Insanity by Sam Graves

Dear Friend,

They say doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. Yet, for some reason, that’s exactly what Nancy Pelosi seems to be doing with infrastructure.

Last year, she rammed a completely partisan infrastructure bill down our throats. Two out of every five dollars in that bill would have gone towards meeting Green New Deal mandates. Predictably, it went nowhere.

Now, instead of coming to the table to get a real bipartisan bill done, she decided to make her partisan bill even more partisan. Now, HALF of her infrastructure bill goes towards addressing progressive Green New Deal priorities. That’s insanity.

We tried everything we could to work on a real bill, but at every turn they shut us down. So yesterday, we decided we’d try to fix at least some of the many GLARING problems in Pelosi’s “infrastructure” plan.

We started simple. Surely, we can all agree that transportation dollars should be spent on infrastructure, not art and landscaping.

Video
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Apparently, that was too much to ask because the majority voted down our common-sense amendment to exclude art from being eligible for transportation funding. Next, we tried to get some bipartisan regulatory reform done. After all, fixing the federal review process would close the gap between the liberal bill and my proposal, the STARTER Act 2.0.

Video
Click to watch my remarks

Yet, they voted down that common-sense amendment too.  With the majority clearly not interested in working together to improve their deeply-flawed bill, we thought we’d find something that every American can agree on—that federal transportation dollars shouldn’t be used to bail out cities that defund the police. After all, we all back the blue, right?

Video
Click to watch my remarks

Again, the majority refused to listen to reason.

We should be working together to FIX legislation. No bill is perfect when it’s introduced. I don’t care if it’s a Republican bill or a Democrat bill. It’s going to have things that need fixing. This bill just happened to have a lot more problems than most.

It seems that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle had some difficultly listening to reason last night, but this isn’t over. I’m going to keep working to get a real bipartisan infrastructure bill done—the kind that America needs right now.

Sincerely,

Sam Graves