Dear Friends,
As your Congresswoman, it’s my duty to be your voice in government and advocate for you every day. I will always put Texas’ 12th Congressional District and the wonderful constituents I represent above politics, always. I am writing to you this week to explain why I stood up against Speaker Pelosi and the left-wing wish list that the White House has misleadingly labelled “infrastructure.”
When most Americans think of infrastructure, we think of the physical structures our communities are built on. Things like roads and bridges.
What the Democrats are calling “infrastructure,” however, is nothing of the sort. In their radical view, “infrastructure” includes tax hikes on families and small businesses, Green New Deal slush funds controlled by Washington bureaucrats, and massive expansions of the welfare state.
Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats realize the American people won’t support this radical agenda, so they tried to disguise it.
Earlier this year, a group of Senators attempted to negotiate a deal to invest in our infrastructure. Unfortunately, these negotiations resulted in a costly, poorly targeted bill full of handouts to Democrat districts. For example, this so-called “infrastructure” package gives the Department of Energy tens of billions of dollars in a Solyndra-style slush fund with little accountability, fails to include any meaningful permitting reforms to speed up the process of rebuilding our communities, and adds additional inflationary spending into an already underperforming economy by failing to fully cover the cost of the bill. An independent analysis from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said the bill will add $256 billion to the national debt over the next 10 years.
Even worse, the far left sprung a trap: from the beginning, President Biden admitted that he wouldn’t support this already bloated “infrastructure” bill until Congress passed an even larger “reconciliation bill” filled with socialist priorities. Speaker Pelosi said the same exact thing, insisting that “there won’t be an infrastructure bill, unless we have a reconciliation bill.”
It’s called a “reconciliation bill” because Democrats are once again using an obscure budget procedure known as reconciliation to move a massive bill forward. Reconciliation is essentially a way for Congress to pass legislation related to taxes and spending with just a simple majority of votes in the House and the Senate, as reconciliation bills do not need the 60 votes most Senate bills require to pass. Since Democrats control both the House and Senate majorities, they are able to use reconciliation to pass this disastrous package without any Republican support in either chamber.
Call it the Pelosi ‘Bait and Switch.’ She held hostage any effort to develop a real, bipartisan infrastructure bill, in order to pass her entire Democrat agenda even though there is united Republican opposition to it.
So, what is in this reconciliation bill? The package includes both one of the largest tax increases and largest spending increases in American history, with almost every penny of that spending going to radical left-wing priorities.
This liberal wish list includes $29 billion for a “green bank” to finance climate change projects with minimal oversight, $7 billion for a “Civilian Climate Corps” that would force taxpayers to foot the bill for thousands of young people to work on supposed climate-change projects, and $80 billion to double the size of the Internal Revenue Service.
It also adds $1.4 trillion in tax increases on families and businesses. This bill would make American businesses less competitive globally by raising corporate taxes and adding complicated new rules. It raises taxes on natural gas and impedes domestic energy production, making us more dependent on foreign energy sources and driving up our cost of living. It hikes taxes on small businesses by over $400 billion in this already challenging economy.
Meanwhile, the bill empowers labor unions by making union dues tax deductible and takes care of Democrats’ allies in the media by including a $1.6 billion payroll tax credit for certain journalists.
This massive bill is geared toward liberal cities like San Francisco and New York, providing residents there with windfall benefits. It includes provisions like $400 billion in Green New Deal-related tax credits that will allow millionaires to buy themselves more electric cars. It even raises the State and Local Tax deduction cap – a giveaway to rich Californians and New Yorkers that does nothing to help everyday Americans.
While she pushes this partisan agenda, Speaker Pelosi is attempting to shame Republicans into raising the federal debt limit to facilitate her spending spree.
We cannot allow this to happen.
I will not support increasing the debt limit while Democrats try to enact historic spending increases with no fiscal reforms. Enough is enough. There is bipartisan support for policies that strengthen America’s infrastructure and economy without breaking the bank, and without political handouts.
I support rebuilding our nation’s infrastructure, but our nation needs targeted investment. I want roads and bridges to be built and repaired and new investments in our water systems and our airports like Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport.
But instead of a balanced proposal to support these types of projects, we’ve been given a supposed “infrastructure” bill which invests less than half of its $1.2 trillion sticker price in traditional infrastructure that is inseparable from the nearly $2 trillion socialist reconciliation bill.
Together, these bills will allow Democrats to spend $3 trillion to fundamentally reshape American society, which would make everyone from young children to the elderly more dependent on government handouts. This is on top of the nearly $2 trillion already spent by Democrats on their radical agenda earlier this year, using the same reconciliation process that completely sidelined Republicans. And all this spending comes at a time when inflation is at a 13-year high, straining family budgets and increasing the cost of living for every American.
Unfortunately, not one cent of this multi trillion-dollar spending spree is for the military for our national defense.
We can do better. As the Lead Republican on the Appropriations Committee, I work tirelessly to pass legislation every year that funds important national and local priorities, from our military to our schools. We do so within responsible fiscal boundaries that ensure spending is targeted, limited, and bipartisan.
I will always be open to honest bipartisan efforts to improve our infrastructure, but I will not fall for Pelosi’s Bait and Switch.
Thank you,
Kay Granger