With president Joe Biden’s “We have a deal” proclamation last Thursday morning, followers of the 5-month Biden presidency could finally heave a sigh of relief after months of GOP/Democrat haggling over the finally agreed-upon $1.2 trillion figure for the long-awaited infrastructure bill.

Biden’s very successful tenure so far has been marked by a plethora of useful executive orders starting from Day One, steamrolling as much of the collateral damage left by his disastrous predecessor Donald Trump as he legally could.

Biden’s important changes in the American social/political landscape include revoking many of Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant hate laws as well as policies that exacerbated the ongoing climate change crisis, welcome new protections for Asian-Americans, Pacific Islanders and our LGBTQ population, curtailing the ongoing and disgraceful Trump attacks on Obamacare (upheld last week thankfully by the Supreme Court), revoking the 2019 permit allowing the Keystone XL Pipeline project, raising the minimum wage for federal employees…..lots of very welcome goodness.

The 2021 infrastructure bill was always going to be a tough nut to crack due to Republican opposition to almost everything that the Biden administration has proposed throughout 2021, as well as the fact that the bullet points of the legislation admittedly takes a broad view of what the term “infrastructure” means.

And this problem has been solved (planning-wise anyway) with the splitting up of the huge $2.25 trillion original 8-year proposal down to the present $1.2 trillion. This legislation is now a two-parter, with the bipartisan infrastructure bill ($579 billion in new dollars) one part. The other section is a separate set of budget proposals that addresses the social programs that the Democrats want to push through, including comprehensive climate change laws, better access to higher education, and health and child care.

The Biden plan for this segment is to pass it through budget reconciliation, which will not require any recalcitrant Senate GOP votes, and will be addressed in the Senate next month when they reconvene. Biden and the Democratic faction most-likely cannot lose a single Democratic vote in the 50-50 chamber to attain the simple majority needed to pass this reconciliation segment, with Kamala Harris providing the tie-breaker if necessary.

And the second, bipartisan legislation segment is the part that contains true “infrastructure” measures including billions of dollars for modernizing our roads and bridges and railroad additions/repairs ($312 billion), increased Internet access and cybersecurity ($65 billion) and charging stations for electric vehicles ($47 billion, which includes many other climate change legislation additions). Eleven GOP senators have given agreement to this part of the total package, including Mitt Romney, Susan Collins and Rob Portman.

And Biden has demanded that this bipartisan segment has to be passed only after the larger reconciliation package that the Democrats champion is ratified. And only after the Senate has passed both parts of the bill will the Democrat-controlled House take them up, and the guess is that they’ll be ratified by Nancy Pelosi and the House in short order when/if this happens.

So this is welcome news, but not a fait accompli. At least the two sides have agreed on how it’ll be paid for (no tax increases…important to the GOP).

Instead, funding would be derived by having the IRS enforce our existing laws more assiduously to collect up to a total of $140 billion dollars in taxes not paid by our richest Americans and many of our corporations, $80 billion from unused extra unemployment insurance that had been terminated before the original September cutoff date (a great idea with the plethora of job openings going unfilled across the nation on every salary level currently), adding in most unused COVID-19 money, among other initiatives that will become clearer as the details continue to evolve over the next couple weeks.

So there’s a distinct possibility that the double-package has a chance next month, despite the predicted Republican-side haggling over the reconciliation package that may have to be passed without a single GOP vote. But the plan is set up having the reconciliation portion ratified first before the GOP-favored segment is passed. The tug-of-war should be very interesting in July.