When President Joe Biden signed a $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill into law in November 2021, the members of Congress who took a victory lap included centrist Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona and Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina — both of whom played a key role in the negotiations. But many GOP members of Congress, anxious to show how MAGA they were, opposed the bill and attacked it as “socialism.”
One of the bill’s critics was Rep. Beth Van Duyne of Texas. Van Duyne voted against it, but on July 7, she bragged about new funding for the Dallas/Ft. Worth Airport — funding coming from the infrastructure bill she opposed in 2021:
Journalist Jamie Dupree called out Van Duyne’s hypocrisy, tweeting:
But Van Duyne is hardly the only Republican who railed against the infrastructure package only to turn around and take advantage of it.
In Tennessee, Sen. Marsha Blackburn attacked the bill as a “gateway to socialism,” and Tennessee Republicans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives joined her in attacking it. But Tennessee hasn’t cut itself off from federal funding.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis has been angrily railing against the Biden Administration’s economic policies — only to brag about the millions of dollars in federal stimulus money being used in his state. On May 17, the Orlando Sun-Sentinel’s Jeffrey Schweers reported, “Gov. Ron DeSantis has been on a spending spree for months, taking credit for millions of dollars in federal stimulus money he’s handing out to mostly rural Republican counties while at the same time, bashing President Biden’s big government spending. Federal bucks have bolstered the state budget for two years in a row, shoring up the state’s reserves, and funding such things as the governor’s job growth program, climate ‘resiliency’ against rising waters, road projects, broadband expansion, college training programs and tax cuts.”
In a January 25 op-ed for MSNBC’s MaddowBlog, journalist Steve Benen called out some of the Republicans who opposed the infrastructure bill only to brag when they used funding from it — a list that includes Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia, Rep. Gary Palmer of Alabama, Rep. Ashley Hinson of Iowa and Rep. Kay Granger of Texas.