Power Up: This Texas mayor wants Washington Republicans to support an infrastructure package

Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price, who is set to retire at the end of the year, told Power Up in an interview on Thursday that a “winning strategy – particularly in Texas – is going to be an infrastructure bill.”

• “It’s been a long time since the feds have put major money into our highways and infrastructure – this pandemic has brought forward the fact that far too many people don’t have broadband access and don’t have what they need to get their job done from home or their kids educated,” said Price. “More money that goes into that, and infrastructure of any kind.. is gonna be a winning message for many people.”

Democrats, however, are already preparing for Congressional Republicans to drag their feet on supporting infrastructure legislation currently being crafted by multiple committees. 

• Sen. Ben Cardin (D- ) was caught on a hot mic earlier this week telling Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg that Democrats would likely have to use the budget reconciliation process again to bypass Republicans to pass the upcoming trillion-dollar spending bill.

But Price suggested to Power Up that now is not the time for the GOP to talk about price tags – a notable comment coming from a Republican in a red state that Democrats have long dreamed of turning blue. 

Texas Democrats issued a “2020 retrospective” last month optimistically concluding that with a more robust voter registration program, the state can turn blue by 2024. The Democratic dream of turning Texas blue failed to materialize in November. But Joe Biden came closer to flipping the Lone Star State than any other Democrat in the past 25 years, losing the state to Donald Trump by 631,221 votes. He flipped Price’s historically red county in 2020, and Democrats believe they’ll win the Fort Worth mayoral race the next time around.

• “We would love to see dollars coming in for infrastructure work here… the numbers are staggering when you start looking at them, the [pandemic] death we’re carrying is staggering,” Price told us.
• “At some point. there becomes a tradeoff for people – if you’re a little bit fiscally conservative, if you’re worried about where America is going, you’ve got to weigh it out and see what really stimulates the economy and puts people to work and that we can live with as a nation,” Price added.

Congressional Democrats are expressing optimism they’ll pick up some support from Republicans to pass a major infrastructure and jobs package. Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) said last weekemd he’d spoken with Buttigieg about using a bipartisan surface transportation bill he crafted last year as a “blueprint for infrastructure,” noting that Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) voted for the bill in committee. 

• “I think we can do something very big. The president and the vice president are enthusiastic about it… And by the way, I’m talking to a lot of Republicans who are excited about infrastructure, you just look at the need in our country,” Buttigieg said this week.
• “I don’t think infrastructure is a partisan issue. I’ve never seen a Republican or Democratic road or bridge, now this is Washington and politics are what they are; it’s going to take a lot of work,” he said.

Still, Republicans are already leery of what Democrats might propose. “There’s is a need for infrastructure … I’m not sure what they offer us is going to be that which we need,” Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.) told reporters earlier this week before criticizing the economic stimulus as bloated with unrelated Democratic goodies. 

Price, however, noted her constituents had no complaints about the stimulus bill, and suggested that campaigning against the $1.9 trillion package passed with zero Republican support will backfire. 

• “Most of my constituents are really working to get their head above water, to get there kids educated … to see they’re gonna get their rent paid, that we’re gonna have the money to help our businesses,” Price told Power Up. “I think at this point, they are just past this presidential election and they are looking to recover.”

It remains unclear how the White House and Congressional Democrats will proceed with piecing together Biden’s infrastructure package. Biden campaigned on a clean energy infrastructure plan that would cost $2 trillion but his administration has yet to talk cost as it pieces together a bill. 

• Politico’s Rachael Bade reported that White House chief of staff Ron Klain met with the Congressional Progressive Caucus and indicated  the “White House is exploring different options, including the possibility of breaking up the jobs package into as many as three bills, according to [Rep. Pramila] Jayapal (D-Wash). Some could garner bipartisan support; and some could be done through reconciliation.” 
• “I think they share that commitment to addressing climate in this infrastructure package,” Jayapal told Bade. “Maybe that’s part of the reason they were saying there may be multiple bills.”

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said raising taxes is on the table to pay for the infrastructure bill “but there isn’t a package yet where we’re talking about pay-fors yet.” Republicans, however, “are drawing red lines on how to pay for the package, rejecting any tax increases and looking askance at other climate-change-related measures,” the Wall Street Journal’s Gabriel Rubin reports. 

• “The president remains committed to his pledge from the campaign that nobody making under $400,000 a year will have their taxes increased,” Psaki added.
• “Sen. Susan Collins, Maine Republican, burst out laughing when asked how Senate Republicans would react to Mr. Biden’s tax proposals,” the Washington Times’s David Sherfinski reported earlier this week. “I would not anticipate that it would be well received,” Collins said.

HAPPENING TODAY: In the wake of the Atlanta-area shootings that left six women of Asian descent dead, “President Biden and Vice President Harris plan to meet with Asian American leaders during a previously planned trip to Atlanta,” our colleagues John Wagner and Annie Linskey report.

• The trip comes after “Biden on Thursday ordered flags at the White House and federal property to be flown at half-staff ‘as a mark of respect for the victims of the senseless acts of violence,’” our colleague John Wagner reports.
• Biden and Harris will also visit the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. There, they will “receive an update from the team of health and medical experts helping lead the fight against the pandemic,” the White House said in a statement.

For situational awareness: “When [Biden] flies to Georgia Friday, he will land in the middle of an increasingly politicized battle between two South Korean electric vehicle battery makers and the state and federal politicians who want to prevent their feud from costing American jobs,” Reuters’s David Shepardson and Ben Klayman report. 

• “The companies, LG Chem and rival SK Innovation Co, are trying to take advantage of past and promised U.S. investments, and ties to politicians in Georgia, Ohio and Tennessee, to win the end game in a long-running legal dispute over intellectual property and access to the growing U.S. electric vehicle market,” per Shepardson and Klayman. 
• “The Biden Administration, through the U.S. Trade Representative’s office, may ultimately pick a winner by the early April deadline. Both declined to comment.” 

DEMOCRATS STACK IMMIGRATION WINS: “The House voted Thursday on two immigration bills, part of the Biden administration’s effort to make sweeping changes to the U.S. immigration system,” our colleagues Colby Itkowitz and Amy B Wang report. Republicans broke ranks and joined Democrats in backing both bills.

• “The American Dream and Promise Act, which passed 228 to 197, would create a path for citizenship for the approximately 2.5 million undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children, known as ‘Dreamers.’”
• “The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would provide a path for immigrant farmworkers to get a green card. The House passed the bill in a 247-to-174 vote.”

• “While some Republicans have pledged support for Dreamers in the past, their party is increasingly uniting behind a hard line strategy to block any new immigration law as it seeks to use the worsening situation at the border as a political cudgel against Biden and Democrats.”
• “That means the immigration measures will join a growing pile of liberal agenda items that have passed the House but are destined to languish or die because of Republican opposition in the Senate.”

THE GLOVES (AND MASKS) ARE OFF: At a Senate hearing Thursday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) pressed Anthony S. Fauci “on health experts’s continued recommendation of masks even for people who have contracted the virus or who have been vaccinated,” our colleague Aaron Blake reports. 

• “Paul repeatedly suggested wearing masks in those cases was ‘theater’ — pointing specifically to Fauci wearing masks even though he has been vaccinated.” But Fauci pushed back.

‘I AM NOT A VIRUS’: “Experts testifying before a House panel Thursday linked the rise of violence against Asian Americans to rhetoric from [former] President Trump and Republicans who have espoused his tendency to blame China for the coronavirus,” our colleague Marianna Sotomayor reports. 

• “Stanford Law School Professor Shirin Sinnar said that Trump’s ‘racist dog whistles’ repeatedly retweeted by millions ‘does create ripple effects across society at large.’”
• “Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) used Sinnar’s testimony to push back against Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who claimed that Democrats were using the hearing to infringe on Republicans’s right to criticize China’s handling of the pandemic.”
• “It’s not about policing speech. I’m asking you to please stop using racist terms like ‘Kung flu’ or ‘Wuhan virus’ or other ethnic identifiers and describe them as virus. I am not a virus,” Lieu said.

“Attacks targeting Asian Americans have increased nearly 150 percent in the past year. Americans of Asian descent have reported being slashed across the face with a box cutter, burned by thrown chemicals, punched in the face and shoved to the ground,” the New York Times’s Catie Edmondson reports. 

‘We stand with you’: Lawmakers hold hearing on rise of anti-Asian discrimination

• “I can’t remember what I was doing, but … I was sick to my stomach … to see our nation’s Capitol being stormed by hostile forces. And it really disturbed me to the point where I did put out a statement, and I’m still disturbed when I think about it.”
• Bush spoke at this year’s SXSW festival in a pre-recorded interview taped on Feb. 24 to promote his new book, “Out of Many, One: Portraits of America’s Immigrants.”

• Meanwhile, “Mexico announced Thursday that it would close its southern and northern borders to nonessential travel because of the pandemic. The closure appears to be an attempt to make migration from Central America more difficult.”
• A page from Trump: Although “Biden has moved quickly to dismantle some of Trump’s signature immigration policies … he is clinging to a central element of Trump’s agenda: relying on Mexico to restrain a wave of people making their way to the United States,” the New York Times’s Natalie Kitroeff, Maria Abi-Habib, Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Jim Tankersley report.
• P.S. “Biden announced that [today], 58 days into his presidency, the country will reach 100 million coronavirus vaccine shots, a goal he hoped to achieve in his first 100 days,” our colleague Colby Itkowitz report. 

DIPLOMATIC SKIRMISM IN ALASKA: “A first face-to-face meeting between US and Chinese officials got off to a heated start in Anchorage, Alaska, on Thursday as US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s statement that the Biden administration would bring up ‘deep concerns’ about some of China’s actions around the world was met with immediate pushback from Chinese counterparts, sparking an unusually public exchange of diplomatic barbs,” CNN’s Jennifer Hansler, Nicole Gaouette and Kylie Atwood report.

• “By evening, the Chinese had accused the US delegation of being ‘condescending’ in its tone, while a US official said the representatives from Beijing seemed ‘intent on grandstanding.’
• “The meeting quickly veered away from the usual diplomatic throat clearing that takes place in front of the cameras before the real meetings get underway. As the two sides traded the unusually intense remarks, Blinken called the cameras back to counter the Chinese officials’ comments — particularly their slights about US democracy — setting off an unexpected chain of rebuttals as each side responded to the other’s remarks.”