The infrastructure bill highlights what is wrong with Congress

The bill H.R. 3684, the Infrastructure Investments and Jobs Act, known simply as the “infrastructure bill,” has been a controversial product from day one. 

The Democrat majority attempted to get a vote to pass the bill before it was even fully written. Yeah, what a wonderful idea: let’s vote to approve a bill before it’s written. What could possibly go wrong?

This situation is a serious contender for the dumbest idea dealing with pending legislation in our nation’s history.

Next, the bill is 2,702 pages long. Most books I read take many hours from start to finish, and most of them are not only a fraction of this bill’s length, usually 300 to 500 pages, but also have much smaller pages with fewer words.

The Christian Bible has about 1,300 pages and about 800,000 words. That makes this Democrat bill twice as long as the Bible. Another way of understanding how long this bill is: compare it to these weekly columns. Each weekly column word-count target is 858 words, give or take a few. Dividing 800,000 by 858 equals 932.4, or enough weekly columns to fill 17.9 years.

The International Christian College and Seminary tells us that it takes approximately 70 hours and 40 minutes to read the Bible. Extrapolating that to the infrastructure bill, someone who read the bill continuously from start to finish in one sitting would spend more than 140 hours, or six days, reading it. With time out to eat, sleep, visit the restroom, and other normal things, add more days. And experts tell us that reading federal legislation is a more difficult read than most books. It takes study time, in addition to reading time.

“These bills are not written for even the educated layperson, Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University, said. “They are written for specialists.” His comment was made back in 2009 when the Affordable Care Act and the Health and Education Reconciliation Act were under consideration. Those two bills dwarfed the infrastructure bill, adding up to 10,516 pages in the Federal Register.

This bill is simply way too big, in both length and dollars spent. It’s a safe bet that few if any of our representatives and senators will have personally read and studied the entire bill. Much of the work will be done by staff, and some topics may simply be accepted as good and proper without anyone actually reading or studying them. Is that really the best way to do things?

Furthermore, there is no emergency demanding that one ridiculously long bill that spends more than a trillion dollars be created and voted on. Truly important measures will have bipartisan support, and can be easily passed individually, or in small groups of two or three closely related topics, and a few dozen pages. 

Within its 2,702 pages the bill contains 10 divisions, and most of those could easily be, and should be, addressed as separate bills to be debated and voted on over time, rather than crammed through all at once.

One part of the bill proposes spending $110 billion for roads, bridges, and major projects. That’s a bunch of money. Will it all be spent on really needed projects? Or will some of it be used for pet projects that benefit some special interests?

Iain Murray of the Competitive Enterprise Institute addressed some specific features: “The bill also contains various faddish ideas like elements of the Green New Deal and ‘Buy American’ provisions, all of which will simply increase costs to American consumers for no discernible benefit. Many of my criticisms of the president’s infrastructure plan as being bloated and wasteful continue to apply to this bill.”

“Finally, several Democrats have made it clear that they view this as the first of a two-part package,” Murray’s evaluation continued, “the second being a budget reconciliation bill with $3.5 trillion of new spending and a variety of progressive wish-list items that would seek to turn the U.S. into a European-style social democracy, with a vastly expanded welfare state. Again, it appears that the plan is to rush this through on the back of the infrastructure bill without proper scrutiny.”

One feature of the $1.2 trillion bill that appears to breach President Joe Biden’s “red line” pledge not to raise taxes on anyone earning less than $400,000 a year is a “national motor vehicle per-mile user fee pilot program,” which would affect most drivers. Calling it a “fee” instead of a “tax” will do little to soothe the pain that drivers will have to endure when they drive to and from work or on vacation to help fund this massive spending plan.

And then we must ask, will there be the need for a “Mileage Czar” with a bloated staff to keep track of these taxes?

There is a need to address real infrastructure issues in the country. But the most important, the most critical area of need today, is securing the southern border. Thousands of illegal aliens, many of whom are gang members, drug dealers, and Covid-infected, enter this country every week. This bill does not address that. Congress needs to address the criminal nature of the border crisis first.