H.R. 3684
Floor Speech
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Mr. WARNER. Mr. President, I also want to, first of all, thank all of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle. Senator Sinema and Senator Portman have taken the lead. I want to thank them both--and Senator Portman for taking at least 40 seconds of my time to enumerate all of our colleagues who were part of this effort.
I also want to thank the staff and acknowledge, as he did, the incredibly important role the White House played. At some point in this process, the White House realized that they couldn't just support this initiative, but they actually had to own it, and they were intimately involved in all of the details, and it is something that I know they will share with all my Democratic colleagues.
I also want to thank the majority leader. He has given us the time we need to get here, to get a 3,000--close to a 3,000-page bill to this floor, this comprehensive. I know it has taken a little more time than, maybe, all of us thought, but the fact is we have been talking about this for 30 years under Democrats, Republicans--both political parties at various times over the last 30 years--because Senator Portman is right. Other nations are now investing at a level much greater than ours. So this record of a $550 billion investment in hard infrastructure over 5 years has never been done before.
Senator Manchin often pointed out, as we were sometimes feuding and fighting over some of the details, that no pothole ever decided it was only going to hit a Democrat or a Republican. It hit everybody's cars.
We all know we have got thousands of bridges that need to be repaired. We all know that, post-COVID, high-speed broadband is not a ``nice to have''; it is a necessity. We all know too many Americans go without access to clean drinking water.
This legislation will be debated and, I hope, passed in a strong bipartisan way. We will show our country, and we will show the world that no country around the world can keep up with us when we make these kind of investments.
I thank my colleagues.
With that, I yield to my great friend, the Senator from Maine.
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