For Biden and senators, a sense that 'world was watching'

WASHINGTON (AP) — When President Joe Biden first announced the framework he'd reached with a bipartisan group of senators for a big infrastructure bill, he said it meant more than building roads and bridges.

Agreement, he said two months ago, would send a signal “to ourselves and to the world that American democracy can deliver.”

The senators who led the legislation to passage Tuesday agreed.

“We all knew that, quite honestly, that the world was watching,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont.

Approved on an overwhelming 69-30 vote, the nearly $1 trillion package would boost federal spending for major improvements of roads, bridges, internet access and other public works in communities from coast to coast. The bill goes next to the House.

What should have been routine, a task Biden recalled as “probably the least difficult thing to do” when he was a senator, became an exercise in showing how damaged the legislative process has become in partisan Washington and how a president and core group of senators were determined to try to fix it.

Powering past skeptics, the five Democratic and five Republican senators who negotiated the deal were interested in Biden’s call to “build back better” after so many failed attempts at an infrastructure overhaul. But they also wanted to build back the confidence of Americans and the world that the U.S. government could tackle big problems.

“We really realized that this was going to be important for the country and I think it’s important for the institution,” Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said recently after a long day at the Capitol. “I’m really worried that everybody believes that we’re as dysfunctional as we appear to be, and so prove otherwise, it’s kind of important.”

Since Biden took office, small groups of senators had been talking and...