Republicans Are Taking Credit for Infrastructure Bill They All Voted Against

One of President Biden’s hallmark achievements thus far is his $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law. Even though Biden compromised with Republicans, and even though the law was so beneficial for their constituencies, a majority of Senate and House Republicans still voted against it in 2021. And now these same Republicans are suddenly trying to take credit for the historic investment they actively tried to stop.

Biden’s law is distributing upward of $42 billion across America to expand internet access and help bring rural and isolated communities into the increasingly digital world. The White House on Monday released estimates of what that means for each state—and Republicans who voted against the bill were quick to claim the victory.

Senator Tommy Tuberville lauded the news Tuesday, celebrating the law’s impact on Alabama’s rural communities:

Senator John Cornyn also tweeted an article boasting about Texas receiving a whopping $3.3 billion for broadband, more than any other state in the nation.

Of course, the spanning infrastructure package includes other popular provisions as well.

Representative Nancy Mace on Wednesday hosted a press conference celebrating the law’s allocation of nearly $26 million to a Charleston, South Carolina, regional bus hub featuring electric buses. Mace has previously called the bipartisan infrastructure law “absurd” and a “fiasco,” and specifically derided funding electric mass transportation as “socialism.”

If it is socialist, so be it: Perhaps Mace’s celebration of the project shows how popular socialist policies might actually be!

Tuberville and Cornyn are among the 30 Republican senators who voted against the bipartisan infrastructure law. Mace is among the 200 House Republicans who voted against it.

For his part, Biden appears to be looking forward to more celebration:

John Bolton, who served as national security adviser to Donald Trump, said his former boss “flouted” the law by hoarding classified documents and that any 2024 Republican candidate who believes otherwise doesn’t deserve to be president.

On CNN Tonight on Tuesday, Bolton was asked what he thinks of the candidates who say Trump should not be prosecuted. “I think that disqualifies those people from being president, and I think I would say the same for any of them who have said he should be pardoned,” he replied.

Bolton added:

You know, part of the equal application of the law is that everybody has to be held to the same standard, and frankly, I’ll just show my biases here, when it comes to national security information—I can’t think of a higher duty for the president, a higher example of leadership to sit, for everybody below him in the executive branch who deals with classified information, than to handle it carefully. Which Trump has flouted. He did for four years in office, he’s done it since then, and I think there’s something to be said to show to people that you’re held to the highest standards because everybody else is, including the president, and when you fail to uphold those standards, you pay the penalty.

The fact that Bolton—an Iraq War architect, radical nationalist and neocon, and former Trump staffer—is calling out Republican 2024 candidates for their meekness speaks volumes. Most of the candidates have been wary of criticizing Trump, even after he was charged with 37 criminal counts for willful retention of national security documents, for fear of alienating his followers. They’re either promising to pardon him or toeing the line by expressing some concern about the allegations while not forcefully condemning him. Only Chris Christie and Asa Hutchinson have been unapologetically critical of the former president.

Bolton also addressed a recently leaked audio recording revealing that Trump bragged about keeping a classified Pentagon document detailing a potential attack on Iran. “As this unfolds,” Bolton said, “I think the public will get a more profound sense of the danger potentially caused to American national security by Trump’s obsession with having these things because, as he says in that excerpt, it’s just ‘cool’ to have it.”

Thirty-four years after being indicted by both the media and the criminal justice system, and sent to jail for a crime he never committed, Yusef Salaam of the Central Park Five has won the New York City Council primary elections, almost guaranteeing he will serve for the same city government that oversaw his unjust imprisonment.

Salaam was one of five Black and Latino teenagers falsely accused of assaulting and raping a white female jogger in Central Park in 1989. Now, decades later, after spending nearly seven years in prison for a crime he didn’t commit, Salaam is poised to represent his home district of Harlem, one of the most historic neighborhoods in New York City, and one that overlooks the north end of Central Park itself.

“This campaign has been about our Harlem community, who has been pushed into the margins of life and made to believe they were supposed to be there,” Salaam said on election night. “Having to be kidnapped from my home as a 15-year-old child, to be launched in the belly of the beast, I was gifted to turn that experience into the womb of America. I was gifted because I was able to see it for what it really was: a system that was trying to make me believe that I was my ancestors’ wildest nightmare. But I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.”

Running for the city’s ninth district, which includes Harlem, Salaam far outpaced a field that included two elected officials currently representing the neighborhood. The race was the only one in which Mayor Eric Adams made an endorsement, backing state Assembly member Inez Dickens, who currently trails Salaam by over 25 points.

While the election was a primary race, Salaam is all but guaranteed to be elected to the council come November.

Since being released from his false imprisonment, Salaam has become a motivational speaker and board member of the Innocence Project, an organization dedicated to fighting against wrongful convictions and bettering the criminal justice system.

In 1989, amid the apprehension of the Exonerated Five, former President Donald Trump bought full-page advertisements in all four of New York City’s major newspapers, including The New York Times, calling to “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY.” He has still not apologized for doing so, even while all five of the individuals wrongfully arrested have been proven innocent.

In March, after twice-impeached Trump faced his first of now two criminal indictments, Salaam released a one-word response: “Karma.”

This article has been updated.

Getting away with crimes is difficult enough, but it’s even harder when you compulsively say out loud in very clear terms that you did them. Such is the lesson Donald Trump is learning, after the release of an audio recording corroborating the federal accusations the twice-impeached former president faces for stealing classified government information and flippantly showing them off to an array of non-cleared individuals.

Indeed, though the twice-indicted and liable for sexual abuse former president has the right to remain silent, he’s never really exercised that, has he? And the pattern continued during an interview with Fox News on Tuesday.

“I had a whole desk full of lots of papers, and mostly newspaper articles, copies of magazines, copies of different plans, copies of stories having to do with many, many subjects,” Trump said. “And what was said was absolutely fine, and very perfectly, we did nothing wrong. This is a whole hoax.”

As a reminder, Trump was indicted on 37 counts for mishandling classified documents, and is accused of even being “personally involved” in packing up boxes full of classified information as he departed the White House for Mar-a-Lago, where the boxes were then hidden everywhere from the ballroom to the bathroom. He allegedly showed the documents—sourced from agencies including the CIA and NSA—to staff members, writers, and even a representative of his PAC.

Court documents cited one recording in particular in which Trump allegedly showed individuals without security clearance “highly confidential” and “secret” documents related to a Pentagon plan for a potential attack on Iran. He notes in the recording he “could have declassified” them had he still been president. CNN released the recording in full on Monday, corroborating what the indictment already detailed: Trump is heard showing “a big pile of papers … off the record … [from] the Defense Department” to individuals without clearance.

Pretty straightforward, yes? You’d think. Yet Trump’s defense now involves doubling down, saying indeed he had tons of papers, copies of different plans, and it was all “absolutely fine, and very perfectly.”

That wasn’t enough though. Asked about his own voice on the recordings, Trump’s ego still somehow activated against the logic of the actual question. “My voice was fine. What did I say wrong?” he asked, before addressing the actual stakes of the question: whether he’s a criminal.

“We have a lot of papers, a lot of papers stacked up. In fact, you hear the rustle of the paper,” Trump assures us. Why, exactly, he’s reminding the public that he had “a lot of papers” and encouraging them to wonder what those “papers” were is unclear.

If it’s all to be performance art, Trump’s conclusion that “nobody said I did anything wrong other than the fake news, which of course is Fox too,” is a nice cherry on top.

Republican presidential candidate Francis Suarez is so qualified for the job, with such an extensive foreign policy repertoire, that he has simply never heard of a Uyghur before.

The Miami mayor declared his 2024 bid for president earlier this month, prompting nearly everyone to ask, “Who’s that?” And he only embarrassed himself further on Tuesday, during a radio interview with conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt.

Hewitt asked the GOP candidate about his campaign’s stance on China’s human rights violations against the Uyghurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic minority. China has built mass internment camps in the Xinjiang province, where most Uyghurs live, and more than a million Uyghurs (as well as other religious minorities) have been detained in the last few years. The United States has classified the mass persecution and targeting as genocide.

But Suarez seems to have no idea about any of it, or even about “what” a Uyghur is.

When asked about the Uyghurs during the radio show, Suarez was completely stumped. The exchange went like this:

Hewitt: Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?

Suarez: The what?

Hewitt: The Uyghurs.

Suarez: What’s a Uyghur?

Hewitt:  OK, we’ll come back to that. Let me, you won’t be, you’ve got to get smart on that.”

Later in the interview, Suarez said, “You gave me homework, Hugh. I’ll look at a—what’s it called, a weeble?”

“The Uyghurs,” Hewitt repeated yet again. “You really need to know about the Uyghurs, mayor.”

“Uyghurs, I’m a good learner, a fast learner,” Suarez responded, seemingly making a joke of it all.

The mayor later tried to do damage control, blaming the mishap on lack of familiarity with the pronunciation Hewitt used.

“Of course, I am well aware of the suffering of the Uyghurs in China. They are being enslaved because of their faith. China has a deplorable record on human rights, and all people of faith suffer there. I didn’t recognize the pronunciation my friend Hugh Hewitt used,” Suarez said in a statement.

Hewitt, of course, used the common English pronunciation of the word.

Again, none of this should be a surprise to a presidential candidate. Both of the last two presidential administrations have accused China of committing genocide and crimes against humanity against the Uyghurs. The Chinese government has been accused of physical and mental torture, mass sexual assault, mass sterilization, and mass detention with the goal of changing people’s identities and religious beliefs.