Here is Politico:
Bipartisan infrastructure talks between President Joe Biden and GOP Sen. Shelley Moore Capito are over, and the White House will now focus on working with a bipartisan group of 20 senators.
Biden and Capito spoke for five minutes Tuesday, the West Virginia senator said, the final conversation in what’s been a stubborn deadlock over how to pay for a massive infrastructure bill and how large that measure should be. The two sides were about $700 billion apart after the GOP’s final offer.
Biden “offered his gratitude to her for her efforts and good faith conversations, but expressed his disappointment that, while he was willing to reduce his plan by more than $1 trillion, the Republican group had increased their proposed new investments by only $150 billion,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement Tuesday.
The breakdown puts new pressure on a group of bipartisan senators to quickly come up with something that can satisfy Biden’s desires and also garner at least 10 GOP votes. After waiting 10 years to have full control of Washington, there’s no desire in the leadership suites to see another six or more weeks of negotiations after the plodding pace of talks between Biden and Capito.
“It kind of surprised me that this other group decided to try their luck at it. It’s got to be different than Capito,” said Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) in an interview. “We’re running out of time. We have seven weeks counting this week until we break in August … we’re running out of opportunities.”
In the White House’s view, Biden came down significantly from his initial spending target of more than $2 trillion. An administration official said Biden never agreed to shift coronavirus relief funds from the American Rescue Plan to pay for infrastructure — a major GOP request. Republicans also never increased the price tag of their offer enough to satisfy Biden, who sought at least $1 trillion in new spending over current infrastructure spending levels.
Read the rest here.
See our infrastructure coverage at Current:
Daniel K. Williams, “What Trillions Can’t Buy.”
John Fea, “What John Quincy Adams Can Teach Biden and Congress about Infrastructure“
