gone up about a buck a gallon. And when I fill up my pickup truck, I’m spending $100 now. And that’s tough for people, particularly people who have to commute for their work. So for lower and middle-income families in Ohio, this inflation is really devastating. You go to the grocery. I just had somebody show me a photograph recently, someone took on an iPhone of three ribeye steaks for $100 at Costco.
“I mean, everything is going up, and that’s really devastating. So you wouldn’t want this infrastructure bill to add to that inflationary pressure. The good news is that as economists look at this, they say that it goes into the economy in ways that should actually be counter-inflationary over time. What does that mean? Well, inflation is where you got too much demand and not enough supply right? So you have, coming off the pandemic, more people getting out buying stuff and yet the supply wasn’t there, that caused this inflation.
“Here in the Congress, we passed legislation that aggravated that made it worse because we passed $1.9 trillion in spending in March. Much of what went right into people’s pockets. Think of the stimulus checks. Think of the $600 more on unemployment insurance and some of the tax provisions. And in effect, created more demand out there. And the supply wasn’t there, which raises inflation. This spending is different. Again, this is not stimulus spending. This is long–term spending for capital assets. So what the economists say, including some conservatives like Michael Strain at AEI and Doug Holtz-Eakin at the American Action Forum, what they say is this is actually going to lead to less inflation because you’re adding to the supply side. So by building that bridge, that’s part of the supply side of the economy rather than the demand side of the economy.
“So I’m pleased with that, too, because what we want right now is to push back against this inflation, not do something that creates more demand and more inflation. One of my concerns about the other legislation that’s being talked about, which is not the infrastructure bill but it’s called the reconciliation bill. Democrats I’ve heard today are calling it Build Back Better more often, but others call it the tax and spend bill, but that’s about more stimulative spending. And I have very serious concerns about that adding to the inflationary pressures we’ve already got, which are so serious, and unlike what the administration said previously, it’s not transitory. I mean, it’s going to be around for a while. Every economist I’ve talked to says they expect it to be around for a year or two. Best-case scenario.
“So again, what we signed today, the infrastructure bill should over time actually have a counter inflationary effect. Most of the money, again, is not going to be spent in the near term. Most will be spent over time, but when it is spent, it’s spent more on the supply side of the economy rather than the demand side of the economy.
“So I’m really pleased that we were able to pass this legislation, and I hope that it’s not just going to provide a model for what we ought to do in terms of substance – helping make our economy more efficient, more productive, doing things that make sense for the people we represent in terms of reducing their commute or making their bridges safer, as I said, or dealing with the online issue, not having access to high speed Internet, being sure that people will have safe drinking water.
“But also, it’s important I think that this bill will be looked at as a model of bipartisanship. What do I mean by that? Well, typically around here, you kind of have a Republican or a Democrat approach to something, and we kind of fight over it. And there’s not much space in the middle. And the reconciliation bill right now that’s being talked about, as an example, is all Democrats, there’s no Republicans supporting it. Everybody knows that. And the question is just sort of how do you tough it out through the process. And because reconciliation can be done with just 50 votes, not 60 votes, the notion is you’d get every Democrat, and then the Vice President would break the tie.
“Much better, I think, if you do something on a bipartisan basis because you get more buy–in from the country, you pass better legislation that makes more sense for our country. Like this infrastructure bill. And the model that was used here was that some Republicans and some Democrats got together and said, ‘Let’s come up with a bipartisan approach to infrastructure, working from the middle out. Not taking our directions from leadership on the right or on the left, Democrat, Republican, or the White House, but let’s come up with something ourselves that makes sense.’
“This was in the context of an early Biden administration proposal on infrastructure. Again, it’s confusing because there’s so many different bills out there. But this one sort of combined the infrastructure bill that was passed today and the so-called Build Back Better legislation they’re now trying to pass because it had high tax increases. It had significant tax increases, mostly on the corporate side, but that would affect working families, in my view, and a lot of people’s views on my side of the aisle. Everybody was against the tax increases. Plus, it had a lot of what the Biden administration called ‘human infrastructure.’ So it wasn’t just talking about core infrastructure as we’ve talked about today, the roads and the bridges and the rail and the waterways and other things that you would normally think of when you think of infrastructure – transportation infrastructure, airports, the ports.
“Instead, it also included a lot of support for ‘soft infrastructure,’ as they called it, or human infrastructure, which in that case was health care, taking care of Medicare changes, some changes, I believe in terms of child care that are in the current Build Back Better. So what we said as a group, five Democrats, five Republicans, was we want to do infrastructure. This is something that’s been talked about, again, forever.
“Every President in modern times, every Congress in modern times has promoted the idea of a significant investment in infrastructure because America is falling behind. And what we said is, ‘Let’s make that promise we’ve given to the American people something that we can actually follow through on this time by having a bipartisan bill that has the support of both sides.’ So we basically took the bigger bill that the Biden administration had proposed, pulled out the taxes, so no tax hikes, but also pulled out the so–called human infrastructure or soft infrastructure and focused just on core infrastructure.
“And that was the principal basis upon which we went forward. The other thing that we decided was that not only we’re going to keep taxes out and focus on core infrastructure, but we’re going to make it truly bipartisan, meaning we’re going to come up with a negotiated settlement and we’re going to make concessions on both sides to find that common ground to get this thing done, and we’re going to do it. And sure enough, we did.
“It took us four or five months. We started eight months ago and passed it here about five months ago. But we had some setbacks because there are tough issues we had to grapple with. How much money to put into the way you expand broadband as an example? And how should it be done through the states or through the feds? We came up with ways that we thought made the most sense, but also could pass muster up here in terms of the bipartisanship. And I think in the end, as a rule, not in all cases, but as a rule, if it has to be bipartisan, if you make that your commitment, you’re going to get better legislation because you’re listening to everybody. Including to the governors in the case of broadband, including to the companies that provide the broadband, but also including the families and the parents who are driving to the McDonald’s to get Internet access for their kid to be able to do her homework. And listening to the small business entrepreneurs who are saying we need this level of high–speed Internet to be able to start a successful company in a rural area, say, in my home state of Ohio. And also listening to those who are interested in having enough access to Internet to be able to get their medicine online basically, to be able to do telehealth, to do actual discussions with medical professionals online rather than having to drive into the hospital, say, from a rural area.
“So that was all part of what we intended to do was to not just have a good bill substantively, but to show that you can do this in a bipartisan way. That group of ten, five Democrats and five Republicans, then became eleven Democrats and eleven Republicans. We kind of grew out from there. And then by the end of the process, we had Democrats and Republicans supporting the final product, including the Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer and the Republican Leader, Mitch McConnell.
“They both supported it, and Senator McConnell in particular, because I’m on the Republican side, gave us the space to be able to work this out. He didn’t agree with everything that we were doing all the time. He let his views be known, of course, but he knew that we had in our intentions to come up with something that was truly bipartisan and good for the country. And that infrastructure was an area where we typically had had bipartisan support, but we just couldn’t get it over the line because of the partisan gridlock around here to do anything. And in this case, he gave us that space, we came up with a good bill and he supported it, and Mitch McConnell’s support was helpful in the end, 19 Republicans supported the legislation.
“In the House, unfortunately, it went over there a few months ago and sat and sat and sat. And that concerned some of us because we could just see it becoming more political, more partisan. And we had a commitment from President Biden and a commitment among ourselves, not only no taxes, being sure that it focused on core infrastructure, but also that we would ensure that it was de–linked from anything else, particularly the larger reconciliation bill that’s now being discussed, the so-called Build Back Better bill, that this was separate.
“We wanted our bill to be addressed on its merits, which is what our constituents expect. The American people don’t want us to do Christmas trees up here where you’re trading things off. They want to know that if you have a good bill, you should be able to get it to the floor and get it passed, which we did here in the Senate. And I appreciate that. But in the House it got all entangled with this legislation that was partisan that no Republican supported. Again, this is the large taxes, large spending bill that’s called Build Back Better, probably $2 trillion of spending. I saw some analysis today that if you don’t sunset all the spending provisions it’s more like $4.7 trillion, and there’s about $1.8 trillion in tax increases to pay for that.
“So we’ll see what happens. I think there’s going to be a gap in their revenue and their spending based on the analysis I’ve seen. And I just think it’s the wrong time in the economy, as I said earlier, to even think about this sort of thing. One, to raise taxes on the economy right now that’s I think exactly the wrong thing to do. We should be helping to encourage those businesses that are finally coming out of this pandemic, have been struggling, don’t have enough workers to be sure that they can get back on their feet, not taxing them. And same with families. Same with the so called the pass-through companies, the smaller companies that would be hurt.
“And then you got to be sure that as we move forward we’re not increasing inflation. And the stimulative spending that goes to the demand side that puts more money in people’s pockets is part of the reason we have this high inflation. So I really hope that that legislation to Build Back Better legislation does not move forward. But my point is the infrastructure bill needed to be dealt with on its own, and it got tangled up with that. And that’s too bad. But at the end, there was a vote permitted finally in the House of Representatives after several pledges to have votes that did not happen. Finally, it was voted on about ten days ago now. And when that vote occurred there was enough bipartisan support, not as much as I would like to have seen on the Republican side, frankly, because I think it’s a good bill the Republicans should support, but there was support on the Republican side and the Democratic side, and it was passed into law and sent to President Biden, and he signed it today.
“So that’s the good news that we were able to get this done and I hope again, provide, at least in terms of what we did here in the Senate, a model going forward of finding out where can you find consensus between Republicans and Democrats on big issues that the American people care about? And we’ve got plenty of them. I would put an issue like immigration, what’s happening at the border, I would put an issue like what’s going on with our financial situation, with this huge new debt we have and the deficit spending every year. But there’s so many issues, health care issues, issues that have to do with how you deal not just with the immigration on the border but people who are here. Shouldn’t we be able to find some bipartisan consensus on these things? And isn’t that what the American people expect us to do, where you’ve got big challenges, whether they’re domestic or international, shouldn’t we figure out a way, even though we have differences of opinion to find that common ground and to move forward rather than to be stuck in a partisan gridlock situation?
“Today, at the signing ceremony, the President spoke a little about that and said that he supported bipartisan efforts to move the country forward, but by the same token he also was saying he supports this reconciliation process that is strictly partisan and would be jamming our Congress, again, without a single Republican supporting it and doing policy that we think is wrongheaded given where we are with our economy, particularly with regard to inflation and the need to come out of this pandemic with a stronger economy, more people working and concerned that tax increases will make that difficult.
“So again, I would like to congratulate everyone who was involved in this infrastructure process. It was a big group up here in the Senate. But the group of five and five, the five Democrats and five Republicans who kind of led the negotiation including my colleague Kyrsten Sinema, who led the Democratic side. She did a terrific job. She was very persistent for those of you who know her and have watched her. That won’t surprise you. But she ensured that we kept on track. And sometimes you get off track because we had a lot of different issues we had to deal with, and it took us, again, a few months to get there. But she was very helpful in terms of moving us forward and getting to a resolution. Ultimately, all ten members agreed, ‘We’re going to resolve this thing. We’re going to come to a solution, even if it means not getting anything we want,’ and nobody gets what everything they want in life, right? In your family, in your business, and in Congress. It’s pretty much the same thing. It’s pretty simple, which is you can’t get everything you want, but you can get most of what you want. In this case, you can do something great for the American people.
“The other eight of those colleagues were Susan Collins, Mitt Romney, Lisa Murkowski, Bill Cassidy, Joe Manchin, Jean Shaheen, Mark Warner, John Tester and so many others were also involved and helpful. But those were some of the colleagues who were part of this G–10 process. A couple of members that I would like to mention tonight and thank them are, again, Senator McConnell for his help, giving us the space to be able to work this out and then ultimately supporting and lending his critical support to something that’s good for the country, good for Kentucky. But also Kevin Cramer on our side of the aisle, was very helpful to us in bringing together our group of 22 Republicans and Democrats. And then Shelley Moore Capito.
“Shelley Moore Capito is the top Republican on the committee that deals with a lot of these issues, including the surface transportation legislation. And she was very helpful, along with the chair of that group, Tom Carper, to get us where we are. They actually met with the White House, Shelley Moore Capito and group of her members, and that gave us a foundation for some of the ideas that we had, but also the committee work we respected. One of the things that I’ve seen time and time again in the last couple of weeks is that it’s a $1.2 trillion bill on infrastructure. In a way it is. And in a way it isn’t.
“So just to explain that briefly, Congress every year has a process where we appropriate funding. We also every five years typically do a transportation bill, the Surface Transportation Act. That $1.2 trillion includes that. So the amount on top of what Congress would have otherwise spent based on what the committees had done on a bipartisan basis is roughly $542 billion. So it’s really a $542 billion bill of new spending, not $1.2 trillion. That may make some of my Republican colleagues feel a little better about supporting it because they’re concerned about our debt and deficit, as am I.
“By the way, we came up with ways to pay for that, including actually repurposing some of the funding that had gone out to COVID that had not been used. But it’s really more of a $542 billion in new spending, still historic levels and again provides enough funding to do all the wonderful things I talked about in terms of making our infrastructure work better for all of us.
“Second, is I’ve heard a lot over the last couple of weeks, particularly about President Biden signing his bill, the Biden infrastructure bill. He negotiated with us, and I appreciate that. His legislation, I said, was very different. It had the tax increases, it had spending on a lot of human infrastructure. And I appreciate that he was willing to say to the Democratic side of the aisle, ‘Okay, that’s what I want, but I’m willing to work with you guys on a bipartisan basis.’ So he did do that. But he also again gave us space to work that out here in the Senate, between ourselves. And that’s the reality.
“And so when we came together with legislation, we were sitting down with his people, including a guy named Steve Ricchetti, who is the Deputy Chief of Staff and the National Economic Council head, a guy named Brian Deese, and we negotiated with them on some of the issues. But this really came out of, again, a true bipartisan process. It’s not really anybody’s bill. It’s America’s bill, because representatives from every part of the country were involved, and those elected representatives made decisions that were in the interests of their constituents, but also our entire country. And that’s why, in the end, I think this legislation represents not just a victory for the American people, which it does, but in a way, a victory for common sense and bipartisanship that this place badly needed.
“I hope it’s a template for things to come. And I hope that when someone goes out on a limb and says, ‘I’m going to support this legislation because it’s in the interests of the American people,’ that that person is rewarded rather than attacked. And in the House, I’ve seen some of this with some of my Republican colleagues who supported it, that people are upset on a partisan basis because they think it somehow gives too much credit to Democrats if this were to pass. I suppose if you took that attitude, nothing would pass because it’s either a Democrat or Republican bill and the other side would block it.
“We need to get to a different mindset where we’re thinking, ‘What’s good for the country?’ And interestingly, when you look at what the polling data is saying about this bill, it’s very popular. Initially, the numbers were 87 percent approval rating – Republicans, Democrats, independents, everyone. One saw yesterday was 65 percent because it’s gotten into more to the partisan back and forth with Republicans saying that somehow because President Biden is in the presidency and he was involved with this, it’s his bill. It’s not his bill, it’s all of our bill. But still, 65 percent approval rating is pretty rare for any major piece of legislation. So the American people get it. They want us to move forward.
“There’re partisans on both sides, of course, who would prefer only to move forward if it’s their way. And otherwise, we should block everything. But the vast majority of the American people understand that we’ve got to move forward and ensure that you have adequate infrastructure to compete with countries like China. Infrastructure changes that will improve our economy’s efficiency, therefore our productivity, therefore increase economic growth, therefore bring more revenue in. Who could be against that?
“There are differences of opinion on how exactly you ought to spend the money. I get that. But I do think this is going to be over time, five years, 10 years, 15 years from now, something people will look back and say, ‘Aha, this project, which could never be done now, has been accomplished and makes my life easier, it makes my community work better.’
“That’s what this bill is going to be about. And my hope is that again, it will be a template for other projects in the future where we say, ‘let’s figure out a way, despite our differences, to figure out some kind of common ground and move forward on these challenges that our country faces and on issues that people really care about to be able to make their lives better.’ Ultimately, that should be our job.
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