The Badly Weakened Infrastructure Bill

If, as is possible, the roughly one trillion dollar infrastructure bill passes, it will be celebrated as a great triumph of bipartisan achievement. In actuality it’s a travesty of that. As Katrina vanden Hueval pointed out in a column in yesterday’s Washington Post, Republicans succeeded in excising critically important provisions: “funding for research and development, for U.S. manufacturing, for public housing, schools and child-care centers, for home and community-based care, . . .for clean-energy tax credits,{and it cut} proposed funding for public transit by half, for electric vehicles by 90 percent and for broadband by a third.”

Not all Democratic senators, much less any Republicans, understand that evading or eliminating the filibuster is critical to the viability of our country and American democracy.