CHARLESTON — The U.S. Senate is closer to voting on amendments to a bipartisan infrastructure package after bill language was finalized Sunday.
The text of a strike-and-insert amendment to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act crafted by a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators including Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., was released Sunday night after lawmakers worked through the weekend.
“This has been the most enjoyable venture for the last six to eight weeks,” Manchin said Sunday night during remarks on the Senate floor. “This is a big deal. I don’t care who is looking at it. It’s been said that nothing like this has been done in 30 years. It hasn’t.”
The $1.2 trillion package includes $550 billion in new infrastructure spending on a multitude of transportation, water and wastewater, clean energy and broadband expansion projects. A procedural motion to begin debate on the bill passed last Wednesday with all 50 Democrats and 18 Republican senators in favor, easily clearing the 60-vote threshold.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., announced Monday morning that the strike-and-insert amendment will become the basis for the bill going forward. The 2,700-page bill could be up for a full vote by the end of the week once the bill clears the amendment stage.
During floor remarks Monday afternoon, U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., reiterated her support for the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. She was the lead Republican negotiator with President Joe Biden before negotiations switched to the bipartisan senator group. Capito was one of the 17 Republicans who supported last Wednesday’s cloture vote to begin discussion of the bill.
“We started by basically saying we can do this, we want to do this,” Capito said. “Bipartisanship can work, particularly in areas where we have traditionally worked together on, but also areas of critical need to our country. We never lost our focus on that, and neither did the president. Here we are today meeting that challenge.”
The bill — a compromise between Biden’s American Jobs Plan unveiled in April, the negotiations between the White House and the Republicans led by Capito and the bipartisan group of senators including Manchin – is estimated to create more than 2 million jobs per year over the next decade.
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act includes billions in new funding for road and bridge construction, public transportation, electric vehicle infrastructure, ports and waterways, airports, clean water and western water infrastructure, environmental remediation, power grid resiliency, clean energy research and broadband.
“I don’t think any of the 100 of us thinks this bill is absolutely perfect. It never will be,” Capito said. “Delivering for the American people is more important than our newspaper headlines today. We can make a historic investment in our nation’s infrastructure with this bill.”
The bill’s clean energy provisions include funding commercializing carbon capture and sequestration projects, pipeline construction to transport carbon dioxide and the opening up of the Gulf of Mexico for a place to store carbon dioxide from sequestration.
“We’re talking about energy that will make and keep America energy independent but doing it cleaner than any time in the world and any place in the world. We’ll be a leader for the world,” Manchin said. “You can’t eliminate your way to a cleaner environment, but you can