In Infrastructure Votes, 19 Members Broke With Their Party

WASHINGTON — Infrastructure funding has traditionally been a broadly bipartisan issue on Capitol Hill, but on Friday night President Biden’s sweeping infrastructure bill passed mostly along party lines.

Only 19 members of Congress broke with their parties on the bill, which passed 228 to 206 with Democrats largely supporting the legislation and Republicans mostly opposed.

So who were those 19 lawmakers — 13 Republicans and six Democrats — who bucked their parties? They can be broken down roughly into three camps: Republicans who consulted with negotiators on the bill; Republicans who maintain the party’s traditional view that funding infrastructure is more important than fighting a president of a different party; and members of the liberal group known as the Squad.

The Squad

Six Democrats who are part of the progressive group known as “The Squad” — Jamaal Bowman of New York, Cori Bush of Missouri, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan — voted against Mr. Biden’s plan to spend $550 billion in new funds over 10 years to shore up roads, bridges and highways, improve internet access and modernize the nation’s power grid.

The Squad has grown from four to six members since 2019, when Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, the highest-profile progressive on Capitol Hill, entered Congress. Its members were among the leading supporters of the strategy to use the infrastructure bill as leverage for passing Mr. Biden’s broader agenda: a $1.85 trillion social safety net and climate change bill.

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has argued that the provisions in Mr. Biden’s bill to fight climate change are needed to offset the impact on the environment from a surge in funding for construction projects.

Passing the infrastructure bill without the larger domestic policy package “makes our emissions & climate crisis worse,” she wrote on Twitter in October. “It keeps us in the emissions red.”

Her position was shared by the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus until centrist Democrats who had been holdouts on the broader bill pledged Friday night that they would vote for it no later than the week of Nov. 15, unless the Congressional Budget Office determines its costs are “inconsistent” with the $1.85 trillion estimate put forth by Mr. Biden’s staff.

While most progressives then agreed to vote for the bill, members of the Squad did not view the centrists’ assurances as good enough and chose to stick with their position of demanding both bills pass at the same time. Ms. Bush said that passing the infrastructure bill alone “jeopardized our leverage” on the broader bill — which includes monthly payments to families with children, universal prekindergarten, health care subsidies and a four-week paid family and medical leave program — and endangered progressives’ ability to “improve the livelihood of our health care workers, our children, our caregivers, our seniors, and the future of our environment.”

Still, Ms. Pressley cast her vote against the infrastructure bill after it had enough votes to pass.

That position infuriated some moderate Democrats….