[AP via FOX] WASHINGTON (AP) — One by one, Democrats and Republicans trekked to the Senate floor on Sunday touting a $1 trillion infrastructure proposal and argued that, after months of haggling, it was time for a final vote on the measure.Standing in their way: Republican Sen. Bill Hagerty of Tennessee.
The freshman senator spent the weekend using a procedural maneuver to essentially grind the chamber to a halt. A final vote that could have happened on Friday night could now linger into the early hours of Tuesday morning, forcing lawmakers to give up their second consecutive summer weekend to plod through the minutia of Senate rules.
More than a dozen Republicans have joined Democrats to clear initial hurdles on the infrastructure bill, meaning the legislation will almost certainly pass despite Hagerty's protest. But the effort could raise the profile of a one-time Trump administration official eager to align himself with the former president, who has stepped up efforts to derail the package.
"I think he’s doing Trump’s bidding. I don’t think there’s any doubt about it," Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont, one of the lead negotiators of the package, said in an interview. "I think they want to try to draw this out as long as they possibly can and hope and pray that Congress fails."
In Hagerty’s telling, his reasoning for taking a stand has less to do with Trump and more about the measure increasing the federal deficit by about $256 billion over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Once Congress approves this legislation, Democrats are planning to take up an even more ambitious — and expensive — spending measure on their own.
"Democrats’ true intention is to rush this bill through," Hagerty said Sunday, adding that Democrats want to pass the bill quickly so they can pivot to the separate $3.5 trillion spending plan, which he derided as "a socialist debt bomb."