As President Joe Biden and his Cabinet fan out across the country touting his economic record, major features of “Bidenomics” would not be possible if not for Republican support in Congress for a $1 trillion infrastructure measure and a U.S. semiconductor production bill.
While the Biden administration attempts to frame his economic record as a “middle-out” and “bottom-up” approach to the economy, in contrast to Republican’s economic philosophy, the most popular parts of the president’s package of policies were negotiated and ultimately passed with Republican support.
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Nineteen Republican senators helped get the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act legislation over the finish line in August 2021, roughly doubling the funds spent over a decade on roads, bridges, the electric grid, and broadband. Seventeen Republican Senators helped advance the CHIPS Act in July 2022, which provides tax and other incentives to expand U.S. semiconductor production. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) backed both pieces of legislation.
Now, many of those Republicans find themselves in an awkward position as the policies they helped build are at the heart of the president’s reelection strategy, but the majority of them are standing by their previous votes.
“I do things that are right for the country, and Republicans like myself can tout what we’ve done, and Democrats who participated can do the same thing. That’s the nature of bipartisan legislation,” said Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT), who supported both pieces of legislation. “Both sides win, and the only way something becomes law in this country is if both sides win. You can’t pass a bill if it only is attractive to one party.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who also voted for both pieces of legislation, said just because the president is taking credit for the bill’s passage doesn’t mean he’s the primary reason it happened.
“If you look back on the infrastructure bill, it was a spontaneous coming together of a group of senators that actually led to 99% of what was in there,” Cassidy told the Washington Examiner. “Now, he did have to sign it, and he had input on the pay-fors, but am I not supposed to do my job as a senator because someone later may try and take full credit for that which other people did?”
“If that happened, I would never do anything as a senator; anything good here that happens, a president is going to take credit for that, no matter the degree of involvement,” Cassidy added.
Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) was a major architect of the bill that boosts domestic manufacturing of computer chips and worked for two years with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and other negotiators. He said work on the legislation that provided $52 billion worth of grants and other incentives for the semiconductor industry began long before Biden ever took office. The need for the legislation was exposed during the pandemic when global chip manufacturers shut down and stopped production.
“The CHIPS and Science Act began during the Trump administration years. Those of us, including some within the administration, who worked very hard to ultimately see it pass both chambers of Congress and be signed into law by the President deserve credit,” Young said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Young and other supporters of the bill emphasize mounting tensions with China reinforced the need to decrease dependency on the country, home to the world’s largest chip maker.
“Anyone who might have opposed this essential national security investment for partisan reasons does deserve the opportunity to explain why they did so,” Young said.
The Indiana senator reiterated that he doesn’t want voters to mix up his work with other portions of Bidenomics that were more controversial, like the American Rescue Plan, the major pandemic-era spending that was passed in the early days of Biden’s presidency. The legislation included $1,400 checks for individuals, expansions to unemployment insurance and child tax credit benefits, and hundreds of billions in aid to state and local governments.
“When I think of Bidenomics, the first thing that comes to mind is the inflation they caused by passing a stimulus bill, when the economy was already red hot, didn’t need to be stimulated,” Young told the Washington Examiner.
While the White House maintains the bill was necessary for economic recovery, some economists believe the $1.9 trillion bill contributed to inflation, though there’s debate about how much. Supply chain woes tied to the pandemic, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and pandemic relief bills totaling nearly $3 trillion under former President Donald Trump also could have contributed to rising costs.
No Republican senators voted for one of the most politically charged parts of Bidenomics, the Inflation Reduction Act, a sweeping $430 billion package of tax, health, and climate priorities.
“I just don’t want this very important but narrower national security investment to be conflated with the inflation created by the president’s stimulus bill or by the Inflation Reduction Act,” Young said. “It’s natural that [Biden] would want to bootstrap the rest of his economic agenda to a very popular anti-China initiative like the CHIPS and Science Act.”
Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), who voted against the CHIPS Act and did not participate during the vote on the infrastructure bill, said each of his Republican colleagues had to make the decision that was best for them.
“They looked very seriously at economic development, and they thought this might very well help,” Rounds told the Washington Examiner on Thursday. “We disagreed with a lot of the reasoning involved just because of the amount of money [Biden] was spending.”
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Ultimately, Republican senators who helped both bills get over the finish line, like Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), overwhelmingly said they don’t regret their votes that may have inadvertently helped build the Bidenomics reelection strategy.
“I think people need to understand how a bill becomes a law,” Tillis said. “The only reason those bills became law is because Republicans supported them.”
