A number of Republican lawmakers are suddenly giving high praise to Joe Biden’s infrastructure agenda— despite voting against it.
In 2021, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville voted against President Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill, which he said would fail to give his state a “fair slice of the pie while also saddling Alabama taxpayers with even more debt.”
“Democrats,” he wrote at the time, “have missed an opportunity to deliver the bill that the American people truly need.”
But the Republican sounded a different note this week, when he touted the “crucial funds to boost ongoing broadband efforts” his state would receive — without noting that those funds were part of the 2021 infrastructure legislation he had vocally opposed. Tuberville wasn’t alone in pulling the “old vote no but take credit” maneuver, as former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger dubbed it. (Kinzinger, who was one of a handful of Republicans to vote in favor of the legislation, noted his frustration with Republicans’ about-face Thursday, saying that he “took a lot of heat” from the GOP over his support for the bill.) Marsha Blackburn celebrated the “progress” on broadband in Tennessee; John Cornyn did the same in Texas; Nancy Mace held a press conference Wednesday to promote a $26 million grant for a transit project — “one of the largest” such grants, she said — that was made possible through the Democratic-led legislation, which she condemned in 2021 as a “monstrosity.” Blackburn, Mace and Cornyn all voted against the infrastructure package.
“Most of them have opposed everything I’ve done,” Biden said of Republicans in a speech in Chicago Wednesday touting his economic record. “Most of them want to get rid of it all. But they don’t hesitate to take credit for it.”
The hypocrisy isn’t limited to those taking undue credit for the infrastructure law; there’s also Lauren Boebert, who lamented the nation’s infrastructure issues this week, despite having voted against legislation to address them.
This kind of thing is obviously nothing new; more than a decade ago, in 2010, Republicans took credit for aspects of the stimulus bill they voted against, having “found a way to have their cake and vote against it, too,” as then-President Barack Obama quipped at the time. It’s not even the first time GOP lawmakers have taken credit for Biden accomplishments they fought against; in 2021, a rash of Republicans went back to their districts to claim credit for elements of the $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill, which every single one of them lined up against. “It’s heartening to see Republicans in Congress reaching across the aisle to endorse it,” White House spokesman Andrew Bates remarked at the time. “Even retroactively.”
Tuberville, Mace, and other Republicans offered tortured defenses against charges of hypocrisy: “Coach voted against the infrastructure bill because it wasted Alabamians’ tax dollars,” a Tuberville spokesperson said of the former Auburn football coach. “But now that it is law of the land, the people of Alabama deserve their fair share.”
No doubt. But Republicans are trying to have it both ways, and it’s important for Biden— who has long struggled in approval polls, despite a record of navigating popular Democratic policies through choppy political waters over the last two-plus years— to make that clear, as he himself acknowledged at a California fundraiser earlier this month: “We got to let people know what we’re doing.”
