Tag: infrastructure bill

Virginia Testing In-Car Drunk Driving Prevention Technology, Could Serve as National Model

Admin

The Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles is working with the Driver Alcohol Detection System for Safety (DADSS) and the Automotive Coalition for Traffic Safety (ACTS) on testing drunk driving prevention technology, which could serve as a national model.

The public-private partnership is starting its testing of the system in trucks.

The $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that Congress passed last month requires drunk and impaired driving prevention technology as standard technology in vehicles as early as 2026. President Biden has signed the bill into law.

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Amid Supply-Chain Logjams, Infrastructure Bill Allocates $250M to Target Truck Emissions at Ports

Virginia Star Staff

This week’s Golden Horseshoe is awarded to the Biden Administration and members of Congress who voted for the $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, which includes $250 million for reducing truck emissions at port facilities, which have been crippled by record-breaking cargo backlogs for months.

Critics have attributed the bottlenecks to draconian California emissions standards that exclude up to half the nation’s truckers from transporting shipping containers to and from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the nation’s two busiest, which together account for close to one third of total U.S. shipping cargo volume.

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Analysis: Five Controversial Policies Tucked Inside $1.2 Trillion Infrastructure Bill Passed by Congress

Virginia Star Staff

The final $1.2 trillion INVEST in America Act passed the Democrat-led House in a late night vote on Friday. Tucked away inside the infrastructure bill are some controversial policies, including these five:

1. The cryptocurrency tax provision in the Senate version of the bill was the subject of scrutiny from Democrats and Republicans. The language was not amended in the final bill that passed the House. The legislation includes an IRS reporting requirement for brokers of cryptocurrency transactions.

2. Under the “national motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot” section of the bill, there is a pilot program to create a vehicle miles traveled system for taxing drivers based on their annual vehicle mileage. During his confirmation process, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg floated the idea of taxing motorists based on the number of miles they travel each year as a way to partly fund the legislation. The Biden administration backed off of full-scale development of the controversial proposal, settling instead for a pilot program.

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Commentary: Taking the Infrastructure Bill Hostage Didn’t Work

RealClearWire
Nancy Pelosi, AOC's mother and her all together

Back in August, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait blessed the strategy of the Congressional Progressive Caucus to withhold their votes for the Senate’s bipartisan physical infrastructure plan until that bill was effectively linked to a bigger, broader, and surely partisan, measure investing in a range of items from climate protection to universal preschool. He argued that “ransoming the infrastructure bill” would turn the tables on the party’s moderates:

Historically, most partisan bills are shaped by the preferences of the members of Congress closest to the middle, and their colleagues on the political extreme simply have to go along with it. … This time, the left has real power. Progressives can credibly threaten to sink a priority that moderates care about more than they do.

Twice in the past two months, most recently last Thursday, the House progressives successfully executed this strategy, blocking attempts by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to pass the bipartisan infrastructure legislation before an agreement is reached on the larger “Build Back Better” bill.

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Votes on Build Back Better, Infrastructure Bill Delayed as Democrats Scramble to Reach Agreement on Lowering Drug Costs

Virginia Star Staff

The House Rules Committee is no longer meeting Monday to markup Democrats’ spending package, meaning that the full House vote on it and the bipartisan infrastructure bill will be delayed past Tuesday, when Democratic leadership originally sought to pass the linked legislation.

An aide said Sunday that the committee would need “additional time to craft language and get final agreement with all parties involved,” telling Punchbowl News that “extensive progress” had been made, and that the House would vote “as early as possible this week.”

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Commentary: Conservatives File Suit to ‘Derail Biden Climate Railroad’

RealClearWire
Michael Regan

Michael Regan began his tenure as President Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator by dismissing dozens of outside scientific advisers appointed during the previous administration — part of an effort to “ensure the agency receives the best possible scientific insight to support our work.”

At the time, Regan (pictured) called it a “reset.” Opponents grumbled that it looked more like “a purge.” Now, one of those advisers, Stanley Young, has filed a lawsuit in federal court accusing the agency of violating U.S. law; the suit also seeks an injunction to halt the work of his former committee.

The legal dustup is the latest rearguard action from the right on environmental issues. Conservatives see the case as their best chance to thwart the Biden administration’s multi-agency approach to combating climate change, seen as hostile to the fossil fuel industry.

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House Approves Debt Ceiling Increase, Temporarily Delaying Nationwide Default

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The House on Tuesday voted to lift the debt ceiling by $480 billion, temporarily averting widespread economic calamity after weeks of partisan gridlock and sending the bill to President Joe Biden’s desk.

The House briefly interrupted its weeklong recess to pass a rule governing debate for three separate bills to which the ceiling raise was attached. It passed on a party-line vote given Republicans continuing opposition to lifting the ceiling.

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Democrats Push to Make Child Tax Credit Permanent Despite a Lack of Taxpayer Support

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Democrats are pushing to permanently expand monthly child tax credits in their spending package, but a new poll shows that just 35% of Americans support extending the payments beyond July 2022.

The expanded payments began in July as a part of President Joe Biden’s coronavirus relief package signed in March. While the Politico/Morning Consult poll released Wednesday found that 50% of Americans supported the increase in payments, 12 points higher than those who opposed them, 52% of Americans said the payments should not be extended beyond their set expiration.

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Third-Party Candidate Princess Blanding Interrupts McAuliffe, Youngkin Moderate-Focused Debate

Eric Burk

In the last of only two gubernatorial debates GOP candidate Glenn Youngkin and Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe made their pitches to Virginia moderates on issues including vaccinations, abortion, qualified immunity, business climate, and Afghan refugees in the Commonwealth. But Liberation Party candidate Princess Blanding provided the most interesting moment of the debate by interrupting from the audience.

Moderators had asked McAuliffe about a statistic the Youngkin campaign cites showing that murder rates rose during McAuliffe’s first term. McAuliffe responded by citing his past investment in law enforcement and sheriffs. He also called for gun control.

“Terry, why am I not allowed on the stage? As governor I will defund the police,” Blanding said before being drowned out by moderators and producers cut away from the live feed.

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26 Governors Seek Meeting with Biden over Border Surge

RealClearWire

More than half of the country’s governors would like a moment of the president’s time – and soon: Twenty-six Republican governors are urging Joe Biden to do more to address the deteriorating situation along the southern U.S. border.

“As chief executives of our states,” they write in a letter postmarked for Monday and first obtained by RealClearPolitics, “we request a meeting with you at The White House to bring an end to the national security crisis created by eight months of unenforced borders.”

The GOP chief executives are requesting an audience “within 15 days” given that the “the crisis that began at our southern border now extends beyond to every state and requires immediate action before the situation worsens.”

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Pelosi Floats Passing Infrastructure and Budget Simultaneously as Moderates and Progressives Feud

Virginia Star Staff

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Sunday floated the idea of passing the bipartisan infrastructure bill and Democrats’ $3.5 trillion budget simultaneously in an attempt to balance moderates and progressives’ mutually exclusive demands.

Pelosi asked the House Rules Committee to look into the possibility after nine centrist Democrats vowed to block the budget if it came up for consideration before the infrastructure bill passed.

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Senate Passes the Largest Infrastructure Package in Decades, over a Dozen Republicans Vote in Favor

Virginia Star Staff

The Senate on Tuesday passed its bipartisan infrastructure bill, moving what would be the largest public works package in decades one step closer to becoming law months after negotiations first began.

The bill, which advocates praised as the largest investment in America’s infrastructure since the construction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s, passed 69-30. Nineteen Republicans joined every Democrat in voting for the package.

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Commentary: Don’t Be Fooled by the Bipartisan, ‘Paid For’ Infrastructure Bill

RealClearWire
Capitol building looking up, blue sky in background

Over the course of the pandemic, federal overspending has exploded even by Congress’s lofty standards. While trillion-dollar deficits were a cause for concern before 2020, spending over just the last two years is set to increase the national debt by over $6 trillion. It’s bizarre, then, that the only thing that members of opposing parties in Congress can seem to work together on is fooling the budgetary scorekeepers with phantom offsets for even more spending.

In total, the bipartisan infrastructure deal includes around $550 billion in new federal spending on infrastructure to take place over five years. Advocates of the legislation claim that it is paid for, but they are relying on gimmicks and quirks of the budget scoring process to make that claim.

Take the single biggest offset claimed — repurposing unused COVID relief funds, which the bill’s authors say would “raise” $210 billion (particularly considering that at least $160 billion have already been accounted for in the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) baseline). Only in the minds of Washington legislators does this represent funds ready to be used when the national debt stands at over $28 trillion.

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U.S. Economy Added Whopping 943,000 Jobs in July as Recovery Accelerates

Virginia Star Staff
Group of people gathered, talking next to an office desk

The U.S. economy reported an increase of 943,000 jobs in July and the unemployment rate fell to 5.4%, according to Department of Labor data released Friday.

Total non-farm payroll employment increased by 850,000 in July, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report, and the number of unemployed persons decreased to 8.7 million. Economists projected 845,000 Americans would be added to payrolls prior to Friday’s report, The Wall Street Journal reported.

“The jobs recovery is continuing, but it’s different in character to any we’ve seen before,” payroll software firm ADP economist Nela Richardson told the WSJ. “I had been looking at September as a point when we could gain momentum—with schools back in session and vaccines widely available. But with the delta variant, we need to rethink that.”

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Senate Fails to Wrap Up Infrastructure Bill After Talks to Expedite Process Collapse

Virginia Star Staff

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer set up a critical vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill Saturday after talks to expedite the process fell apart late Thursday.

Both Republicans and Democrats engaged in marathon talks Thursday in a bid to vote on a package of amendments and to advance the sweeping public works package. Doing so, however, required approval from all 100 senators, and Tennessee Republican Sen. Bill Haggerty refused to go along even as his Republican colleagues urged him to do so.

In a statement, Hagerty attributed his objection to  the Congressional Budget Office’s estimation that the bill would add $256 billion to the national debt over 10 years.

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Commentary: Pandemic Lockdowns Were a Public Health Mistake

Virginia Star Staff

More evidence to confirm what many Republican lawmakers and free-market advocates such as Americans for Limited Government were saying from the start of the Covid pandemic, lockdowns would be one of the most tragic mistakes in American history.

The Rand Corporation and economists from the University of Southern California have released a new study examining the effectiveness of pandemic lockdowns, using data from 43 countries and all 50 US states.

“We fail to find that shelter-in-place policies saved lives,” the authors report. In the weeks following the implementation of these policies, excess mortality actually increases—even though it had typically been declining before the orders took effect.

And across all countries, the study finds that a one-week increase in the length of stay-at-home policies corresponds with 2.7 more excess deaths per 100,000 people.

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Transportation Sec. Buttigieg Says Mileage Tax Won’t Be Part of Biden’s Infrastructure Bill

Virginia Star Staff
Highway Traffic

Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said Monday that a mileage tax won’t be included in President Joe Biden’s infrastructure proposal.

Buttigieg told CNN anchor Jake Tapper the tax is “not part of the conversation about this infrastructure bill,” despite floating the idea of taxing people based on how far they drive last week.

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