Democrats Delivered on Infrastructure

Floor Speech

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Mr. COSTA. Madam Speaker, I thank my friend, Congressman Cartwright, for allowing me the opportunity to speak on the bipartisan infrastructure package. The fact of the matter is, this is long overdue.

We have been living off the investments our parents and our grandparents made a generation or two ago. During most of the 20th century, America led the world in investment in its water, in its transportation, in its electrical grid, all the things that have made us the great country that we are.

In recent decades, we have lagged behind. We now rank 13th in the world in terms of the amount of investment that we make in American people because investing in our water, in our transportation, in our roads and bridges, in our internet system, that is investing in people. That is investing in people who create jobs that make the economy better.

As a result of the passage of this bipartisan infrastructure bill, for the first time in a long time, America will lead the world next year in investments in the future in our water, our transportation, our electrical grid, and all the things that are a part of this piece of legislation.

We can't just take our eye off the ball. We have to continue these investments. In California, in the San Joaquin Valley that I represent, these investments are going to be billions of dollars in our water system. We have horrific droughts that we are experiencing right now. With climate change and the other efforts in this legislation to deal with the impacts of climate change, we need to ensure that we have a sustainable water supply in California for our farms and farm communities, as well as ensuring that we have clean drinking water for rural areas that don't have it today. This legislation does just that.

This legislation also takes an opportunity to look at the other areas that we need to do in the next piece of legislation: childcare for millions of women who want to get back to work; and providing efforts to improve our healthcare system, to fully fund the Affordable Care Act, a promise we made 11 years ago.

My district had 25 percent uninsured. Eleven years later, only 10 percent of my district is uninsured. These are the kind of investments we need to make in people.

I thank my colleagues for supporting this effort. Yesterday was a wonderful afternoon with the President, with my colleagues, Republicans and Democrats alike, to really celebrate the fact that we are beginning to do what the American people sent us to do, which is get the job done and invest in our country.

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