Wisconsin – COOPER GENERAL NEWS

U.S. President Joe Biden stops at La Crosse Municipal Transit Utility in La Crosse, Wisconsin, the United States, on Jan.

Kevin Lemarque | Reuters

President Joe Biden traveled to La Crosse, Wisconsin on Tuesday to promote its recently announced bipartisan infrastructure framework of $ 1.2 trillion.

While there, Biden toured the city’s Municipal Transit Utility and made comments focusing on how the massive infrastructure package would benefit Wisconsin residents.

“It’s going to change the world for families here in Wisconsin,” said Biden.

“More than a thousand bridges here in Wisconsin are classified by engineers as structurally deficient,” he said. “A thousand, only in Wisconsin.”

The framework includes $ 579 billion in new spending on roads, bridges, railways, public transportation, electric vehicle systems, electricity, broadband and water.

Biden also promoted rural high-speed broadband expansion, which the deal would fund if Congress passed it.

The deal will “ensure” [high speed broadband] is available in every American household, including the 35% of rural families who currently don’t have it, “said Biden. In Wisconsin, 82,000 children would not have reliable internet access at home.

Biden also drew on familiar lines of how the deal will help the United States win the already ongoing technology and innovation race with China and prove that democracies can do better for people than autocratic systems of government.

Biden’s remarks in Wisconsin preview how he plans to sell the infrastructure contract across the country in the coming weeks, emphasizing how the deal will benefit residents of each state in particular.

His next stop this weekend is Michigan, where Biden will perform with Democratic state governor Gretchen Whitmer.

However, Biden’s seminal La Crosse speech belied the dangerous path ahead for the bipartisan agreement in Congress, where it is still just a framework of a plan on paper and yet to be written into law.

The deal was negotiated last month by a group of ten Senators, five Republicans and five Democrats, and announced last week.

Biden’s suggestion during that announcement that he could veto the framework unless lawmakers pass other democratic priorities as well, briefly threatened the deal.

Over the weekend, the president reassured some Republicans by making it clear that if passed of his own accord, he would sign the bill.

“I was very happy to see the president clarify his remarks because it didn’t match everything we were told along the way,” Senator Rob Portman, R-Ohio, an architect of the plan, told ABC News on Sunday .

President Biden began a national tour in Wisconsin Tuesday to educate voters about the bipartisan infrastructure deal announced by the President and Middle Senators last week.

Mr Biden used his speech in La Crosse, Wisconsin, to highlight several aspects of the deal – which would increase federal spending on physical infrastructure by $ 579 billion, the largest such increase in decades. He portrayed the deal as a deal that would improve the quality of life for Wisconsin residents, including by increasing the use of broadband internet in rural areas, where about 35 percent of families lack reliable internet, according to the White House.

“This bipartisan breakthrough is a big deal for the American people,” Biden said, predicting the deal would create jobs that did not require a college degree. “This is a blueprint for rebuilding America.”

Mr Biden pledged to replace the nearly 80,000 lead water pipes in Milwaukee, and cited spending on road and bridge repairs to reduce traffic for drivers across the country, the equivalent of an annual loss of $ 1,000 for the average American because of lost time.

The president and his staff have argued aggressively over the past few days that the deal would be a huge step forward for the nation in key infrastructure areas, as part of a delicate effort to sell Democrats in the House and Senate for the merits of a deal fell well short of Mr. Biden’s initial $ 2.3 trillion US employment plan. The deal leaves out entire categories of spending on climate change and investing in home nursing for the elderly and disabled.

The president called the deal the largest federal infrastructure move since President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the law to create the interstate highway system 65 years ago. “This is a generational investment – a generational investment – to modernize our infrastructure,” he said, “to create millions of well-paid jobs.”

The tour is also designed to reassure Republicans that Mr Biden is committed to the agreement. Mr Biden told reporters Thursday that he would not sign the bipartisan agreement unless it was accompanied by a second, partisan bill that includes much of Mr Biden’s remaining $ 4 trillion economic agenda, which is a hectic weekend for the White House sparked some Republicans questioning whether the deal could survive.

On Sunday, Mr Biden released a statement saying he did not mean to imply that he would veto the bipartisan agreement and pledged to campaign aggressively to get it passed. This worried the progressives, who are counting on the second passage of the party law.

Alluding to the intricate politics of the two economic laws, Mr. Biden also used the Wisconsin speech to highlight much of the second half of his agenda that was excluded from the deal, including investments in housing, childcare, tax loans for parents, child poverty aim to combat, and invest heavily in public education.

“I will continue to point out that critical investments are still needed,” he said.