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CHARLESTON, W.Va. – U.S. Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) Committee, today joined “America’s Newsroom” on Fox News to discuss the need for a targeted, bipartisan approach to infrastructure legislation, and reacted to President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion proposal.

HIGHLIGHTS:

ON LATEST INFRASTRUCTURE TALKS, NEED FOR BIPARTISANSHIP: “I think that if you’re going to have a bipartisan infrastructure package as we’ve had numerous times in the past, you have to have buy-in from legislative leaders. I think that goes without question. We have had a lot of conversations. I’m speaking all the time with Senator Carper who is the leading Democrat on EPW, we’ve been to the White House together to talk about this. So there are ongoing talks.”

ON DEMOCRATS REDEFINING INFRASTRUCTURE: “I think the expansive definition of infrastructure that we see in this sort of ‘Green New Deal wish list’ is called into question. I don’t think that the American people when they think of infrastructure are thinking of home health aides and other things that are included in this bill.”

ON WHAT INFRASTRUCTURE MEANS: “I just spent two weeks at home. We toured a lot of road and bridge projects that are ongoing that we need to give our governors the flexibility to pursue forward what works in rural America, urban America. We opened a new transit station in southern West Virginia. We looked at a waste water and clean drinking water project in the northern part of the state. Those are the basic needs, along with broadband being a new basic need in my opinion that I think we need to focus and where we have that bipartisan synergy where we have in the past gotten together and we can get together again. We’ve got to take some of this extraneous stuff out.”

ON MISLEADING WHITE HOUSE CLAIM THAT REPUBLICANS AREN’T FORWARD THINKING: “I think it’s’ really wrong and misleading to the American public for the president and others to say that we as Republicans are not willing to look forward to what the infrastructure of the future is. We passed a bill 21-0 a year ago that had electric vehicles charging stations and other resiliencies in construction materials, some of the things that think are going to be important moving forward. But that is just a small part, 15 percent of the bill is in that, let’s look at what everything else is.”

ON HOW REPUBLICANS CAN NEGOTIATE WITH THE WHITE HOUSE: “What I would say is you’ve got to reemphasize what working together is. If you have two negotiating positions and the president doesn’t move off of his position, which is what happened under COVID. We moved off of our original position as Republicans, the ten of us, we came back with a counter offer and it was dead silence, and they moved on to reconciliation. My problem is I don’t want to be used as a tool of bipartisanship only for the window dressing, I want to get in there and really work it…yeah the optics of it…and they’re going to go ahead and do what they want anyway with this reconciliation. That I think is the danger and the American people don’t want that.”

BACKGROUND:

On February 11, Senator Capito met with President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and other Senate infrastructure leaders at the White House to discuss the nation’s transportation and infrastructure needs. U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg joined the meeting by phone.

Senator Capito’s full statement following that meeting can be found here.

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