U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday embraced a $1.2 trillion bipartisan Senate deal to renew the nation's roads, bridges and highways and help stimulate the economy -- a major breakthrough on one of his key domestic policy goals.
Freddie Joyner has more.
BIDEN: “Really good meeting.
And to answer your direct question, we have a deal” U.S. President Joe Biden on Thursday announced a bipartisan Senate deal had been struck to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure projects.
The $1.2 trillion proposal came after months of White House negotiations with Democratic and Republican lawmakers… Something Biden embraced in his later remarks inside the White House... “...a bipartisan group of senators, five Democrats, five Republicans, part of a larger group, has come together and forged an agreement that will create millions of American jobs and modernize our American infrastructure to compete with the rest of the world known in the 21st century.” The deal has $579 billion in new spending that includes major investments in the nation's power grid, broadband internet and passenger and freight rail.
BIDEN: “...what we agreed on today is what we could agree on the physical infrastructure.
There was no agreement on the rest.” What was left out of Thursday’s deal was new spending on home health care and child care… key initiatives for some progressive Democrats.
The Democrats who control Congress by razor-thin margins aim to cover those areas in another spending package that they want to maneuver through the Senate without Republican votes.
One member of the bipartisan group of 21 senators who negotiated Thursday's deal, Republican Rob Portman, said this: "We didn't get everything we wanted but we came up with a good compromise that is going to help the American people."
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