DES MOINES, Iowa – U.S. Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, during his weekly Capitol Hill Report told Tom Williamson of KIIC in Albia, Iowa, that critics of his support of the infrastructure bill are misrepresenting the bill.
He shared an example from his wife Barbara when he called her after the vote.
“I always call my wife at the farm before I go to bed. And she said, ‘Why did you vote for that bill that had a mileage tax in it?’ She heard that on TV. And I said, ‘there’s no mileage tax in this bill,'” Grassley explained.
In the House version of the infrastructure bill, there is language that paves the way for a mileage tax by creating a program that would study such a tax, and it was also included in the Senate version of the bill.
But it does not implement a mileage tax – yet.
“People said that it had the Green New Deal in it, that it had amnesty for immigrants, that it had tax increases in it. So you know, where that comes from, is the fact that we were talking about a highway bill and a broadband bill and the lock and dam bill. At the same time, we were talking about all these other things being in another bill, and people thought that they were going to go together. And so I ended up voting for it because for four years under Trump, he wanted a $2 trillion package,” Grassley said. “I think the people that are criticizing me now, never criticized Trump for $2 trillion. So I don’t know why they’re considering what we’re doing now to be so bad, particularly, when over the course of my 95 county meeting so far this year, I’ll bet I in 80 to 85 of them, I’ve heard people (say) ‘we need the infrastructure, we need broadband, our bridges are in bad condition.'”
“In fact, Iowa’s bridges are 50th out of 50 states, 23 percent of our bridges are considered structurally deficient. And so when I hear from the Farm Bureau, the Corn Growers, the soybean people, the Iowa Retail Federation, the Iowa Motor Truck Association, the Chambers of Commerce in the big cities of Iowa and all this about, we got to have infrastructure, we got to improve our highways, we have to have safe bridges, we have to have broadband because a lot of people in Iowa can’t get the internet. So that’s why I voted for it,” he added.
Listen to the full Capitol Hill Report below:
