Photo via Flickr / Adam Schultz
President Biden was in the right place at exactly the right time when he traveled to La Crosse last week to begin pushing passage of the trillion-dollar bipartisan infrastructure jobs package he negotiated with Republicans. Wisconsin will be an important political battleground in next year’s midterms that could determine the success of Biden’s presidency.
The timing couldn’t have been better. The president’s appearance here was immediately followed with the announcement of the largest jobs surge of Biden’s presidency. Blowing past expectations of 700,000 jobs in June, the U.S. added 850,000 new jobs and continued the nation’s fastest growth in wages since the early 1980s.
That was due to Biden’s $1.9-trillion-dollar American Rescue Plan that passed in March without a single Republican vote in either the House or Senate. It was the perfect time to promote passage of Biden’s infrastructure bills to create millions of even better paying construction jobs and clean energy jobs of the future.
“This will be a generational investment to modernize our infrastructure,” Biden said in La Crosse. “We’ll put American workers to work in good paying jobs. Not a minimum wage job, not a $15-an-hour job. A prevailing wage job, good-paying jobs repairing our roads and bridges.”
GOP Sabotage
Biden and Democratic leaders have made it clear from the beginning they’ll pursue the president’s job creation along two parallel tracks. One is through bipartisan negotiations with Republican Senators willing to stray from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s continuing attempts to sabotage America’s economic recovery under Biden. Not every elected Republican thinks it’s a good idea politically to block Biden from putting Americans back to work in better paying jobs after they were thrown out of work for year under the previous Republican president.
The second track is a budget reconciliation bill all 50 Democratic Senators could pass with Vice President Kamala Harris breaking a tie with Republicans. That’s necessary to pass Democratic priorities that are extremely popular with the American people but Republicans vociferously oppose. These include clean energy jobs to reduce the devastating effects of climate change and other “human infrastructure” including affordable health care and subsidized childcare allowing women to return to work. An overwhelming majority of Americans also want wealthy individuals and corporations to pay income taxes just like they do. Republicans consider continually cutting taxes for their millionaire and billionaire donors their top priority.
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Republicans claimed they were “blindsided” when Biden said he intended to pass both bills, but they’ve really always known that. Republicans don’t get to dictate what Democrats put into legislation that requires only Democratic votes. That depends on how much Biden can negotiate with his party’s most conservative Senators. West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, the most conservative, already said he could support adding as much as $2 trillion in additional spending over the next 10 years for Democratic priorities through budget reconciliation. He wants to fund part of it by reducing those enormous Trump tax cuts for the wealthy and their multimillion-dollar corporations.
More Jobs, Higher Wages
Biden’s creation of millions of American jobs paying higher wages by November 2022 could fuel such a robust national economic recovery it completely reverses the usual expectation for an incumbent president to lose congressional seats in the midterms following his election. That’s the reason some Republicans are providing bipartisan support for Biden’s infrastructure jobs bill.
Here’s another reason Wisconsin was an excellent place for Biden to launch his nationwide campaign to build support for his economic recovery program. Wisconsin Republicans no longer represent state voters after losing the last two statewide elections in 2018 and 2020. Republican control of the legislature is the result of corrupt gerrymandering a decade ago that is coming to an end. Most Wisconsin voters, like most Americans, have no interest in continuing to refight the election. They’re relieved all the lies and chaos are behind them. Now they’re eager to get on with rebuilding America.
Wisconsin also offers one of the best opportunities for Democrats to increase their Senate majority in 2022 with the expiration of the nationally embarrassing tenure of Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Fantasyland). Johnson lives in an alternative reality where a violent Republican attack on the Capitol threatening to dismember members of congress and hang the vice president to overthrow a presidential election is an enthusiastic Trump campaign rally.
Any rational political party would flee from their defeated, one-term, anti-American president as quickly as possible before his most deranged supporters returned to the Capitol to finish them off. Instead, Republicans are sticking with their losing president in an election that wasn’t even close in which Americans voted for a return to normal life in their democracy.
