Cotton: Democrats’ infrastructure bill will be focused on higher taxes, ‘Green New Deal’

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in an interview on Sunday threw cold water on the likelihood of Democrats picking up his support for an upcoming infrastructure push.

During an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Cotton indicated that he believed any infrastructure bill pursued by Democrats would be a wish-list of progressive priorities including programs related to the “Green New Deal,” the legislation introduced by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) that would push the U.S. toward 100 percent renewable energy.

“This bill is not going to be geared to those needs, this bill will be geared towards big tax increases and the Green New Deal,” Cotton predicted after host Chris Wallace confronted him with statistics related to Arkansas’s infrastructure needs.

“We spend too much money on things that are not roads, or bridges, or broadband access,” the senator added.

His comments come as some Democrats, including Sens. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have indicated that they believe infrastructure reform, likely to be the Biden administration’s next big legislative push following the passage of a $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, will have to be passed using the budget reconciliation tactic which only requires a 50-vote threshold for passage in the evenly divided Senate where Vice President Harris would serve as a tie-breaker.

“What I have seen this year and in past years is that if we want to do something significant, it is very hard to get Republican support,” Sanders said last week.

“So the devil is of course in the details. If Republicans are prepared to support a significant and important piece of legislation that deals with climate change, deals with infrastructure, that’s great. My own feeling is at this point I doubt that that will be the case,” he added.