Coons Gushes About Super Secret Bipartisan Caucus Work on Infrastructure Deal as Infrastructure Deal Falls Apart
McConnell put the kibosh on the pared-down to nothing infrastructure deal in real time. No matter. Coons rushed to take credit for saving America. All hail BIPARTISANSHIP!!! All hail the SUPER SECRET BIPARTISAN CAUCUS!
Q: You were a part of the larger group of 20 bipartisan senators who have been meeting on this. Tell us your thoughts about the impact and the import about what we just heard from the president and your colleagues at the White House.
Sen. Coons: Well, Dana, this is a great day for President Biden, for the determined group of ten Democrats and Republicans who you just heard from – from Kyrsten Sinema and Rob Portman, from Joe Manchin and Susan Collins and others who have been hammering away at this for days and days. And now the work begins to build it out, to make sure that beyond the 21 of us who have publicly been supporting it and urging them along, we get more supporters in both caucuses. Over the next eight years, this represents $1.2 trillion in investment and infrastructure. That really is a big deal. And this framework has $[579] billion in new spending. To get an agreement on that on a bipartisan basis took a lot of very hard work.
So I just want to congratulate the folks who were just over at the White House with President Biden. This is a significant accomplishment. Something that should not go unremarked is that the Senate of the United States also just passed in the last hour and a half a bold bipartisan bill on climate change in the agriculture sector. Senator Stabenow and Senator Braun were the leads on this. There are good bipartisan things happening here in the Senate. I do think for us to accomplish most of President Biden’s boldest agenda in the American Jobs Plan and Family Plan, we will still have to proceed by reconciliation – which I support.
But as you just heard, a Republican senator from Louisiana celebrated the White House. This package has $47 billion to do climate resiliency work. It is great to hear Democrats and Republicans legislating together around something as urgent as combatting climate change and as significant as creating great high-paying jobs, building American infrastructure for this century.
What a joke. McConnell has constantly and repeatedly proven that the bipartisan caucus is a figment of Coons’ imagination.
McConnell has constantly and repeatedly proven that he means it when he says that Biden is getting zero Republican votes in the Senate on anything that reads like a Biden win. And yet Coons can’t stop acting like a fucking fool.
I simply don’t know what is more strange. That Coons can keep this blizzard world pantomime going, or that the press continues to cover it as if it is real. It’s like day 1,597 of a drought and Coons still gets to stand in front of TV cameras and say, “Feels like rain today. Later this morning or maybe this afternoon.”
It ain’t happening, and as you note in another post, none of the Republicans will end up voting for it, because the only reason they were playing along was to kill the non-road&bridge portions that Biden said will be brought up in reconciliation.
There’s also the lie in Coons’ bullshit preening that the skinny version “accomplish[es] most of Biden’s agenda.”
When will the media stop pretending this guy speaks for Biden? To my knowledge, Biden has never acknowledged any supposed “closeness” between the two, and you know what they say about Irish Alzheimer’s — you forget everything but the grudges.
Biden will never forgive Coons for the Tom Gordon stuff; he felt strongly enough about it back then that he publicly snubbed Coons from the stage at a Democratic Party function. I must assume, then, that it’s Coons, who likes to pretend he’s Mr. Ethics, who is spreading this lie.