Dave McCormick, a wealthy former hedge fund manager and leading Republican candidate for Senate in Pennsylvania, would vote to repeal President and 13 Republican House members, including Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who hails from the Philadelphia suburbs.
“Senator Casey fought to make sure the bipartisan infrastructure law will deliver thousands of good-paying jobs in Pennsylvania for years to come,” said Maddy McDaniel, a spokesperson for the Pennsylvania Democratic Party. “Meanwhile, professional job-killer David McCormick’s mission is to kill off every job in the Commonwealth, from laying off workers to outsourcing American jobs and now repealing the infrastructure law.”
McCormick’s campaign defended the candidate’s stance, citing a Kimberly Strassel column in The Wall Street Journal that said that less than one-quarter of the bill’s spending went to traditional infrastructure like roads, bridges, tunnels and waterways.
“While Pennsylvania’s infrastructure needs improving, a stunning 77% of the so-called ‘infrastructure’ bill that Bob Casey rubber stamped went to fund Democrats’ ridiculous climate pet projects rather than actual infrastructure in our communities,” Elizabeth Gregory, a spokesperson for McCormick’s campaign, said in a statement. “At a time of historic inflation, Joe Biden and Casey increased the financial burden on taxpayers, once again failing the people of Pennsylvania.”
Strassel’s op-ed in the Journal is based on a July 2021 analysis conducted by the Center for a Responsible Federal Budget, a centrist think tank, that found that the bill dedicated $110 billion to roads, bridges and major construction projects, and $17 billion to ports and waterways. That means the bill would spend just $127 billion of its $548 billion in new spending on “items that most people associate with” the term infrastructure, according to Strassel.
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The final version of the infrastructure bill created $566 billion in new spending.
But even under the old total, Strassel’s math is misleading. Strassel, McCormick, and other conservatives object to the bill’s investments in electric vehicles, environmental resilience, public transit and a greener electric infrastructure.
But CRFB’s original analysis shows that the bill included plenty more in so-called traditional infrastructure spending than Strassel admits. Key line items include $66 billion for freight and passenger rail (the latter of which Strassel claims is only used by a small subset of the population), $25 billion for airports, $11 billion to improve road safety, $65 billion to expand broadband internet service, and $55 billion for water infrastructure, such as removal of lead pipes.
