GOP lawmaker: Biden's jobs plan is a secret ploy to alter the Supreme Court

Florida Republican Rep. Kat Cammack is using a novel attack against President Joe Biden’s $2.25 trillion infrastructure package: She says it’s a “social engineering” program and would secretly alter the Supreme Court.

On Tuesday, Cammack tweeted, “President Biden’s new infrastructure package and tax hikes won’t do anything to stimulate our economy. Businesses need incentives to keep their companies growing, but these plans do just the opposite.”

She attached a clip of a Sunday appearance on Fox News during which she made a series of false claims about the plan.

“We have an infrastructure plan — or I should say so-called infrastructure plan — where less than 6% of that is actually going to roads and bridges and rural broadband, you know, actual real infrastructure,” the first-term lawmaker said. “The left wants to socially engineer what they call ‘green infrastructure,’ child care, Supreme Court reform — all this stuff is packed in.”

Warning that imposing higher taxes on Americans earning $400,000 or more annually would create poverty and “class warfare,” Cammack said, “We’ve seen for the last few months, these first 100 days under President Biden, that Americans don’t like the direction that the country is going, whether it is the Biden border crisis, whether it is this ridiculous notion of social engineering under the guise of infrastructure, Americans don’t like this.”

Cammack’s claims are provably false.

There is nothing in Biden’s jobs plan that mentions the Supreme Court; it contains instead a series of proposals to invest trillions of dollars in roads, bridges, transit, water systems, child care facilities, broadband, and clean energy.

The bipartisan commission Biden has assembled to study possible reforms to the Supreme Court is unrelated to the infrastructure package.

Apparently Cammack is applying the term “social engineering” to spending on such priorities as upgrading child care facilities and building new ones where they are most needed, investing in caregivers, and expanding access to long-term health care under Medicaid.

Her claim that just 6% of the bill goes to “real infrastructure” is based on a definition of the term that has been repeatedly debunked by fact-checkers. While about 6% targets roads and bridges, FactCheck.org notes that inclusion of investments in such physical infrastructure as ports and transit, mentioned by Republicans in their own proposals, and in broadband brings the figure to 20%.

Most Americans also believe that investment in human and climate infrastructure are important.

Cammack’s claim that the American public opposes these plans is flatly contradicted by poll after poll.

A Monmouth University survey released Monday found 68% of Americans support the American Jobs Plan, while just 29% oppose it.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.